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Does anyone really enjoy that moment in a restaurant when the waiter appears at your elbow asking whether the food is all right? Partly because I don't want to make a fuss, but usually because my mouth is full, I smile sweetly and mumble something about it being fine.
Fast forward to the same moment when I am dining with Gary Rhodes, in his restaurant on Arcadia, the ship launched last year by P & O Cruises. I am eating in one of the best restaurants at sea, with the man who made it all happen, and he wants to know how the food is. Fortunately, he has timed his question so that I am able to answer: it's wonderful.
It's not every night you eat with a celebrity chef, so I had planned hard for the evening. My black or my red number? Hair up or down? Rhodes had no such worries. He arrived, a little late, looking every inch the chef, as if to emphasise that Arcadian Rhodes is not just a restaurant with his name on the door. Chef, as the staff address him, explained that he had been in the kitchen, but had nipped back to his cabin for a clean white coat.
Rhodes has been involved with Arcadian Rhodes from its inception right through to its opening on April 14 last year - and his involvement continues. The chefs and waiters were trained at Rhodes Twenty Four, his restaurant on the 24th floor of Tower 42, the tallest building in the City of London; he devised the menus - there are two for the Mediterranean and two for the Caribbean; and he comes aboard four times a year to keep an eye on things.
Why is he doing it, I asked. His reply, that he has always wanted to have restaurants around the world, was delivered with a smile. But, as I tucked into a starter that was so good I didn't want it to end, I couldn't help feeling there was more than a little truth in this ambitious statement.
Arcadia is cruising the Caribbean until March, when she crosses the Atlantic for a summer season of sailings from Southampton to the...