an innocent email on monday morning about the possibility of lunch snowballed, and by the time saturday rolled round, there we were — deborah and i — in our best walking shoes, primed and hungry for whatever the afternoon might bring us.

well. we did have a plan.

i’d been curious to try the new sopra outpost in potts point, and that is where we began. it is much swisher than the original waterloo warehouse: banquette seating, shiny red mosaic walls, an unsubtle soundtrack that made us feel like we were in a 60s italian movie (a slapstick comedy, at that), and — the deal-breaker, were there deals to be broken — fancy, custom printed, evocatively illustrated place mats on very nice textured paper.

they had them arranged just so on the bar, but we spirited a couple over to our table top with not too much recrimination from the waiter. (very efficiently, he showed us a particularly fetching one with a big plate of pasta emblazoned with “fratelli fresh”, and then he replaced the ones we had pilfered.)

much less efficiently, we made our choices for lunch; everything sounded so delicious. and then of course, it was.

there was an antipasto platter to start — four little mounds of: mushrooms and cumin; spicy caponata with surprise crunchy almonds; arancini with aioli; simply dressed green beans.

there was a risotto ala milanese, rich with the colour and tang of saffron, with tiny nuggets of meat folded in. there was a salad of lettuce and tomatoes in salad cream. and then…

there was a roasted bit of organic pork. i’d asked the waiter what it came with, and he said, “nothing. it’s just the meat.” and he added, as an afterthought, “there is a bit of cress on top”. it was just as he said.

and it was amazing. tender, flavoursome meat, fatty where it counted, crowned with a great arc of salty, crunchy crackling. sigh. even shared between two, it was more meat than i’d normally eat in a day. maybe even two or three days.

we ate, and ate, and at some point deborah said, “this is one of the best lunches ever,” and i could not disagree.

and you might think that after a meal such as this, there would be no room for dessert. and you might be right, to a point: no dessert was had where we sat, or even down the road at yellow, but once we had roused ourselves and propelled ourselves back towards the city through darlinghurst, and made the requisite stops for a meringue duckling (croissant d’or) and loaf of walnut sourdough (infinity bakery), we could not resist the lure of the mountains of gelato at messina.

just look at that chocolate sorbet — so glossy and dark (how would you choose between that and the chocolate orange sorbet?). and what about the crisp and bracing lemon sorbet? the pear gelato was much less peary than i’d anticipated, but the fig delivered everything it promised. we sat for a while, in the cool and dark, and watched as streams of lithe girls in long dresses sashayed in for scoops of this and that. we watched a child demand vanilla.

we finished up, wistfully, and made our way one block south, to the chocolate shop.