A few weeks ago, I inexplicably lost the ability to make table reservations at restaurants. And I don’t mean the kind of restaurants where they fly in the sushi from Japan on Gulfstream jets, or where they serve you foie gras lollipops with your bill.

I couldn’t get seated at hamburger joints; I was refused service at pizzerias. It didn’t matter if I showed up in person, or if I called in advance, the conversation with the hostess would always be the same: she would ask me what time I wanted to eat; I would tell her 7pm; there would be stifled laughter and a long pause; then I would be offered a choice of 4.32pm or 1.07am.

What had I done to deserve such treatment? Was it my accent? Was it my . . . personality?

Turns out I wasn’t alone. The other day I called a friend of mine at 4.15pm and heard an unusual din in the background. “I’m having dinner with my sister,” she explained, awkwardly. “They could only get us a 3.45pm reservation, so we pretended we had jet-lag.” They were dining at a well-reviewed new pizzeria in Hancock Park called Mozza, where a reservation is like an asteroid-induced Ice Age: theoretically possible, but so statistically unlikely as to be unworthy of much thought.

And yet the sudden impossibility of 7pm reservations in LA makes no sense. The city’s economy, like the rest of the US economy, is struggling: and the collapse of the real estate market has hurt more here than just about anywhere else. And while LA’s residents are getting poorer, menu prices are going up, a result of inflation and the weak dollar.

As you might imagine, LA’s restaurant critics are dyspeptic with fury. Patric Kuk, who writes for Los Angeles magazine, complained in his review of Craft – owned by one of the stars of the TV show Top Chef – that he had failed on no fewer than five occasions to get a reservation after 5.30pm. Then the Los Angeles Times weighed in with a 3,000-worder on the subject (knowing the Los Angeles Times, this will be the first of an 18-part series). The reporter, Leslie Brenner, explained how she attempted to make a number of 7pm telephone reservations, was refused, then turned up anyway, only to find empty tables.

Amid all the quoted excuses from various restaurant gurus on the economics of seating policy came something that sounded horribly like the truth – from a PR consultant called Joan Luther. “They [the restaurants] want you to think they’re busy,” she said. “It’s very silly, but I just think they’ve got into the habit.” So there you have it: a citywide conspiracy by a struggling restaurant trade to turn away its own customers, in the hope that turning them away will make them want to come back even more.

That’s Tinseltown for you, I suppose. In the meantime, I’ve developed my own habit to counter the restaurants’ refusal to give me a 7pm table. It’s called cooking.

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