Off Menu with Ed Gamble and James Acaster · Plosive

Nikesh Patel

February 25, 2026·1 hr 13 min·5 clips

Nikesh Patel reveals how he got caught on Hunted just minutes into the game.

First, the throat clearing piles up. Ed sells Fresh Hell, a Canadian breakfast bagel ad barges in, and the show settles into its intro ritual. Then apples cause the first wobble. A cooking metaphor crashes into a fizzy apple drink, because even the intro cannot stay upright for long. The sharpest clip veers into Pokemon Go. What begins as nostalgia for walking around a park becomes a daft audit of why catching everything is hopeless. New monsters keep showing up. Dynamax takes blame, the dream of communal park fun fades, and Barcelona suddenly becomes the next ridiculous destination. That pitch sounds brutal. Trying to justify a weekend away for Pokemon Go, especially with a kid, is funnier than the game. The crew bit keeps spreading. Helen Bauer and Sakisa get named, the booking pattern gets spotted, and the podcast starts threatening to swallow the whole group. Producers nearly get pulled in too. The rule, invented mid riff, is that people off camera would need to be notorious somehow. A silent group chat wife wins the room. Her refusal to post earns bizarre pride, while Bauer's raid requests and pretend crying selfies make the opposite case. The ending goes back to food crime. Hunter's Chicken without chicken or bacon leaves cheese and barbecue sauce, which the table treats as ejection worthy. Benito settles cheese on a plate. Charlotte Church gets invoked, Benito's answer becomes gospel, and Ed and James wrap.

As heard by us

A fast, loose Off Menu turn that keeps the dinner chaos moving.

Off Menu keeps the dinner premise wobbling, and that is part of the appeal here. The best stretches land on childhood meals, Pokemon Go nostalgia, and a dream main course that gets knocked around almost as soon as it is named.

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Why you'd press play

A chat that darts from Pokemon Go nostalgia to dream-main-course nonsense.

Read the full recommendation in PlayNext →

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