Someone once said to me that one day, somebody must have been out fishing and said “I’m a bit hungry, I think I’m going to eat an oyster”. And it must have been a bold man that first did so.

The thing about eating oysters is that there wasn't a first man who did it. We evolved into doing it. Kissing each other on each cheek - was first done by some old roué in France who said: "Come here my dear; let me show you my new discovery. Now, close your eyes..." and so kissing each other on each cheek was invented. Possibly.

Oysters are not my thing particularly. I love fish but just not oysters. When I order a seafood grill at The Lure in Camarillo, Laura, our favorite server knows without having to ask me, to substitute the oysters for scallops. As much as I don’t like oysters. It's not oysters that were the big foolish mouth-adventure for mankind; the real idiot was the first man to eat a well-done steak. We are so familiar and comfortable with cooked food; we can barely comprehend how strange it must have tasted.

Nobody has the faintest idea when the first steak was grilled; actually, a lot of people have faint ideas, and they range from 10,000 to 2.5m years ago. But imagine, all you have ever eaten is raw meat. Burnt meat must have been truly disgusting. Everything about it is alien. The temperature, the texture and the taste. Our palates are a combination of acquired instinct; poisons taste bitter, mother's milk is sweet and learnt cultural and aesthetic prejudice, like the Chinese don't drink milk, the Jewish don't eat pork, and everyone in peep-toe heels likes champagne apparently.

So, burnt meat won't have been an eureka moment, but the benefits of cooked meat aren't about aesthetics. Nicety follows necessity. If you roast your meat, it's easier and faster to eat. You can consume more, and this is all-important for little naked men who are competing with a host of predators and scavengers that come with integral butchery sets in their mouths or claws. Cooked meat allowed us to absorb the protein we needed to make big brains and come up with other good ideas after flame-grilled sirloin.

So, anyway. I had a friend visit recently from Lake Arrowhead, and as is customary when we have friends over for the weekend, we usually visit our favorite steakhouse; The Palm in Beverly Hills but it’s a bit far too go from the Conejo Valley and my friend will insist on paying, The Palm although it is very nice and decent quality, it is not cheap. Plus, he doesn’t understand food. A decent a la carte meal to him would be the saver menu at a Denny’s.

So, we go to­­ Mastro’s in Thousand Oaks instead not because it’s any less classy but it is quite a bit nearer and as most of us know with living in Ventura County, we don’t have to take out a loan to park our cars, compared to those in LA County.

Mastro’s is really everything you want from a decent restaurant. Rooms that don’t make you feel claustrophobic, and a decent bar. If steakhouses are not your thing, then for us Brits living in America, it's difficult to explain how deeply and neurotically attached people can become to the providers of meat on plates.

Every major city in America has its big chop shop, which will have a darkish, clubbable, robber-baron feel. There will inevitably be a maître d' of age who is so oleaginous that if he lay on a beach, he'd count as pollution. The waiters will be psychotically annoyed old men in long white aprons; the steaks will be huge, black and pink, and unnaturally soft and saliva-y. The worship of meat in these places is akin to that at Ukrainian lap-dancing auditions. They use words such as heritage, venerable and timeless.

The first thing you notice about Mastro’s is that it has a different feel to it than many others. It’s got a nice relaxed atmosphere to it, a warm charm but somewhat modern without being intimidating like many nice steak restaurants are. I will add that The Palm has a similar welcoming feel to it too. We did however time our visit wrong, as we were told that there were not enough shrimp dishes ( or prawn dishes – where I am from) that evening, probably because the prawns had been refused entry visas from Nova Scotia. The lobsters, though, they were American enough and they made it through, which was a positive, as I love lobster.

The steaks in most steak houses are offered to you with a lot of qualifications such as: their age, weight, place of birth. I really want the kitchen to sort out all of that. My choice between an 18oz, 27-day red poll from Texas, as opposed to a 15oz, 30-day black cow from Kentucky, is nothing more than a coin-toss guess. It's the sort of information that gives you the illusion of expertise, sophistication and taste, but I don’t know what any of it means. Meat varies from carcass to carcass far more than it does from Monday to Wednesday or Kentucky to Texas.

All that aside, I do love American steak. I like its graininess and its dribbly incontinence compared to what we have in the UK. And Mastro’s is no exception. It’s great.

My friend, who irrationally hates American food particularly steak, but just as irrationally loves so many things about American food, pulled a smile and tentatively said: "This is really good, isn’t it?" Food normally is the only thing he mentions with a tentative face. This is because he usually can't tell the difference between a fillet mignon and bubble wrap and is almost always wrong. About 12 years ago, I was sat in a lovely Italian restaurant (C&O Trattoria) in Marina del Rey with him and before the waiter had time to hand us the menus, he popped across the road to a mini market for some Pringles and a Bagel before dinner. This was because he thought the food was going to be horrible food that was until he tasted their killer garlic rolls. But here at Mastros, he never had the chance to find a mini market and just as well. It was delicious. Everything was great from the food to the service and the ambience of the place.

Earlier on during the meal, when our server had brought the meat over on a slab, the guy just leaving on the table next to us said “you should ask them whereabouts it was conceived too”. I laughed but as I look around, I noticed this guy is one of our first ever customers.

He had noticed us walk in but as we had company, he didn’t want to interrupt us, so he made out he hadn’t seen us. Now, I’m 6ft 2 and a former rugby player and swimmer. I have a presence when I walk in the room although my wife is the complete opposite. She is 5ft-ish, very slim and slender and if it wasn’t for her striking looks, you’d easily miss her when she walked in. However, she gets noticed quite a bit, she mostly drives around in one of our bright yellow and blue vehicles, with You’ve Got Maids plastered all over it. You can see them from the moon, apparently.

We are quite recognizable anyway, our vehicles get around the area quite a bit. Our house cleaning service is ranked as the area’s favorite for customer satisfaction, which we have worked extremely hard to achieve this. The parting conversation from our client was he wants us to provide an office cleaning service for his offices. He and his wife are so happy with the house cleaning service we do for them that they want to get rid of their current office cleaners who are barely doing an adequate and have us instead. He further added that he has another client for us, his neighbor has had a maid service work for her, and the maid had managed to spill something on their carpet.

On top of this, the IRS have since contacted her for back taxes. Now, she pays the maid cash, they aren’t licensed bonded and insured and guess what, she doesn’t declare her earnings to Uncle Sam. So, the IRS have approached this householder and want to know where their tax money is and as the maid has technically become a domestic employee, they go after the home owner for their cut. Which really is something that is not that uncommon.

Now, we are the area’s most highly rated House Cleaning Service and Commercial Cleaning Service covering Malibu, Camarillo, Ventura, Oxnard, Carpinteria, Summerland, Thousand Oaks, Newbury Park, Westlake Village, Agoura Hills, Calabasas & Pacific Palisades.

We offer a full service weekly or bi-weekly recurring house cleaning service. We also offer 52 Point Spring Cleans (Deep Cleans), Move in Cleans or Move Out Cleans, Pre-Party Cleans or After Party Cleans and Commercial Cleaning Services.. We have consistently been the most highly-rated local cleaning service on Google and Facebook for the past 6 months and this is a credit to all the hard work our house cleaners and office cleaners put in.

So, the next best thing to do is call us on either 805-321-6243, 805-917-6243 or 424-224-6243. Book an appointment for us to visit, so we can provide you with a free in home estimate.