Well, this is FUN!! The food is delicious and so is the TENSION. Eve and Hal clearly LOATHE each other for some reason, and G doesn’t really want to be here. He’s clearly running away from something. Or someone. Eve, who is an absolute darling, is trying to be mother and getting herself into all sorts of social knots, poor lamb. And in the meantime I’m positively guzzling red wine and eating the most GORGEOUS steak since I left Whitby.
Speaking of the steak though – a really strange thing. It doesn’t just taste LIKE the one from the Pier Inn. I would go to my grave swearing it is the one from the Pier Inn. The bearnaise sauce, the wedge salad, the chips fried in dripping. If I didn’t know it was impossible, I would say the chefs had gone over to Whitby and brought the steak back here, like some kind of international Deliveroo. I look sideways at Hal. I know we started off on the wrong foot about the Alien thing, and if he and Eve are feuding I’m TEAM EVE all the way, never mind how cute he is. But curiosity gets the better of me. ‘Does yours taste like Nando’s?’ I say, in the friendliest voice I can manage.
He nods, mouth full. ‘Exactly like it.’ 
        ‘And your . . . dish,’ I say to G. I can’t remember the name of it. ‘Is it the same as your dad’s?’
‘It’s like he made it,’ he says.
‘How are they doing this?’ I wonder. ‘They must have fifty chefs. And a lab. And an online research team.’
‘Shall we test them?’ says Hal, his eyes shining behind his glasses. I notice his eyelashes – they’re really long and glossy (wasted on a straight!!). ‘Let’s order something else. See how good they are.’
So we spend the rest of dinner testing the kitchen to destruction. We ask for increasingly outlandish things – blowfish sushi, prairie oysters, breast-milk ice cream. You name it! We boys drink as we order – I’m on red, Hal is on white and G is on his Dark and Stormys. Soon we are as Hammered as a House of Horror.