Seventy plus kitchens is a wonderful problem to have and a genuinely stressful one to solve at the gate with a hungry group behind you. So here is the plan we hand our own friends before their first visit.

Arrive hungry, and arrive early-ish

Do not eat before you come. Obvious advice, routinely ignored. Get here in the first hour after we open if you can, not because it is quieter, though it is, but because you want one lap before you commit to anything. The first hour is for looking. The rest of the night is for eating.

Send one person to claim a table the moment you spot a free one and let everybody else keep moving. Tables are the real currency here. Once you have one it becomes home base, the group peels off in twos, and you end up eating like a very well-fed committee.

Graze the zones, do not conquer them

Work in small orders across several zones rather than one big order in one place. One dish each, carried back and shared, is how you taste eight kitchens in a night instead of two. Have a browse through who is cooking before you arrive if you like a plan, or just follow your nose, which is more or less what the zones were designed for.

Between rounds, the bars are your pit stop. Frozen things, cold things, something with a bit of theatre to it. The stages run live music most nights we are open, so if you hear a set start up, take your drink and go and stand in it for a song or three. What’s on has the line-up.

Then the best bit: leave by water. The CityCat turns a feed into a proper outing and it is comfortably the easiest way to do the whole night without giving parking a second thought. Getting here has the ferry, bus and parking detail.