47- 48 St John’s Square, EC1; 020 7250 0833

Lunch, Sun-Fri, midday-3pm; dinner, Mon-Sat, 6pm -10.30pm

5 stars: Glad to be grey, 4 stars:Grey for today, 3 stars: Fade to grey, 2 stars: Grey bashing, 1 star: Off the greydar

They’re calling last orders in the kitchens of the West. Every year for the past decade, I have predicted that this was going to be the year of the great hunger — the restaurant recession — and now it’s happened. Just as I soothed, it’s about time we had a winnowing, separated the wheat from the caff, cleared out the Augean dining room. Now I can say with a brimming cup of smug: I told you so. The IMF and the World Bank both agree: now is not a good time to be serving surf’n’turf. You don’t want to be caught offering a wine list that starts at £50 for a half-bottle of Australian Pinot Viagra.

In the City, the cat-fattening lunch places are noticing the absence of customers, but the coffee shops have put their prices up 20p. People who used to go for napkin lunches are now taking a latte and a wrap and the jobs section of The Guardian.

The first rule following a recession is that worried people don’t start by amputating bits of their lives, they downsize them first. When you’re frightened, you put all your effort into not panicking. You don’t make desperate decisions, you make little, sensible, parsimonious changes and hope that maybe the fear will go away. Well, a lot of restaurants are going to go away before the fear does, and I feel conflicted about that. On one plate, there are too many exploitative, lazy dining rooms that badly need to have their balls fed to the bailiffs. Then again, some of my favourite places in the world are restaurants. They’re where I ply my trade, albeit the way a wolf plies sheep. But restaurants are essentially good things, on the side of the angels. A restaurant makes a street a better place, collectively they make cities better places — every closure is a gap in the smile of civilisation. So, on one hand I feel Old Testament about smiting the unworthy with terrible gourmet capitalist wrath; on the other, I don’t want to see chefs and waiters on the street. And, most importantly, none of us wants to encourage dinner parties.

But hey ho, it’s not my job to make restaurants thrive, or throw them to reality television. If I check the PR file, aka the bin, I see that there are still hundreds of restaurants waiting to open, like a list of new recruits going up the line to the Somme. In rich boom time, more than 80% of catering start-ups go chicken breasts up within a year. But it’s not going to affect everybody equally, and here, for what it’s worth — which is probably more than your Isa — are some of my tips for nascent dining rooms.

1 Don’t get caught with a concept. Nobody wants a new anything at the moment, especially not a new, new way to get hot protein down their throat. In times of uncertainty, we will all turn to what we remember. So anything that looks solid and nostalgic and sounds like Elgar is good.

2 Value. That doesn’t mean cheap, but it does mean customers will want to leave feeling like they’ve been fed, not epiglottally challenged. Set lunches are good, as are two-fors, children’s menus and drinkable house wine by the carafe. We are so completely over wine waiters who make very drinkable recommendations that turn out to be £500 plus service charge on the bill.

3 Comfort food. Not necessarily nanny food, but stuff that makes you feel warm and loved. We don’t often talk about the intrinsic emotion of dinner, but some things just do make you feel safe and hugged. Some dishes are like first-name chums — always there for you. Your soup: everyone has a mate who’s a big soup. A creamy curry. Anything with a cheese sauce. Crème brûlée. Big bits of meat. I predict a return of the chariot trolley: a rib carved at the table by a fat cook who looks as if he could see off the Book of Revelations.

4 Cafes. Depressions are seen out in caffs; from corner booths and Formica tables people make plans, regroup, flirt with waitresses. The cafe is the great invention of hard times. You can sit for an age; you can start again and eat breakfast three times a day; read a paper in the warmth; have company. A cafe is always better than being unemployed on the sofa with Countdown. A good caff is a life-saver, a city’s Samaritan, a secular chapel with WiFi instead of prayers. In hard times, everything is about repeat business, about loyalty, about “See you Friday”. So you don’t want to go opening one of those destination-event Ukrainian hooker spots.

5 Hospitality. Restaurants so often forget what it is they’re actually selling, the service they are really providing. Modern dining rooms pile on the anxiety: will you get a table? Will the clipboard Nazis recognise your name? Will the waiter ignore you? Will you puff a small fortune for a little lukewarm something from the chef’s cubist period? Will you leave feeling worse about yourself, smaller, bullied, ripped-off, despised? When everywhere’s full, restaurants may mistake rudeness for sophistication, blasé for cool, pudding for a doll’s hat. Restaurants were invented by the French during the terror — you don’t get a bigger depression than that. The Venetians and the Austrians came up with cafes during times of turmoil and calamity, and they grew up to ferment revolutions, love affairs and poetry that doesn’t rhyme.

Public eating is the good time in bad times. Every dinner is a vote for home, a commitment to a better tomorrow, a toast to health and happiness, a haven for conversation, conviviality, friendship, plans and prosperity, and a public display of what really matters, what’s worth making, defending and passing on.

I did do a review this week, I’m sure I did. I know I did. I ate something somewhere so you wouldn’t have to — possibly as recently as last night. But I simply can’t remember anything about it. No, hold on, I’m getting grey — it was grey. Painted in those National Trust matt flat tones that are called things like Dead Pigeon or Maudlin Mortician. Where on earth was it — somewhere in Clerkenwell, perhaps? Maybe I’m making that up. Clerkenwell is the synonym for all lost and disregarded things, it’s a never-never land of inanimate objects. Your sunglasses, the lens cap, your mother’s pashmina, the girl you stood up on a blind date — they’re all in Clerkenwell. So let’s say the restaurant was in Clerkenwell. I went with friends — I do remember them. Nick and Nick, Christa and Alice, all shiny, bright and gyroscopically humming with anecdote and interest.

And there was a waiter. I’m sure I remember a waiter. He was like Rory Bremner, which I suppose means he was like everyone. He had a pad of some sort. What did we eat? There was an omelette, yes — yes, I had an omelette as a starter. It was slightly burnt. What was in it? Okay, close your eyes, deep breath, regress the omelette, see it on the plate, smell it, what does it smell of . . . I’ve got a blocked nose. Okay, put a bit on your fork, put the fork in your mouth, what does it taste like . . . ah, hot, hot! Oh, it’s prawns. It’s a sort of Vietnamese Cambodian omelette. Is it nice? No, not really. Weird. You know, if I was sitting at a street table in Hanoi in a flowery shirt, I’d probably quite like it, but it’s rather lost in Clerkenwell. Okay: atmosphere. Well, obviously none. A transient grey restaurant that vanished without trace.

Was it expensive? I don’t think so. Was it worth it? Not really. I could have had an omelette at home with some mates. But then that would have been a dinner party and obviously too recession to bear. Whatever this place is called, it wasn’t so exceptionally dull — I’d have remembered if it was. It’s as forgettable as hundreds and hundreds of other restaurants with no sense of occasion, pleasure, anticipation or pride. Sort of culinary Rohypnol. If you can’t be enthusiastic about the reason you got into catering, then why on earth should the customers be enthusiastic about coming back? But they’re all dodos now. Waiting on the shore of extinction for the bankers to club them on the back of the head.

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