The doorbell rings; it’s friends for dinner. I am – uncharacteristically – a bag of nerves. Is the bread warm? Is the cutlery polished? The wine chilled? I should also add that I am wearing a waitress’s apron and carrying a notepad.

“Welcome to the Pop-Up Restaurant,” I say with professional brightness as I open the door.

The sitting room has been rebuilt as a restaurant with little tables, napkins, flowers and candles. Garden furniture has been disguised with tablecloths.

A swivelling office chair and the piano stool are in service. This has taken me four hours to assemble, yet it does look oddly like a restaurant. There is even Carla Bruni noodling tunefully in the background.

“You must have music in a restaurant, at least at the start,” advises my chef friend Dave – who used to run a real restaurant in central London and who is helping Mr Millard in the kitchen.

“And immediately people arrive, give them something to eat and something to drink.”

I grab coats, throw them at a nearby child and smile. Tightly. Meanwhile, downstairs is fraught. “Get those squashes out,” Dave the chef orders the sous-chef (that’s Mr Millard). “And do it properly!”

Mr Millard leaps across the room as if stung and wipes a speck of butternut squash from the plate. “Now get them upstairs and on the table,” shouts Dave. At me. Standards, standards.

At a dinner party I find people accept food any old how. If you are running a restaurant in your house, however, everything has to be immaculate and instant.

No ladleful of lasagne and dollop of broccoli: you have to give them a proper serving that corresponds to the menu (or, in our case, what’s chalked up on the children’s easel). Pop-up restaurants are the latest unexpected offspring of the recession. If you love cooking and have space, it is (apparently) a way of making money. If you love eating out it’s a way of having a slap-up meal at a reasonable cost.

There are a couple in Paris, several in New York and at least three in London, all aided by the existence of Facebook, PayPal and Twitter.

The food at these instant restaurants ranges from quasi-student to haute cuisine. It’s haute-plus at David Clasen’s First Weekend, which takes place every month in his Belgravia drawing room.

Clasen, a bright-eyed former banker with cheffy ambitions, serves up an “aggressively seasonal” five-course menu including delicacies such as “celeriac whoosh” to an invited clientele that, on the night I was there, included QCs and opera singers. We ate whooshes of this and morsels of that – much of it from his father’s kitchen garden – and moaned with pleasure, while Clasen stayed firmly in the kitchen.

On the other side of London, the Underground Restaurant has been running for 10 weeks. It is operated by Miss Marmite Lover, who has seen her Saturday night bookings rocket from 12 to a current record of 34.

You simply buy a £25 ticket from her blog (tinyurl.com/cp3joy) and turn up. A waitress offers wine from a bottle adorned with a raffle ticket.

This is in case the Underground Restaurant is raided by the police, in which case you are all told to break into Happy Birthday, pretend it’s Miss Marmite’s 40th and say your wine was won on the tombola. It is all a bit under the radar because it’s not actually legal to run a restaurant in your own house.

This, of course, makes the process all the more exciting. I am expecting 16; in the end, 17 turn up. The extra one is Miss Marmite Lover herself.

“I’ve come to check out what you are serving,” she says. Well, there’s no choice, I say. And the menu is veggie, cheap and safe.

While Dave and Mr Millard furiously crumble ricotta, I scan the dining room. Everyone is eating. I can escape. Great. This is one of the unexpected pleasures of a pop-up eaterie.

You say hello, take the coats and leave them to get on with it.

Unlike that moment at a dinner party when you must abandon the cooking and talk to Simon, who doesn’t know anyone, and introduce Jennifer to Emma, because they will get on so well, you leave your guests to do it themselves. Plus you aren’t drinking, so there is no danger of that dinner-party moment when you realise you have to clear the table before you slide beneath it.

Anyway, there was no need for formal introductions. Within 10 minutes my guests were table-hopping and in one case shoving tables together. Even though all the customers were friends, everyone behaved in a distinctly different way to me. It must have been the apron.

“Can I have some salt, please?” asked someone on table 1. I cursed him – silently, of course. “Salt?” yelled Mr Millard downstairs, busy arranging asparagus spears on 17 plates.

“God!” He lobbed an ancient, four-fifths-empty container of Saxa. Then I had to find a bowl in which to put it. Then I realised the bowl had about a year’s worth of dust on it. But Sebastian, our washer-up (a crucial addition, this), was busy at the sink so I had to wait.

I had forgotten table 4 wanted some water, while table 5 was sans cutlery. To compensate I bunged some red wine at table 5, whose glasses were half empty. “Er, I was actually drinking a different wine,” murmured a diner, staring at his now blended glass. I bet this doesn’t happen at the Ivy, I thought, charging downstairs for the 30th time, followed by two children and the dog.

Health and safety? Well, I did have the back door unlocked, so there was a fire escape.

In the end, after ice-cream and coffee and herbal tea and coats and trips to the ladies, everyone pitches out into the night very happily. The bill? I don’t bother, as my customers are guinea pigs. If I were charging, the accepted rate for a pop-up meal seems to be £25 a head. This would be for three courses – wine might cost another £5 or so for a bottle.

Can you actually make money from a pop-up restaurant? If you are careful with your costings and portion sizes and ensure that the provenance of absolutely everything, from flowers (32 tulips for a tenner, after some haggling) to napkins (100 paper ones for a quid at the Pound Store), is bargain basement, then you might be able to. Above all, you must shave all extras from the cooking.

“Keep it really simple and seasonal,” says Dave, as we wash the pots and mop the floor and sit down, exhausted, for a glass of wine, just as if we were the staff of a proper restaurant.

Am I taking bookings for next week? You must be joking.

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