Last night I had dinner at the Radio G’s, a man who had fearlessly turned fois gras into shaving-cream like mousse on the last occasion, a man who thinks nothing of putting an equal weight of butter into his potatoes for mash. Tonight was supposed to be some kind of indoor picnic and, in response, I came up with that most picnic like of all foods - beans.

Good God girl! You’ve lost your watusi! Nobody should bring beans, let along Boston Baked Beans, to a picnic. That’s like bringing some fat guy to your highschool reunion! Well, there was a perverse desire to displease and maybe to pinch. This is how I feel about foodies in general, despite being one myself. Or, perhaps it is here that I will draw a thin line in the sand.

Foodie is too vague a word. There are food fans and food snobs, the way there are well-dressed fashionable people, and fashion victims,  or people walking around the world buying apples from their grocery store, and hairy men who smell like pee running away from their attendants. Bringing baked beans to this soiree was the equivalent of Samantha Morton wearing a grey sweatshirt to the Marc Jacob’s show. And, like that grey sweatshirt that took four years to smell bad, my beans took nine hours to look like pig’s swill.

In all fairness, a guy who has almost two Ikea Billy bookstands caving under the weight of culinary literature should be an excellent cook. And, to be fair, he really was quite good. The homemade pesto on soft cheese was very myum, the grilled pepper on bonito/nori butter was smackeroo, and the lemony olives were as fleshy as an paralytic’s lower lip. So far so good.

Then, he brought my beans out. Beans are really great on a plate. They obstinately refuse to budge without leaving a slimy mess and they somehow always look like throwup. To top this winner, I matched it with some homemade spicy salsa to go with. Salsa and beans are like the James and Esther of Good Times, except when somebody doesn’t like black spin-offs of white TV shows, or when somebody isn’t used to eating spicy food. The first biteful was full of positive expletives. The second biteful was smokily choked. And there was no third. The beans were politely scraped up as not one but three bottles of red were simultaneously opened in a bid to drown the fires.

Then Radio G took things into his own hands and brought out the goods. First, perfect grilled leg of lamb, a little baby lamb raised in the countryside of D’Oc, carved at the table with a proper knife, and some smash. The lamb was slightly charred on the outside and so juicy on the inside. It had been flash roasted with some anchovies laid on for luck. Salt and pepper and nothing else. I like it when people know you don’t have to pull out the stripes when you’ve got a good piece of meat. But what a surprise… The smash was sprinkled all over with tiny pieces of confit de citron. Sliding that delicate lemony creaminess onto a quivering hot piece of reddish sweet lamb is very close to suckling on your mom’s tit when you were three months old - world peace is happening right now.

To finish, Radio G knocked us out with a premium poached peach, simmered in red wine and a whole bunch of spices. I rolled myself out of there in a meek state of happy defeat. Of course he’d won. Of course sometimes Cher really knocks you out with a vocoder and sometimes the lamb of D’Oc shall rule the world.