Call it democratisation, call it a new spirit of parsimony, but one thing's for certain - the way we eat in restaurants is changing. The days of sitting in awe at the brilliance of the chef and the superciliousness of the waiters are over. Who has time - or the appetite - for processions of unbidden amuse-gueules or for finicky main courses tugged and tweaked to within an inch of their lives? We don't want clever deconstructions of fish and chips: we want the real thing, simply cooked and brought to the table with the minimum of fuss.

What has happened is a shift in power. It is now the diner who is in control. After years of tyranny at the hands of ego-driven restaurateurs, customers can vote with their wallets, and empty restaurants are having to listen up. Suddenly it is OK to answer the sneery question “sparkling or still?” with “tap”. There's no longer any shame in ordering the house white. You want just two starters? You go ahead. A doggy bag? My pleasure, madam. The test is how restaurants respond to these changes, and for those that don't shape up the writing is on the wall.

But is this all just down to a winter of fiscal discontent? There has also been a fundamental shift not just in the way we want to eat, but in what we want to eat as well, and it is this new style of cooking as much as anything that dictates the style of restaurant we are turning to now. You cannot fail to have noticed that fillet steak and poached chicken breasts are no longer de rigueur. You are just as likely to find skirt of beef and confit duck leg instead. Read some recent restaurant reviews and a lot of this no-nonsense, just-like-granny-used-to-make fare is put down to the credit crunch and the harsh winter. But I think that's a short-sighted view. If you want to better understand the way that Britons eat out today you need to look not at this recession but the last one.

The dour years of the early Nineties brought a move away from the prevailing culinary fashions of the previous decade. French-influenced nouvelle cuisine, with its daft presentation and ludicrous price tag, typified the flash-in-the-pan exuberance of the Eighties, but it went out of favour with long lunch breaks and limitless expense accounts. Anyone starting out in catering as the recession kicked in had to contend with dwindling customer numbers and soaring overheads. For want of a better expression than one coined by John Major at the time, they went back to basics.

The Nineties bred a generation of utilitarian, casual eateries that still dominates today's restaurant scene. At street level there were canteen-like spaces such as Belgo and Wagamama. Current successes such as Canteen and Strada are merely apeing the same formula - producing food of a standard slightly higher than the norm and serving it in a casual, no-nonsense way. And then there was the gastropub. That word still sounds like a dubious culinary “concept”, but when places such as the Eagle, in London, or the Walnut Tree, in Abergavenny, started serving rustic dishes with their draught beer and workaday wines the owners were simply taking advantage of the relatively low set-up costs required to place their operations in previously defunct boozers.

Big-name chefs of the day such as Simon Hopkinson, at Bibendum, Rowley Leigh, at Kensington Place, and Alastair Little, at his eponymous Soho restaurant, were crafting menus that had more in common with the literary works of Elizabeth David and Mrs Beeton than the haute cuisine they had been trained to serve up.

Not all chefs came from a conventional background. In Clerkenwell, Fergus Henderson, a lapsed architect, took over an old smokehouse and named it after the address, St John, with its pared-down menu and basic setting, is possibly the most influential restaurant in the world today.

A friend recently visited Los Angeles, where she was taken to Gordon Ramsay's newest US venture, at the aptly named London Hotel. She had a ball, but her hosts - dyed-in-the-grain Californians - were bemused by some items on the menu. “They couldn't get their heads round the variety meats,” she told me. “Variety meats” is an American euphemism for offal. Ramsay's LA menu is a pioneering work in a town obsessed with lean cuts of prime meat. Pig's head, ox tongue and veal sweetbreads take pride of place on the à la carte selection. Perhaps he is trying to raise the odd Botoxed eyebrow among his diners. Whatever his motives, the peppering of his menu with offal is paying lip service to a place that put previously marginal dishes such as fried chitterlings (intestines) and Bath Chaps (rolled, stuffed pig's head) on the map.

It wasn't all about time and money. As you watch today's TV chefs such as Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, Rick Stein and Jamie Oliver champion Britain's small-scale farmers and artisan producers it is worth remembering that they also started out in a decade marked by food scares and scandals, including the BSE crisis. Environmental awareness has moved from being the preserve of hippies in rural communes to a national concern.

It is probably the (hopefully) unstoppable rise of more ethical food production that is informing today's “cuisine de credit crunch”. When three friends and I opened up at 32 Great Queen Street in 2007, we felt more confident about being able to produce sensibly priced, seasonally informed and artisan-produced grub than at any time in my 15 years at the stove. There is a huge sense of pride and confidence in British ingredients and understated cookery that simply did not exist on such a large scale 20 years ago.

The fact that it takes place in restaurants more than at home is down to an unfortunate notion that domestic cookery needs to be quick and easy. But next time you are about to head for the convenience aisle at your local supermarket consider a trip to your nearest butcher's or farmer's market instead. Talk to the knowledgeable and enthusiastic people who work there and you will find a wealth of inexpensive produce that is worth its weight in gold. Food that takes time to produce is not always time-consuming.

What's in

Walk-ins and a seat at the bar

New World Malbec

Shared plates and tapas

Braised lamb's hearts with mint and barley

Cod and chorizo casserole

Rice pudding with damson jam

What's out

Reservations two weeks ahead

First-growth claret

Seven-course tasting menus

French rack of lamb with baby vegetables

Turbot with pistachio foam

Vanilla bavarois with strawberry coulis and champagne jelly

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