Have you ever, ever seen anyone eat a kebab in the daytime? No. People only eat them late at night because you have to be completely off your face to eat one. They also glow in the dark so you can find your way home.
Now, Pierre Le Chef may not enjoy eating sweaty lamb at 3am outside Birmingham nightclubs, but he does know a lot about cooking. In fact, he spends most of his time trotting around the globe in search of those certain ingredients which make his dishes extra special and enhance his reputation.
This time Pierre is off to Switzerland, Greece, the West Indies, Mexico and France to track down each country's gastronomic treats and, naturally enough, you have to be there to help him.
The ingredients are spread over 48 increasingly complex levels and your first task is to find Pierre's floor gun - which is needed for stunning the ingredients - and his net, which is used to trap them. You have to collect a certain number of ingredients on each level, then deposit them in a cage to open the level exit.
To hinder your progress, the vegetables can run away or stun you, there's a time limit, and you can be attacked by bacteria or have your captured ingredients set free by the evil Le Chef Noir.
There's a little tactical planning involved here. Depending on the location of the cage, you can either collect all your ingredients in one feel swoop - but risk losing them if you get stunned - or you can keep making return trips to the cage to deposit each ingredient.
Pierre can also collect fruit bonuses at the end of every world and there are a variety of different weapons - including tobasco sauce - which he can use on the ingredients and nasties on each level.
This game is great. You can't help liking the cutely animated Pierre as he leaps around from platform to platform and it really is tremendous fun chasing the ingredients around each level, depositing them in a cage, then setting off for more.
Out To Lunch is also very tricky. Even early on you can get hopelessly stuck - Switzerland, for example, is filled with narrow, icy platforms which can make getting from one end of a level to the other incredibly frustrating. You also never know where the exit is until you've deposited the last ingredient into the cage, so you have to be quick on your feet.
You also lose a life - Pierre comes with three - every time you fail to complete a level on time or get struck down by a nasty bout of salmonella. There are no continues and you only get a password once you've completed a world, so you have to complete 12 levels in one go, with failure sending your right back to the beginning again.
Despite this, Out To Lunch remains extremely enjoyable. The joystick control is intuitive and you can usually scale the death-
Graphically the game's a treat, with gorgeous parallaxing and slickly animated sprites. Looks like Pierre Le Chef could be with us for some time to come.