iON The Table with the Gastrodetective: ‘O flesh, flesh, how art thou fishified!’

I was in Al-Shami, Jericho’s Lebanese restaurant, with my Scottish friend JoJo, who was paying me a surprise visit. What I had thought was a bin bag stirred in the darkest recesses of Allam Street and there he was, hirpling along in a kilt, sporting a zany yellow sweatshirt and woolly socks (complete with a plastic dagger down one).

9 days had passed since he’d dropped by, his departure delayed by a grim cold. Undeterred, he made himself comfy, perching nightly in front of BBC Alba and rousing the house with a terrible gravel-shaken-through-jelly cough.

To cheer him up, I’d taken him to Al-Shami. They do delicious, cloud-white goblets of raki, which, on contact with ice, turns from a clear, pungent, aniseed syrup into a cloudy liquorice tipple (called lion’s breath). Mmmm… Next, they do lots of tasty mezze: mohammara bil-jawz (£3.60), a delicious rose-coloured crushed nut sludge, smooth curd-sour labneh (£2.20) and zahra maqlia, puffs of spiced cauliflower (£2.40). They even offer foreign oddities that gladden the reserved British heart, like fried lamb’s brains … or fried whitebait - which JoJo ordered.

Now, I find whitebait as attractive as Cornish stargazy pie (the pie with the pilchards’ heads sticking out, eyes baked opaque, like John-the-Baptist octuplets looking up at you from stiff collars of pastry). But, worse, I once had a bad experience with whitebait.

Think Turkey 1986.

There I was: a student, anaemically polite, newly arrived on the Turkish coast. Clearly, I was so weird that I attracted the kindly attentions of a middle-aged Turkish couple, Sener and Elma. Promising? Well, it just so happened that Sener and Elma had come up with the smart idea of teaching themselves English using Shakespeare’s plays. “Wouldst thou like a lemonade? asked Elma. “Do not give the caitliff waiter a tip: he is a very modest scoundrel.”

Yes, they took a shine to me, organising an entire surprise day’s fun for me: a boat trip. At 6 a.m. Uner, a fisherman (think stunted hawthorn tree wearing pink plastic flipflops) turned up to take me on a jaunt. A poor sailor, I quickly experienced waves of light, playful nausea on the trip, the highlight of which was a deserted island. Uner explained: “This Eez the Best Island. Once Many People. Now None. When the House for the Mad Men Went the Island is Empty.” An ex-asylum.

I was hatless … the sun poured down on me. “You hungry?” asked Uner, with a teasing wink. Mute, I shook my head. In a flash of pink flipflops, he slipped over the side of the boat, to resurface moments later, his shorts bulging with sea urchins. With his pen knife, Uner scraped out the frills of pink eggs onto his palm. “There: you eat,” he urged. Every time I gulped down the progeny of another urchin, Uder beamed. “More!” he’d cry.

After 6 hours, the full delirium of sunstroke setting in, I lurched onto the pier. And there they were, my new friends. “Dost thou enjoy? Sweet wretch, thou comest with us to a hostelry. There will be great feasting this eve!” They linked arms with me and off we went. “We have ordered a great fish!” they chattered. Oh, I could have laughed with joy. “And for thou we have kepst the head! But most wondrous of all, willow, we have this fair repast.” A tower of whitebait was laid in front of me. “Thou eatest whilst we feast our pleasured eyes upon thee.” And so they watched, nudging each other in happy joy, as I chewed through the fins, spinal cords and stomach bags of a shoal of whitebait.

Thus it is that I urge you to do as I did when life gives you a second chance: don’t share JoJo’s whitebait. He ordered it. He should eat it. Which he did, each mouthful interspersed with a jellied cough, threatening to return the whitebait as fishy ectoplasm.

Stick, like me, to sensible once-hoofed food like the small crimson bombs of Armenian sausage dished up at Al-Shami.

Al-Shami is at 25 Walton Crescent, Jericho