THE all-too-visible faces of the restaurant boom of the past 20 years belong to two seldom overlapping cadres: a gallery of genuinely gifted chefs and a gang of telly chefs. These persons of chasmically differing aptitudes and aspirations are, however, united by their overkeen sense of their worth, their formidable amour-propre and their insatiable appetite for publicitym — an appetite which has been cravenly pandered to by a massively indiscriminate and untutored media.

Gastronomy and restauration are areas of endeavour in which anyone and everyone is reckoned to be expert. Ignorance is no bar to success. The cricket commentator who admits to not knowing what a googly is; the fashion editor who boasts of never having heard of Schiaparelli; the political columnist who doesn’t care about confusing Crossman and Crosland: these are improbable figures — or people talking themselves out of a job. Yet the food “writer” who believes wasabi to be mustard or states that sweetbreads are testicles or counsels that bouillabaisse can be made from North Sea ingredients is a commonplace.

No one understood this better than the tireless, ubiquitous PR Alan Crompton-Batt, no one exploited the institutionalised vacuity of Britain’s gastronomic press with more gleeful gusto — and no one more regretted this woeful status quo.

Alan Crompton-Batt was a most unusual man and a most unusual PR. His was — to the public at any rate — the invisible face of the restaurant boom. That he singlehandedly invented modern restaurant PR in this country is indisputable. That PR should be the most professional, most accomplished part of restauration in this country is, inevitably, seldom acknowledged. For, after all, the PR cannot blow his own trumpet; the media who owe everything to the PR are unwilling to admit to that debt; the restaurateur/chef is so consumed by his genius and acumen that he too stays shtum.

Crompton-Batt’s achievement was, however, more than the invention of what might seem like an overblown adjunct to restauration. He went further. In many instances he created what he would subsequently represent.

He manipulated his clients as much as he manipulated his press: and it was his press. He assiduously courted editors and encouraged them to devote space to his product, to appoint restaurant reviewers, to commission food features. He was astonishingly successful.

It would be going too far to say that an engagingly enthusiastic cynic such as Crompton-Batt ever idolised anyone — but he was much indebted to Andrew Loog Oldham, the Rolling Stones’ first manager. In his early twenties he ran a punkish band called the Psychedelic Furs but gave up on them when he discovered that such a job mainly entailed being a sort of therapist to teenage egos.

He realised, though, that cooking and chefs and restaurants were susceptible to the same shock treatment. He was also indebted to The Sweet Smell of Success.

He was, however, far from the caricatural, boorish PR schmoozer. He was courteous, funny, subtle, witty. His own success was due to a baffling combination of opportunism, genuine charm, hardnosed prescience and a scholarly, near-encyclopediac knowledge of gastronomy and restauration. Indeed he possessed such a knowledge of countless topics. However, he wore it lightly.

During the years of his pomp he had around him a quasi-harem of beautiful, young, well-connected women — Rebecca Churchman, Victoria Ewing, Catherine Fairweather and Elizabeth Moody whom he married in 1987 (they later divorced) — which rivalled that of Naim Atallah. His initial contact with the world which he would inhabit for the rest of his life was, improbably, as an inspector for the Egon Ronay Guide: a spell during which he let a room in his rather grand North London mansion flat to his fellow inspector, the future chef Simon Hopkinson.

His first client as a PR was a very different chef, Nico Ladenis, a peerless craftsman whom Crompton-Batt reinvented, encouraging him to behave as an intemperate monster. It was an unconvincing impersonation, but it made news. The bad-boy chef was born. The better the chef the worse he behaved. Marco Pierre White and Gordon Ramsay leapt from the same mould — living, breathing, cussing clichés.

But as his creations prospered so did he flounder. He admired and bonded with Jeffrey Bernard. They were introduced at an epic lunch in The Ivy: the owner Jeremy King recalled that had they been ordinary punters they’d have been thrown out five hours before they actually left.

Alan Crompton-Batt enjoyed a peripatetic Forces childhood which was gastronomically enlightening. When his father, an RAF officer whom he adored, left the service, he bought a grocery store called Russell Chinn in the culinary desert of Salisbury. He didn’t prosper. As his son would, he died in middle age.

Alan was educated at Bishop Wordsworth’s School in that city, to which he would sentimentally return only to remember why he wanted to leave it and hit the big wide world.

Alan Crompton-Batt, public relations consultant, was born on March 21, 1954. He died of pneumonia on September 20, 2004 aged 50.