It's the ones who are at the core of the crisis who are always the last to know. Those football managers who have steered their teams through 18 consecutive defeats (“Sacked? Me? Why? What did I do?”). The Wall Street experts who designed new investment products so whacky you'd have to be drunk to invent them, and drunker to invest in them, are shocked when the financial world collapses around their ankles.

Now it's the turn of restaurateurs. They are blinking with disbelief: how come, they are asking themselves, everyone realised their racket was over, except them?

Dining out at fancy restaurants - the sort of places where, on catching sight of the bill, you find yourself making the same noise as Janet Leigh when the shower curtain is yanked back in Psycho - is becoming as unfashionable as eating larks.

Antony Worrall Thompson has just closed a bunch of his restaurants and pubs. Jean-Christophe Novelli announced that his gastropub chain has run into trouble. Tom Aikens went into administration before reopening under new owners (with many former suppliers clutching unpaid bills). Recession has hit eating out harder than any other part of Britain's leisure and hospitality business. Restaurants accounted for 45 per cent of the industry's insolvencies in the final quarter of last year when 141 restaurants folded, compared with 107 in the fourth quarter of 2007. In all, 503 restaurants went bankrupt in 2008. That's 32 per cent more than in the previous year.

The beneficiaries? Firms such as Domino's Pizza, whose profits jumped by a quarter last year as diners switched from picking up a fat restaurant bill to picking up the phone and dialling for dinner. Kentucky Fried Chicken is also licking its fingers, announcing this week that it will create 9,000 jobs to meet demand from families happy to eat out of a cardboard bucket.

That's why pretty much any high-street chain you can name is offering promotional inducements. Downloading two-for-one discount vouchers might even be overtaking porn as the No1 activity of websurfers. How did it come to this, the restaurateurs wail?

You know why? Because restaurant-goers are mad as hell and they're not going to take it any more. It's because we read of yet another new restaurant charging £140 for a run-of-the-mill meal for two and think: “You're really opening another £70-a-head diner when most people's net wealth has shrunk so small they can carry it in their navel? Are you smoking something?”

Those days are over. You can eat better, for less money, in most Western cities than in London. Walk, at random, into a restaurant in Rome or New York or Madrid: not only is the food better, and cheaper, but the atmosphere is warmer, and the clientele more varied in age and class.

Now that the expense-account customer has vanished along with Lehman Brothers, these restaurants are as busy as a chimney sweep in Bahrain. Notice anything about those that survive - thrive, even - through thick and thin? They're the ones that hand you a menu so inviting you can't decide. This is because the dishes have been around for decades. Demand has been tested over time. They are proven crowd-pleasers. Places such as The Ivy, Le Caprice, The Wolseley. It's no coincidence that the last of these is run by Chris Corbin and Jeremy King - who previously ran The Ivy and Le Caprice.

If the world wanted cassoulet with clams and galangal, French cooks would have hammered out this combination long ago. Nobody wants to eat in a restaurant where the chef thinks he knows best what you want to eat or the waiter has to explain the concept of how to order. We don't need salt sourced from the Himalayas. Not every dish is improved by chorizo. Nobody wants to eat a £17.95 lamb shank again.

Too many restaurants in England have misunderstood their role. They are places we go to when we don't want to cook; when we want to catch up with friends or to grab a bite after a movie. The restaurant, and food? They lubricate the evening. Unless you are going to El Bulli in Spain to experience Ferran Adrià's cooking, they are rarely the point of the evening. What we mostly want is a cosy trattoria that we can stagger home from. But even the cheaper end of the market makes your spirits sag.

Most pizzas in Britain are dismal and sell for prices, given the cost of the ingredients, that are a tragedy for Britons and a comedy to Italians. Most restaurants that don't cost the earth belong to dreary chains, where there is little incentive for individual branches to inject life into the formula dictated by head office.

Many of these chains are driven not by a passion to feed people but by a get-rich-quick passion to open enough outlets to fatten the business enough to seduce a private-equity predator. When was the last time you walked into a restaurant in England where you felt immediately embraced by the family that owned it, where you felt confident that even if the food was not Michelin-starred, the welcome would be? How often do you to eat in a restaurant that was also there a decade earlier? Where are the La Coupoles and Bofingers and Brasseries Lipp of London, let alone the corner bistro where you can get an omelette and a beer and nobody sneers when you leave with a bill of €10?

Worrall Thompson blames his plight on his bankers for not throwing him a lifeline. That's like hiking naked across the Antarctic and blaming the weather for your frostbite. I recently met a friend for dinner at Worrall Thompson's Notting Grill. I felt queasy for a day afterwards. Maybe it's time that restaurateurs, like bankers, stood up and said sorry. This recession has made them feel sick to their stomachs? Really? Join the club.

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