The most glorious moment in a lifetime of eating – three times a day, seven days a week, going on for forty-two years – was one night at the famed Two Faces restaurant, in trendy South Yarra. It was my first and so far only visit to that august chophouse. I was filled with trepidation and awe. Actually, I was practically quaking. The Two Faces, you understand, costs an arm and a leg, but never mind that, this was a wedding anniversary, or my wife's birthday, or some similarly daunting occasion, and I was going for broke.

O.K.

So there we sat, the good wife and I, in that svelte subterranean chamber, praying that the shoddiness of our clothes not be noticed in the general hubbub of great food – I had painted both ankles black to simulate matching socks – and not just great food but all around us such elegant gentlemen and their diamonded ladies as to make Clark Gable and Vivien Leigh look positively cheap and trashy.

Unaccustomed though we are to knives and forks, the good wife and I managed to slog our way through the delectable meal, and then suddenly the waiter presented us with the bill, and the glorious moment was at hand.

No, no, not that.

Not that at all.

Nothing like that.

The glorious moment was when the waiter similarly presented the bill to the elegant gentleman to our right, and then to the elegant gentleman to our left, both gentlemen of that ilk born with silver cufflinks in their mouths and caviar sandwiches for school lunch, and it was my delight and triumph to watch them nonchalantly flip over their bills and then with a cry of ‘Hot fuck!' topple senseless to the floor.

I have dined out on that glorious moment ever since.

Actually, it was my mother who had the right idea about eating out. She never did it. ‘Feh!’ she would cry, at the mere thought. ‘Who needs that filth? I’ve got my own kitchen!’

Imagine!

Never once a watery spaghetti at Pellegrini's.

A raw-in-the-middle John Dory at El Calamaro.

A bowel-cleansing curry at Jamaica House.

Or such a stuffing yourself with barbecued meats at Vlado’s Charcoal Grill that it is a delight to find that your car has been stolen when you stagger out into the Richmond night and the seven- hour walk home is the only thing that saves you from cardiac arrest.

But wait a minute.

I almost forgot.

There were occasions in which my mother laid aside her hygienic scruples and treated us to an angelic blow-out, moments of gastronomic madness supreme, and these occasions, I now recall, followed the fitting out of her offspring with footwear for the coming year – at Ezywalkin’s lush premises with its cancer-inducing X-ray machine to reassure you that there was plenty of room for growth in the black leather tubs you had just had inflicted upon you yet again – and then off we clomped to Coles, in Bourke Street, upstairs, on the first floor.

Ah!

Coles push-your-tray-along cafeteria!

Was there ever such a haven of bliss?

All those little windows Filled with such great goodies, jellies and cakes and things of orgasmic cream and psychedelic hue, which the second you popped one on your tray, your mother grabbed it and put it straight back, substituting for it something drear and wholesome like a chunky cheese sandwich or a cloggy date slice, each one of these parental grabs accompanied by a fierce cry of ‘Feh!’ – not that it mattered, because when you got to the end there was never a vacant table to be seen and in less than a second the entire contents of your tray slipped from your shaking hands and crashed in full finery to the hard floor.

Wow, that mother.

Denied the arse-breaking chairs at the Faraday Cafe.

The handfuls of salt flung upon your chips in the gloom at La Chaumiere.

The occasional rare sighting of Barry Humphries in the clothes of a man at the Society.

The barely-suppressed sneer of the waiter at Baxter Provender when you can’t quite finish your second pig.

And at Kuni’s.

At Maxim’s.

At Mietta’s.

At the Oriental Gourmet.

At the flash, brash Deli in Toorak Road.

At all those places where I occasionally break public bread, in this great city of a thousand grand restaurants and food halls and eating places galore, where none need go hungry so long as someone else is paying –

I hear the cry of my long-ago stay-at-home mother –

And I order another dish.