See Katy Perry’s Inaguration photo diary.

Once they call our number—Vogue and Perry fight for possession of the tiny bill; Perry wins—we sit and eat, and she is mostly left in peace, absent the occasional guerrilla pesterer. The food is meltingly good, and she is pleased when I vacuum up a homemade taco with absolute relish. “When I was younger, I used to be a part of the surfing-and-skateboarding community,” she says. “And after a whole day of having saltwater in my mouth was this taco. It always, always hit the spot.” She points out the window. “There is a charity shop right there that I would go to after I ate here. Lunch and a new dress.” She urges me toward a tamale, and I dig delicately into what looks like a puddle of damp piecrust to find more deliciousness. She says, “We used to have ladies when we lived here—Hispanic ladies in church—drop these off at our house on Sundays. It was nice. It was one of the perks.” I’m guessing there weren’t too many perks. No, she says, they were few and far between.

The waiter brings horchatas, which she is worried I will not like, but the icy, milky-thick cinnamon taste is a fabulous counter to spice and hot peppers. “Do you like cinnamon?” she asks. I do: It was the smell of America when I first used to come, in the 1980s. All the coffee I ever drank in the USA appeared to have cinnamon thrown on top, I tell her, before Starbucks changed everything. Perry (who was born in 1984) puts on a face of mock awe and whispers: “You knew a life before Starbucks?” and then, “How do you get on with cheese and things?” I tell her I’m very fat at the moment, and she jokes, “Oh, yeah, I can’t even fit through a doorway.” Pitch-perfect.

This is why Russell Brand fell for her in a minute and a half, I’m thinking: because of the quick-fire slapstick/deadpan, adult/childish wisecracking and point-scoring. When they were both on form—and in love—they must have come over like Hepburn and Tracy. Brand was “a magical man” when she met him four years ago, she says, and he has always looked like a romantic little package—an all-eras history boy with his Regency hair, skinny Tudor legs and codpiece, and Wuthering Heights recklessness. “He’s a very smart man, and I was in love with him when I married him,” Perry says. “Let’s just say I haven’t heard from him since he texted me saying he was divorcing me December 31, 2011.” I murmur something about Brand’s bad-boy reputation but add that his native land, the UK, forgives him because he’s hysterically funny. She responds, “Hysterical in some ways. Until he started making jokes about me and he didn’t know I was in the audience, because I had come to surprise him at one of his shows. So. Hysterical to a point. I mean, I have to claim my own responsibility in things. I do admit that I was on the road a lot. Although I invited him time and time again, and I tried to come home as much as I possibly could. You saw that in the movie.” Katy Perry: Part of Me, a documentary released last year that has garnered $32 million worldwide to date, covers the period before, during, and after her time with Brand. “That wasn’t edited to leave footage out—there wasn’t any footage of him.”