“What do you fancy for dinner?”

“I don’t mind.”

“What about pizza?”

“Not really.”

“Curry?”

“Maybe.”

“Chinese?”

“We had that the other week.”

“So what DO you fancy?”

“Honestly, anything.”

No.

Not anything.

We established that four suggestions ago.

Welcome to one of Britain’s most ridiculous domestic negotiations:

Choosing a Takeaway

There are hundreds of decisions we make successfully every week.

We go to work. Pay bills. Book holidays. Raise children. Operate vehicles weighing more than a tonne without causing an international incident.

Yet put two hungry adults on a sofa with a phone and suddenly choosing dinner requires the negotiating skills of the United Nations.

Twenty minutes disappear.

Three menus are opened.

Someone says “I’m easy” despite providing mounting evidence that they are, in fact, extremely difficult.

And everybody gets slightly hungrier and slightly more unreasonable.

So perhaps we’ve been asking the wrong question.

Instead of:

“Where should we order from?”

Start with:

“What sort of takeaway night are we having?”

Because that narrows things down considerably.

Is This a Pizza-on-the-Sofa Night?

You know the night.

Nobody wants knives and forks. Okay, possibly a spoon if there’s ice cream involved, but that’s a problem for Future You.

Nobody wants sophistication.

And absolutely nobody wants to hear the phrase “small sharing plates”.

You want pizza.

Something hot. Something cheesy. Something that arrives in a cardboard box and can be eaten while watching television without anybody pretending this is a proper dining experience.

This is also the takeaway where everyone insists they’ll only have a couple of slices.

“Don’t order too much.”

“I’m not even that hungry.”

“One large will definitely be enough.”

Then, fifteen minutes later, somebody is staring accusingly into an empty box.

“Who ate the last slice?”

You did, Marko.

We all saw you.

Peterborough has plenty of pizza options. Some are genuinely excellent.

Others are the sort of pizza you order because it’s 10.47pm, you’re wearing slippers and your standards have entered a temporary but perfectly understandable decline.

And sometimes?

That’s exactly the pizza you need.

Are We Having a Proper Curry Night?

A curry night is different.

A curry order always starts sensibly.

Two mains.

Rice.

Perhaps a garlic naan.

Perfect. Done. Sensible adults ordering an appropriate quantity of food.

Then somebody says:

“Should we get some starters?”

Dangerous.

Very dangerous.

Suddenly there are onion bhajis.

Samosas.

Another naan because apparently one naan between two people would constitute some sort of humanitarian crisis.

Someone has added a side dish “for the table”.

And the table now contains enough food to survive a minor siege.

Not that anyone is complaining.

Peterborough certainly isn’t short of choices when it comes to curry, either.

Through Taste Trail, we’ve already seen how much gets hidden behind those three little words: “fancy a curry?”

Indian classics, regional dishes, Goan cooking, Nepalese food and plenty more besides.

Which raises another question.

When was the last time you ordered something different?

Because most of us have our dish.

You know yours.

The one your thumb automatically scrolls towards. The one you’ve ordered so often you could probably identify it from twenty paces in poor lighting.

Maybe tonight is the night to try one different thing.

One.

We’re not asking you to become a different person.

Nobody needs that sort of pressure on a Thursday evening.

Is Tonight the Night You Finally Try That Place?

This might be my favourite kind of takeaway night.

You know the place.

You’ve scrolled past it approximately 37 times on the food apps.

You’ve looked at the photos.

You’ve opened the menu.

You’ve even said:

“We should try that one day.”

Then you ordered from your usual place.

Again.

No judgement. I once spent about twenty minutes comparing menus before ordering exactly the same thing I’d intended to order in the first place. A spectacular use of everybody’s time.

But tonight could be that day.

Because there’s a strange thing about takeaway apps.

They give us almost ridiculous amounts of choice while making it very easy to repeatedly choose from the same tiny corner of it.

And sometimes that makes sense.

Your regular order might be brilliant.

It might be reliable.

It might be the culinary equivalent of putting on an old hoodie and discovering a tenner in the pocket.

But sometimes it’s simply habit.

And habit is how you can live somewhere for ten years before discovering that apparently everyone else has been eating something fantastic half a mile from your house.

You ever had that happen?

Someone mentions a place you’ve driven past 400 times, tells you exactly what to order, and suddenly you’re wondering where this information has been all your life.

That’s the recommendation we want.

Or Is This an “I Need My Usual” Night?

Let’s defend this one too.

Not every dinner needs to broaden your horizons.

Sometimes you’ve had a day.

You don’t want discovery.

You don’t want surprises.

You definitely don’t want to study twelve menus and read a one-star review written by somebody incandescent with rage because their chips arrived nine minutes later than expected.

You want your order.

The one you barely need to look at the menu for.

The one your other half can order without consulting you because you’ve been eating exactly the same thing since approximately 2019.

There is comfort in that.

Actually, there’s something rather nice about it.

Local takeaways quietly become part of people’s routines.

Friday night after work. Saturday evening with the football on. The emergency Wednesday dinner when the fridge contains half a pepper, some questionable yoghurt and a jar of mustard.

You know the place.

They know the order.

Everybody understands the arrangement.

Why interfere with a perfectly functioning system?

How We’re Going to Find Peterborough’s Best Orders

Here’s the thing.

We don’t want to tell Peterborough what its favourite takeaway is.

We want Peterborough to tell us.

But there’s one rule.

Don’t just give us the business name.

Tell us the order.

That’s the useful bit.

Not:

“Dave’s Takeaway is brilliant.”

Great. Lovely. Thanks, Dave’s mum.

We want:

“Go to Dave’s and order THIS.”

Tell us about the pizza with the topping combination that sounds slightly wrong but somehow works.

The curry you order every single time.

The kebab that requires both hands and a degree of structural engineering.

The burger nobody talks about.

The Nepalese dish everyone should try at least once.

The Chinese order your family has spent fifteen years perfecting.

Give us the insider information.

Because that’s how you discover what people genuinely love.

Not by producing another enormous directory of takeaway businesses and leaving everyone with exactly the same problem they had before.

And there’s another benefit.

Next time somebody asks:

“What do you fancy?”

you might finally have an answer.

Tell Us Your Order

So, Peterborough:

Where should we order a takeaway from tonight — and what exactly should we order when we get there?

Pizza. Curry. Chinese. Kebab. Burgers. Thai. Nepalese.

Something we’ve forgotten.

Something we’ve never heard of.

Something you think deserves far more attention than it gets.

Give us the place + the order in the comments below.

Be specific.

Because “the curry place near the roundabout” isn't going to help anyone.

And if enough people keep nominating the same dishes, well...

We may have to go and try them.

Research can be terribly demanding.