Lunch with Pauline Gandel started with clams. Except the molluscs aren’t on the menu at Garden, the restaurant at the National Gallery Of Victoria, where I eventually sit down to eat with the matriarch of the Melbourne retail dynasty famous for Chadstone shopping centre.

Rather the clams – or at least their shells – are upstairs in the NGV’s Pauline Gandel Gallery of Japanese Art, and the feast is very much a visual one.