Look, there’s no doubt that a fine dining experience can be a memorable occasion.

But there comes a time in a man’s working week, and sometime’s in a woman’s, even, when a sinking realisation settles in the pit of your stomach. Not long after the arrival of that sinking feeling, a ache, an itch, a craving develops, which is only exaserbated by the approach of the weekend and the succesful punishment of a stack of work. We’re talking about the need to have a “chow”.

A chow is, by definition, not fine dining. Which is not to say in any way that the food and drink itself is never of a high standard or quality – the fundamental variation from haute cuisine is the attitude with which one approaches the food – the angle of attack, per se.

With haute cuisine, one holds the food in one’s mouth, allowing the requisite time for flavour notes to develop, and make their way in a delicate, dancing trickle across your olfactory nerves.

When you chow, you get the food in your face. And you love it.

It tastes good – amazing even. Sure, it’s not as complex or delicate as haute cuisine, but the desire and the hunger is there, and it’s the desire and hunger that propels this particular chow onto the podium of “Best Meal Ever”, every time. A good chow is sociable, it banishes fatigue, it coats you in a warm blanket of comfort and then chills you back to life with a frosted beverage designed for one thing only – to slake your thirst.

The Chow isn’t food, it’s a primal re-imagining of the medieval feast, where our ancestors would gather around fires in mead halls and bomas and roast meat on the fire, jug down copious amounts of complimentary beer, and celebrate each other’s company.

The pub lunch is a great example of a Chow.

Now here’s where I want you to listen carefully.

56 pubs in Cape Town have combined to over a R50 pub lunch at a different venue, every single day. You’l get an honest plate of delicious pub food (you know what this is called by now), and a draught beer.

What a joke. I’m laughing all the way to the tap, I’ll tell you that much.

So here’s the vibe:

The R50 Pub Lunch and Draught vibe is happening from 25 January (I know! So much time lost already!) to 6 March.

You can find a participating PubLunch venue on your desktop here, or on the go, here.

Once you’re at the place, you have two ways of getting your Chow on.

1) If you’re on FourSquare, check in to the place.

2) If you’re not on FourSquare, send an sms to the unique venue code (which will be on display pretty much all around you at this point).

After you’ve completed one of those two tasks, show your waiter the special appearing on your cell phone screen, and begin wriggling like a four year old at the business end of a car ride to the beach.

During your digestion phase you’re likely to get an SMS asking you to rate the quality of the Pub Lunch at that particular place on a scale of 1 – 5. It’s in your interests to respond honestly, because the top ten Pub Lunches will be aggregated from your response – at which point we’ll all have nailed our ten best places to eat when we have that primal craving for beer and food.

So there you have it, kids. Find yourself a venue nearby, and get on it. Take your Enos along – one can never be sure that one won’t get carried away.