Hello and welcome to Table Talk, the Spectators Food and Drink Podcast. I'm Lara Prendergast.

And I'm Olivia Potts. And today we're delighted to be joined by Charlotte Ivers. Charlotte will be,

I'm sure, a familiar figure to many people, given that she is the restaurant critic and columnist for the Sunday Times.

Charlotte, welcome to Table Talk.

Thank you so much for having me.

Charlotte, we're going to start where we always do at the very beginning

and ask you, what are your earliest memories of food?

I was thinking about this the other day,

and there are kind of so many really,

but there's one that really sticks out in my head. And I was at Frankie and Bennings. I don't

know whether you guys went to Frankian Bennings when you were kids. It was sort of a,

I don't even know what you call it, an American-y, Mexican-y style fast food, fast casual place. And we've gone there. I must have been about

eight years old, I reckon. And my mom had got the risotto. She's vegetarian. So most of the

things on the menu were, as I recall, kind of big steaks and things like that. But she had

the risotto. And I never really encountered this before.

And I had a bite off her plate and it was sort of congealed in a way. I don't think it was a

particularly high quality risotto. But there was something about the sweetness of it and the

way that it had congealed together at the end of the meal that I just thought was the most

remarkable thing I'd ever tasted. It was utterly, utterly magic. And I sort of think, you know,

I suspect people say this a lot to you. I sort of think I've been chasing that risotto my whole

life ever since. Has it ruined technically good risottoes for you?

I think it might have done, but it's more that, it's not so much about the risotto itself.

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