I ALWAYS find that meeting up with an old friend is a bit like trying to catch up with a soap you've missed for a few weeks.
 At first you're blatantly aware that there's a big gap of knowledge you have to fill - but after just a few minutes you feel as though you saw them only yesterday. And so it was when I met up with my old pal, former ECHO writer Jane Gallagher, who is now making a very fine living in PR thank you very much. So, not surprisingly, the first few minutes of our visit were spent excitedly gossiping, and trying to find out who had done what, when. We gossiped as I picked her up, we gossiped in the car, we gossiped in the car park . . . and then we entered the laid-back, trendy (but not uncomfortably so) Italian Kitchen restaurant in Formby - and there we stopped. It's not hard to be impressed by the decor in the Italian Kitchen. It's a colourful, laminate-floored, diner's paradise - with fantastic fragrances wafting across the room. The restaurant was pretty busy considering it was a week night. As I had offered to pay, I was secretly pleased to see there was a fixed price menu - any two courses for £10.95. So I very generously declared that Jane could choose exactly what she wanted, and hoped she wouldn't pick up on the reason for my unprecedented generosity. If I was going to be generous to Jane, I was certainly going to be generous to myself - and so for starters I chose the very indulgentsounding pomodoro galettini, which was described on the menu as 'puff pastry with sundried tomatoes, caramelised onions and melted mozzarella. It was just as I had hoped. Deliciously tasty, with enough mozzarella to stop it being too dry, and the sweet onions finishing off the dish perfectly. Jane had chosen cozze mariniere, mussels with onions, white wine, creamand garlic, which she said tasted delicious and really fresh. As the plates were taken away, we resumed our incessant chatting - hopefully not to the annoyance of other diners, until the main courses came. | 
Article
