I should have probably added photos? Because that seems to be the post thing to do?

Taking photos of food makes me feel queezy

Verdict: A highly successful spontaneous Christmas dinner. I left feeling heavy, slightly smoked, and only moderately guilty about the mileage of my food.

However, the dessert was so sweet and so persuasive that I ignored my biology entirely and ate the whole thing.

For dessert, after refusing one, I was inevitably presented with a semolina puree with cinnamon and nuts on the house. By this point, my stomach had already filed a formal protest and was beginning to look for the nearest exit.

This was the 1,001st way. It was tender, juicy, and spectacularly un-mediocre. The accompanying vegetables were a trifle salty. As if the chef had a brief, passionate argument with a salt shaker and lost. But they were still undeniably delicious. And in combination with the rest perfectly lovely.

The Main Event
The main course was a lamb shank. Now, it is a well-known fact across the planet that there are 1,001 ways to cook lamb, and approximately 1,000 of them result in something resembling a damp woolly jumper.

It forces you to decide exactly how many "shits" you are prepared to give about the logistics of your dinner. I opted for the local option, mostly to avoid being judged by a parsnip that had traveled more than I did to get to the table.

This presents a moral quandary. You find yourself staring at a dish, thinking, "Do I really want the 150km chicken? Am I prepared to live with the carbon footprint of a bird that has seen more of the countryside than I have this year?"

The Guilt of the Traveling Carrot
The menu operates on a system of radical transparency that is both admirable and deeply stressful. Next to every dish is a measurement of exactly how many kilometers the ingredients traveled to reach your face.

This was followed by bread and oil. The bread was soft, the oil was smooth, and the flavour was… thyme. In fact, everything tasted of thyme. I am reasonably certain that if I had bitten my own arm at that moment, it would have had a distinct, smokey herbal finish.

They began by providing a small, complimentary soup. It was a lovely gesture, the sort of thing that makes you instantly like the waiter, like it was their choice to provide you with this free gift.

The Thyme Continuum
The first thing one notices is the smell. It is not a subtle smell. One of their signature dishes involves smoking meat directly at the table, which results in the entire room being plunged into a thick, pleasant, but undeniable cloud of "Nice Burnt Thyme."

None of the men at the establishment in this situation looked particularly comfortable. Especially in contrast to a group of ‘lads’ from the states who were there together and were very comfortably entirely checked out in the most authentic of ways after a day of sightseeing.

I was escorted to a table in the rear, which offered an excellent view of the clientele. Now, this was Christmas Day. And where I sat, I could exactly see how hard men were trying to check all the ‘date-boxes’ of their female counterparts.

I agreed, mostly because I find that being told exactly when to leave saves one the trouble of having to make a decision later on.

Upon entry, I was met by a hostess whose job appeared to involve the complex multi-dimensional mathematics of "Fitting a Single Human, that did not book, into a Space Designed for None." She informed me that if I agreed to exist in a specific chair for exactly two hours, she could accommodate me.

It is 4,000 years old. That is a very long time to remain a pile of rocks without someone coming along and turning you into a car park or a luxury condo.

It’s large, sprawled out, and was home of plenty of fancy art. They clearly figured they should invent the idea of floors to make it all feel a little grander.
This also solved the reoccurring problem of where to store all those olives.

So far I had surprisingly good luck with my Windows surface studio laptop. Very capable gaming machine