Restaurants | 27 May 2006

The Michelin-starred French restaurant Roussillon has just launched a ‘Mini-Gastronome’ programme. This means that on the first and third Wednesday lunchtime of every month children aged 11 and under get to eat a free seven-course menu designed to introduce them to top-class cooking while ‘exciting their palate and their eyes’. To be perfectly honest, I think most children are enough of a pain without excited palates and eyes, but it might be worth a shot. However, what child to take? I can’t take my own son because he is now a big teenager and much too busy slamming doors and leaving wet towels all over his bedroom even though returning them to the bathroom would involve what? A walk of almost three yards? (And it’s downhill!) I don’t want to borrow a pre-school child because they are tedious and need help in the toilet. I then think of Angus, the 11-year-old son of my friend Louise. He is smashing as well as an interested and adventurous eater. But Louise is a good and responsible mother who would never, ever allow her son the day off school — if you are clever, I guess you can co-ordinate with school holidays — to eat Michelin-starred food. ‘You bet, count us in!’ she says when I call. I hope she and Angus won’t get in trouble with nosy, educational-welfare types so will not reveal their surname, which is Crombie. Angus’s middle name is Argyle. Louise’s husband, Stuart, who is quite Scottish, named him before Louise could even get a look in. She wanted Archie. Angus has a brother called Cameron and a sister called Rosie, and he is mad for tropical fruit. It’s all Louise can do to keep in him guavas. Heavens, I do hope they can’t be identified. I’d best not add that they have a dog called Bunty.