The Twilight of the Restaurant Critic

In October 1976, Michael Caine, the chef Richard Shepherd, and the Irishman Peter Langan opened Langan’s Brasserie in Mayfair. It was the start of something. Over the next 50 years, London became one of the great restaurant cities in the world, and that story is the subject of Dylan Jones’s epic new book, Table Hopping: The Secret History of London Restaurants, from Langan’s Brasserie to the Wolseley. It’s a social history of modern London told through its dining rooms. Jones edited British GQ for more than two decades and has written about everything from Bowie to Bond. Here he turns to the rooms he seems to have spent much of his adult life in.

This is not a book about food. Jones argues that restaurant culture and culinary culture are different things. The social history of a city, he says, is more about where and why people eat than what they order. So the book runs through the designer restaurants of the ’80s and Marco Pierre White’s arrival at Harveys in 1987, then into the ’90s, which Jones calls the golden age of the London restaurant: The reborn Ivy, the first gastropubs, the vast glamour of Quaglino’s and the Atlantic, and Damien Hirst’s Pharmacy. After that comes the tyranny of the tasting menu, small plates, street food, and Sexy Fish. Most of it is told by the people who were there: Chefs, owners, maître d’s, critics, and regulars.