Hello and welcome to Table Talk, the Spectator's Food and Drink podcast.

I'm Olivia Potts.

And I'm Nora Prendergast.

And today we are delighted to be joined by Dan Keeling.

Dan Keeling is an award-winning wine writer, magazine editor and restaurateur. He is the

co-founder of Noble Rot which began life as a cult food and wine magazine, but then expanded to

a wine bar and restaurant. In the last week a second Nobel Rott restaurant has opened in Soho,

and the Noble Rock book, Wine from Another Galaxy, will be published on the 29th of

October. Dan, welcome to Table Talk. Thanks for having me. Dan, we'll start where we always start,

which is at the beginning. Can you tell us what your earliest memories of food are? I think my

earliest food memory is probably sausages and a particular sausage from a butchers in

Little Chalfont in Buckinghamshire where I grew up until I was about three years old and they were

very peppery and I remember being quite obsessed by them. Then we moved to North Buck's from there

and then I guess my next obsession would be cheese flan at school.

Quite kind of British foods and my mum worked so there'd be a lot of kind of frozen foods as well

when I came home from school and had to make it on my own like lean cuisine and Finder's

pancakes, all of that kind of stuff.

And then my mum was a good cook although I did make the mistake of giving a Delia Smith's book,

How to Cook, when I was at college,

in a particularly stoned moment as a Christmas gift.

And I don't think that went down very well.

But she was a good cook, and it was lots of things like spaghetti bolognese and burgers.

...