THE BEST

- elBulli

- River Café

- The Square

THE WORST

- Ambassade de l'Ile

- Chicago Rib Shack

- Cha Cha Moon

- Waterhouse

- Alain Ducasse at the Dorchester

- Bel Canto

Where have all the sub-prime steaks gone? Gone to pork belly, every one. Even before the crash-bang-crunch was a 90-point headline, this was a year of gastronomic belt-tightening. The restaurants of conspicuous oli-gastronomy, with five glacier-faced, missile-breasted, Alaïa-clad Valkyries at the lectern who would never recognise any name that didn’t end in -ski and said you could wait in the corridor while they decided whether to feed you, are over.

Having the paparazzi outside is a sign that this is a place not to be seen in. The quality and calibre of celebrities caught outside unbookable restaurants have gone way down. Now it’s more likely to be a bloke who used to be in EastEnders, a drunk runner-up from Big Brother, and Piers Morgan. Gone are the days when Brad Pitt would engagingly take a swing at a pap, or some trashed techno-babe would wink pink getting out of a cab for the edification of 15-year-olds and downloaders everywhere. Big-money dining in multimillion rooms is so utterly over. Binge dinners are just not chic or smart, and the restaurants that specialise in them suddenly look embarrassing, passé and tacky. Sake No Hana had an overindulgent opening. Backed by Evgeny Lebedev, it is a perfect example of how to completely and utterly miss the zeitgeist, like turning up at a No Third Runway protest dressed like a 1970s Braniff hostess.

They always say that catering is the first into a recession and the last out, and I think the food knows, I think the ingredients can tell. Knives and pans have a sibyl’s sense of what's coming. There has been a move away from tables with five layers of linen, glasses big enough to breed goldfish in, and a special spoon just for supping your jus. The writing was on the wall for amuse-bouches and unordered shot glasses of tricksy gunk with caviar on top. No more gold leaf on your risotto, or truffle oil on everything. The slow-cooked rediscovery of British Industrial Revolution food overcame everything this year. For the first time in two decades, there must have been more English-restaurant openings than Italian. The fear of poverty has coincided with a digestive nationalism, a confidence in the home-grown — and thank God.

The writing on the wall also told us what field our cow came from, and the name of the wendy house in which the chicken brought up her happy, multicultural brood. Menus stopped being written by Barbara Cartland and all read like they’d been penned by WH Auden, Ted Hughes and Bill Oddie. Food went back to the sideboard, to scrubbed oak tables and bentwood chairs, served by people who wore home-baked shoes and had degrees in sustainable English. Pubs merged into restaurants, and restaurants served five types of beer. There was a sense of generous austerity about, and a cool pride.

Cooks’ menu envy made them compete to see who could serve the most gangleous of remote cuts and the weirdest hedgerow weeds. Fillet steak became braised shin; shoulders replaced cutlets; every time you opened your mouth, it was filled with a mustardy snout, ear or fry (bollock). The totemic dish of the year was the ubiquitous pork belly: a slow-roasted slab of crackling and fat, held together by slivers of exhausted muscle. It’s in every TV chef’s Christmas cookbook, and personally I’d happily not eat it again for a year. Brit food has been forcibly and good-humouredly taken back from the xenophobes and Little Englanders, from football yobs and the false teeth of pensioners. It’s not granny food or school food or hospital food, or the clubbable, stuffy, sticky, paunchy Sunday food any more. It is smart and sexy: who’d ever have thought that pies and mushy peas would be lubricious? But, it turns out, they really are. And there were dripping-fried chips with everything. We all went out to eat home-cooked without irony.

And while the regeneration of British food was the main course of this year, it was at the expense of other people’s. London’s variety became noticeably thinner. Chinese restaurants are disappearing. What’s left is either sordidly glutinous and cheap, or sordidly glutinous and expensive. The Thais that so many of them metamorphosed into are budget clean-up noodle bars for tourists and students pausing to take on carbs. There isn’t a single Jewish restaurant that’s worth the journey now. London’s East End has one or two bagel shops. North London has a couple of delis that cater for diaspora nostalgia and make you yearn for New York. Sadly, Le Petit Surge in real French bistros seems to have stalled at some shockingly Froggy pretension that deigned to adopt a missionary position in London this year. The search for a better burger also goes on. A few chains — Gourmet Burger, Byron and Haché — make a very decent version, but invariably everything that goes with them (and doesn’t a ridiculous amount of stuff come with a meat sandwich?) is still genuinely vinegary, sweet and ersatz. The best burger came from a duck in Croque Gascon in Westfield shopping centre.

I’m invariably wrong every time I make a prediction. But you don’t need to be a divine called Doris to work out that next year it’s going to be all about price. Not necessarily cheapness, but value. A lot of restaurants are going to go out of business, because they can’t adapt, don’t have the skill, and don’t really get what it is they’re selling. I’ve never met an ex-restaurant proprietor who didn’t blame two people: the customers and me. But it’s not rocket science. It’s just cooking. It’s all about hospitality, and that feeling of being comforted, replete, warm and welcome. None of these things are on the menu, and a child of three would understand them. Sadly, they don’t let three-year-olds run restaurants. They have food and beverage managers who know it’s all about percentage points, mouth feel and the length of table occupancy.

I will, however, predict we’re going to see a sharp decline in sushi — it doesn’t hit any of the spots. There will be fewer courses, and bigger platefuls, and more house wines and carafes. Most new restaurants already offer a dozen wines by the glass. I also suspect that expensive sandwich shops are going to have a precipitous decline in custom — the luxury sandwich is an oxymoron. It just deposits slightly more mayo into your lap. There won’t be any more Russian restaurants, or pubs that serve something that really ought to be cheap absurdly expensively. Restaurants won’t be able to depend on gimmicks or selling the customers to each other as fashionable, trendy and exclusive. But expect a rise in the number of clubs or restaurants that are part-private, part-public. This isn’t so much about keeping hoi polloi out, but getting the money in in advance. A club is guaranteed a dollop of cash every January 1. And in a recession, cash flow is everything.

My tip for next year is: eat more lunch. Everyone is going to do bargain offers to keep their dining rooms full. And some of these will be the best deals in the country. And remember the waiters. Leave tips in cash and be generous. When money’s short, you should give more away. Their wages will be cut mercilessly. Restaurants are about hospitality, and the paunch of hospitality is generosity, and that should go both ways.

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