18 Bruton Place, W1

For some people, the appeal of a restaurant is less about what gets eaten there than about who eats it. When I was appointed restaurant critic of Tatler in 1999 it was made clear to me that the most important part of my job would be getting the names of three celebrity regulars for the "Who?" slot at the top of each review. If a pre-booking phone call could not promise me diners of the calibre of Jemima Khan, Bryan Ferry, Jilly Cooper and The Akond of Swot (ideally all together, at a table, sharing a low-fat fondue and a glass of ’poo) then I wasn’t even allowed to go and try the food.

The problem with this policy was that anywhere that actually does have a handful of A-list regulars generally enjoys their custom because of the privacy, or at least the illusion of privacy, it promises. So they won’t tell you over the phone who’s coming in. And anywhere that does tell you the names of its famous customers is doing so because it needs the publicity, which means that the food is crap. So I tended to do what I have always done when presented with a sticky journalistic quandary, I made it up.

I went wherever the food sounded good and then whacked three famous names at the top of the copy, willy-nilly, to keep the editor happy.

Alas, I am not much of a celeb-hound so my lists of famous diners were characterised by a lot of unlikely repetition and occasional rank unfeasibility. Responses to my monthly offerings from the beautiful and well-connected Tatler staff ran along the lines of, "Wow, the Pope gets around, doesn’t he?" and "Are you sure Fidel Castro goes to Royal China for dim sum on Sundays?" and "Who on earth is Saul Bellow?" and "Isn’t John the Baptist dead?"

So anyway, I was upstairs at Rules the other day enjoying the best steak you can get in London (because Rules is the only restaurant in London, indeed the world, where you can get a rump steak from one of Paul Coppen’s three-and-a-half-year-old Belted Galloways from North Yorkshire) when into whom should I bump but Rory Ross, my predecessor as Tatler restaurant critic, now a fine-living correspondent for a number of publications so refined and elitist that they have to be published in America.

"Been anywhere good recently, Giles?" He asked.

"No," I said, for it was true. "What about you?"

"Bellamy’s," he said. "It’s going to be the place for a while, I think. I’ve been a few times and couldn’t believe it - everybody who is anybody is there."

Once a Tatler restaurant critic, always a Tatler restaurant critic. He named names. I hadn’t heard of any of them. They all had titles or owned companies or small Middle Eastern countries, or were the sons of people who did. Or they were married to heiresses, raced cars for fun, shot big game and had aftershaves named after them.

"What, no Bedingfields?" I asked. "No Rooneys or Dohertys or Swanks? Not even Kenzie out of Big Blazin’ Brother Squadron?"

"No, Giles," said Rory. "That’s the whole point." (I can’t believe I just wrote "‘No, Giles,’ said Rory" - it sounds like a bloody Biggles novel.)

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