We hadn't finished the first course when my wife looked up to ask, "Sure you want to give this up?"

She was saying more than that she was enjoying the salad of chickpeas and shrimp, sweetened with plump sultana raisins and spiced with just a whiff of curry.

I shrugged, my passive way of reminding her we'd been through this, that the time had come to try something new, something I hoped would be as enlightening and as fun as reviewing restaurants.

"Did you forget what I married you for?" she pressed.

I could have squirmed. Instead, I laughed. She did, too.

Martha and I have been dining out together for more than 40 years. Those first meals had nothing to do with reviewing restaurants. We began to date in the mid-1960s at San Jose State.

A date occasionally meant driving up the Bayshore Freeway to a play, club or restaurant in San Francisco. If columnist Herb Caen had made a restaurant sound intriguing, that's where we'd head if it wasn't too expensive.

My mother sometimes would send me $20 to help with textbooks or other college expenses. I never told her that her hard-earned money often was spent at a San Francisco restaurant she'd likely never visit herself. I was selfish and unfair, but now can rationalize with little guilt that those meals were part of my education.

For Martha and I, our first memorable meal out together was at Omar Khayyam's, a plush Middle Eastern restaurant in San Francisco's theater district. If I remember correctly, the hefty menu was embossed with quatrains from the Persian poet's best known work, "The Rubaiyaat." Something about "a loaf of bread beneath the bough, a flask of wine, a book of verse – and thou beside me singing in the wilderness." We were in the wilderness and too young for the wine, but our infatuation with restaurants was under way.

It was the first restaurant where we sat side by side, a thrill for a couple of college kids who'd never imagined such a romantic concept. Someone in a suit, with a proprietary air, sat down with us at the outset. He announced he was about to "break bread" with us as a symbolic gesture of welcome.

"I'm here to serve you," we remember him saying, despite our unease over just who he was and what he was up to.

I wonder to this day if he might have been the owner, legendary restaurateur George Mardikian, a Fresno Armenian American who in 1951 received the Presidential Medal of Freedom for his contributions as a food consultant to the Army during World War II and the Korean War.

I've no idea what we ate, but I doubt it included eggplant. That wasn't something I grew up with, but even then I think I was fairly adventurous. Something about what people ate and how they ate it intrigued me, and still does.

I haven't a clue about what's behind this curiosity, though I can speculate that a person's behavior at and about the dining table says a lot about them – "know the bread, know the baker," that sort of thing.

Back in San Jose, as a student reporter, I finagled occasional assignments to review acts at a local nightspot, the Safari Club. Food was secondary to the thought of getting a drink with a fake ID and getting an interview with such entertainers as Trini Lopez and Mel Tormé.

During one visit to the Safari Club I had an opportunity to impress Martha by lighting a tabletop candle whose wick was cold and black. I fired up the tip of a rolled-up paper napkin and then watched it explode in flames as I stuck it into the candle holder.

It got the candle going, but the napkin burned so fast and so hot I had to drop it into the holder. For a terrifying moment, I had visions of the Safari Club becoming the Torch Club, and writing a far different story.

To this day I wonder if that unsettling incident accounts for my mild irritation whenever I walk into a restaurant to find tabletop candles unlit.

I did not grow up in a family of gourmets. My father could pan-sear a steak. My mother was a fine cook, in the way of someone who had grown up on a Wisconsin dairy farm. She had a weekly meal schedule that customarily included fish on Fridays, chicken on Saturdays, roast beef on Sundays, and meatloaf some other time during the week.