For instance:

The menu arrived with an efficient and Latinly suave waiter. It has a bit of a concept, but not enough to bother with. You can ignore it and order meat, fish or pasta. I started with scrambled eggs, tipped back into their shells, with the addition of gorgonzola and hazelnuts. An egg is possibly the greatest invention in the infinite history of everything. It is ergonomic, it is satisfying, it contains protein and fat in two colours. It can be consumed in uncountable ways, from a prairie oyster to a victoria sponge. And if you don’t want to eat it right away, it’ll turn into a chicken.

Adding hazelnuts and gorgonzola isn’t even within crowing distance of being an improvement. The cheese was invisible to the tongue. Being able to make gorgonzola disappear is a clever but useless trick. Nick had a polite version of ribollita with bread and beans. It was a peasant who had gone to college and become an accountant. I followed with a special cockerel. Why is this cockerel special, I asked. “It’s a small cockerel,” said the waiter, without even a hint of an entendre. What arrived was a rolled and stuffed chicken that was well poached, elegant, decorative, witty, but insincere and rather empty.

Nick had tortelloni. It was filled with something that was too wan to leave a memory. We shared risotto with some lobster bits and a dusting of parsley. Again impeccably put together, the rice with just the faintest virginal resistance to the tooth, stirred to a velvety richness. But it would only have been exciting if we had pushed it up our noses.

Pudding was a coppa Machiavelli. I asked who Machiavelli was, imagining it was the pâttisier. “A Renaissance artist,” said the waiter. It’s a comfort to know that Italian education is just as dense as ours. It was a sad, pale, shiversome and whimpery thing, named after the man who said that it was better to be feared than loved, the personal motto of all restaurant critics.