Unseriously, I am considering going vegetarian for the most pathetic reason possible – in the wake of a flurry of luncheons and dinners across the culinary pleasuredome that is Patan, I feel a little…ill.

It all started last year. The penultimate day of 2066, that is, when a colleague and I figured, finally, that we’d stop whining about the cold, congealed kachauras of chana at our local eatery (and the steaming wai wai accessorised by the sahuni’s filthy black fingerdips), and hotfoot it to Jawalakhel. “Where’s Chopstix,” I wondered, until I realised I’d already been in this second-floor establishment in Kumaripati the year before. Not that it was unmemorable – I recalled the clean lines of the long, narrow dining section and the reasonably priced, decent Chinese fare, and the ‘cool’ bar within. It’s just that in this dog’s life, certain evenings blur into others, and nights out, rather than standing crisply upright in fully-charged memory banks, tend to be lumped under ‘bhatti’, ‘bar’, ‘restura’ or ‘party’.

I digress. We headed to the sofa set bar, which didn’t look as ‘cool’ by day, not least because of the Bollywood trivia on the flat screen above us. But the Mongolian Chicken was hot enough, certainly more so than the bland Kung Pao Chicken and the Chicken Chowmein. And the milk tea tasted like coffee. Actually, it was coffee. It mattered not a jot as I scraped all the food groups into my bowl and scarfed ‘em down happily. If there’s one thing I appreciate, it’s a bellyful of food. Ah, the days of fat, greasy chips after disconsolate portions of Thai food in London Town, preferably consumed in full view of the stingy restura!