On Sundays there’s a buffet for pounds 14.50.Israel Solly’s, 148A Golders Green Road, London NW11 (0181-455 0004) Mon-Thur, Sun lunch and dinner, Fri lunch, Sat dinner. Food and decor is Middle Eastern, the staff are Israeli, and everything’s kosher, including French and Israeli wines. The first-floor restaurant, Solly’s Exclusive – above the take-away counter and snacking tables – serves great hummus and falafel, shish kebabs and shawarma, with halva to round things off sweetly. Around pounds 15 a head without drinks.Poland Wdka, 12 St Alban’s Grove, London W8 (0171-937 6513) Mon-Fri lunch and dinner, Sat, Sun dinner A long-established but revived, modish restaurant. Besides pierogi (dumplings) filled with wild mushrooms, potato and bacon, there’s herring salad; smoked eel; kulebiak; wild rabbit with peas, peppers and celeriac; and venison with red cabbage and plum compote.

A brilliant selection of vodkas gives it an edge, while the interior has an appealing, slightly undecorated appearance. Lunch is pounds 10.50 for two courses, pounds 13.50 for three; pounds 22 or so for three courses a la carte.Portugal A Cozinha, 33 St Stephen’s Street, Bristol (0117 922 5505) Tue-Fri lunch, Thur-Sat dinner. This is run by a husband and wife who aren’t Portuguese but who fell in love with the simple, fresh cuisine and incite their customers to do likewise in their front-room restaurant. When the lid comes off the cataplana (copper pan), setting free a stew of pork, fish and shellfish, peppers and green beans and fresh coriander, it is hard to resist. There is also caldo verde soup; lamb casserole with olives and vegetables; pork with paprika and pickled vegetables Portuguese wines and puds maintain the illusion Around pounds 20 a head without drinks.. There are more dignified ways to arrive for lunch with a very famous celebrity than attached to the business end of an AA tow-truck.

But thanks to the caprices of my ageing Fiat (and my own negligence in failing to top up its radiator), my rendezvous with Terry Wogan was only made possible by the prompt attention of Derek, the AA’s most obliging patrolman. Derek was so impressed to learn who I was meeting that he volunteered to tow me at high speed down the M4, to ensure that my illustrious lunch- date wouldn’t be left twiddling his thumbs over the bread and olives. So fast did we travel that I still managed to arrive at the restaurant before Terry, who was startled to be hailed in the street by a fluorescent stranger shouting, “I got her here for you!”

Still, even if my Derek ex machina hadn’t delivered me to Terry, I can think of many worse places for a gastronome celeb to be stranded than The Fat Duck, a small restaurant in the London-commuter-belt village of Bray, which is rapidly eclipsing its more famous neighbour, The Waterside Inn, thanks to youthful chef/proprietor, Heston Blumenthal.
This was Terry’s first visit to The Fat Duck, although he used to live in Bray (“before Michael Parkinson moved in and property prices took a dive”). We were renewing a happy acquaintance which began 15 years ago when I worked as a researcher on his TV chat show. “I’m glad you asked me here – I’ve wanted to try it for a while, but I can never get a table,” he said, as he attempted to settle his comfortably upholstered frame into one of The Fat Duck’s rather less comfortably upholstered iron chairs.The recent award of a Michelin star has increased the pressure on dinner tables, although for our midweek lunch, the dining room was only lightly occupied. Converted from a pub, the restaurant’s low ceilings, roughly finished cream walls and coir flooring give it a homely, countrified atmosphere which belies the sophisticated polish of its food.Blumenthal’s cooking is best described as modern French, though his labour- intensive methods and adventurous combinations of unlikely ingredients mark him out as a genuine original. A whole veal sweetbread is roasted in a salt crust with hay and served with cockles.

Spiced cod is paired with braised coxcombs; it’s the kind of menu where you wouldn’t be surprised to come across caramelised seahorses, or a horse’s tail in aspic.Luckily, despite his professional background in Fighting The Flab, Terry has a cheerfully indulgent relationship with food, and was keen to sample widely from the intriguing menu. “People often say about me, `You’re too thin – you should eat a bit more!’” he chuckled as he pondered his selection. “And I have to say to them, `I eat every bit as much as you do – it’s just that I’m highly strung, so I burn it off. I’m coltish!”’He began with a characteristically complex creation – a thick tranche of roasted foie gras, served with seasidey accompaniments of marinated raw salmon, a crisp crab biscuit, crystallised seaweed and a pureed oyster sauce.

“The foie is beautifully cooked, and that’s very hard to do when it’s such a thick piece,” Terry pronounced. He was impressed, too, by the supporting ingredients, “though I tend to think foie gras should be served very simply, just crisped on either side, with probably a sweet or piquant counterbalance”. This probably qualifies as the longest serious speech I’ve heard him make.My starter, a lasagne of langoustines, pig’s trotters and truffles, was equally elaborate and no less fine. Silky sheets of fresh pasta enfolded three sweet langoustines and a fine dice of truffles and mushrooms, to which julienned pig’s trotters added jellied richness and vanilla notes. “In Ireland, they call pig’s trotters `crubeens’,” Terry mused as he tried to catch their fugitive flavour in the stingy mouthful I spared him.There was something oddly familiar about eating unusual food in Terry’s company because, as viewers of Wogan may remember, its host was regularly obliged to sample bizarre delicacies, such as alligator and kangaroo, while rolling his eyes and grimacing. It was part of my job to procure these recherche foodstuffs for him; I still shudder to recall the morning I spent eating my way around an East End whelk stall in the interests of research.Since the programme finished, though, Terry has successfully rehabilitated his palate in Gascony, where he has a second home, “in the heart of duck country”.