This episode of Table Talk is sponsored by J-Food-O, dedicated to sharing the best Japan has to offer.

Over the next few months, J-Food-O and a selection of London restaurants will create seafood and sake pairings for spectator listeners to help develop your knowledge and enjoyment of the drink.

The pairing will focus on the concept of umami, which in Japanese means the essence of deliciousness.

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

I'm Lara Prendergast.

And I'm Olivia Potts.

And today we're delighted to be joined by Russell Norman.

Russell is an award-winning restaurateur, writer and broadcaster, and the founder of the Polpo Restaurant Group.

Last year, he launched Tortoria Bruto, which saw him return to the London restaurant scene.

Russell, welcome to Table Talk.

Thank you.

Glad to be here.

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

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

Well, like many people of my generation, I suppose,

my earliest memories are in the kitchen of my grandmother in Forest Gate in East London making chocolate

cornflake cakes in the late 70s, early 80s. So I would have been sort of, you know, pre-seen

and not particularly interested in food, but, you know, delighted to be able to make something

that was edible with my grandmother. But they were always very basic and usually involved lots of sugar. Yeah, those, I guess,

were my earliest memories. You know, I grew up in a large family in Hounslow, in West London.

I had five brothers. I was one of six boys. And so meal times were very regimented with my mother. We had a,

we had a sort of almost a military roster of meals every week. Monday would always be, I don't know,

...