So, what are the nominations for the worst restaurant concept? Concept being the main ingredient in opening a dining room these days. Behind every plate, there is a strong press release. Every well-made dish has a half-baked theory. Public eating is on-message. It can’t just taste good. It has to sound good and think good. It can’t just be good for you. It has to say good things about you. I imagine chefs bully their commis now by shouting: “What’s your motivation for this collection of ingredients?” It’s all method cooking.

The runaway winner for worst concept among the people I’ve asked is Spoon, Alain Ducasse’s chronically expensive international chain of dining rooms that are barely enjoyable menu Su Doku. When one opened in London, you couldn’t get near the place for a month. Then, when everyone had been once, you could have walked in with infectious hepatitis and not given it to anyone of any consequence.

There were plenty of nominations for Mongolian barbecues, where you had to cook your own food at the table — which is about as exciting, fun and moreish as being given a ball of wool and told to knit your own socks. Also fondly remembered were mono-menu restaurants that sold only soufflés or soup or baked potatoes. Then there was the other extreme: Birdcage, where the drinks came in syringes, the chocolate on scorpions and the bill on an abacus.

My personally cherished worst was the sadly missed Fashion Cafe. It was supposed to be the first of a chain that would roll out on a catwalk to become the Hard Rock Cafe, only with better tits. Serving bad burgers and cheesecake, and decorated with impossibly thin and beautiful women, it was a restaurant that mass-catered eating disorders. Girls left asking for two doggy bags: one to throw up in, the other to wear over their head.

The Blonde said that her worst-ever eating concept was Ethiopia. Injera, the unique, morbidly chilly, sodden edible plate with bilious, rabid stew, is not everyone’s ideal light lunch. It isn’t helped by the polite habit of kneading a golf ball of nappy gloop and popping it into the mouth of the person next to you.

Communal eating is what most people I asked disliked most about cerebral dining-room concepts. Restaurants do this because they think it shows a laid-back, relaxed, pick’n’mix attitude to life. It also allows people on fascist diets to eat nothing, while others can stuff their faces without appearing greedy. It’s supposed to extract the starch from linen dining without reducing the skill and star-hungry vanity of the kitchen. And, of course, it’s a great way of racking up the bill.

This concept of relaxed collective hospitality confuses two primal elements of eating. There is our need to dine in groups: shared meals strengthen bonds and confirm hierarchies. There is also an apparently contradictory but equally strong behavioural imperative, which says that eating in groups is competitive, and that you need to protect your stash.

Sharing menus are usually based on a misunderstanding of exotic habits. Indians may eat off communal dishes, but their plates are inviolable. There are strict etiquettes about not touching the serving dishes with anything that has touched your mouth. Taking food from someone else’s plate is exceedingly rude, and even if it weren’t, I really hate it. Eating is not a random act of chance. Every plate has a plan, a rhythm learnt over a lifetime. You meander back and forth, make decisions about this bit, that morsel. Eating is like composing a small personal fugue. And someone else just dropping in to carry off your finale — well, that’s piracy.

The Blonde says her favourite eating concept is Italian: kick off with collective antipasti, then individual plates. Mine is Russian service combined with French restaurant food — an invention of the 19th century that gave us individual courses and waiter service combined with the style and greed of the middle class. One of my other favourites is the American diner, a concept that epitomises the best of a nation: an egalitarian, come-as-you-are room that sells breakfast all day, because it is never too late for a fresh start. Although the choice looks byzantine, the number of ingredients is spartan and can be prepared by skilled but nonprofessional short-order chefs. It is a source of continual consternation that nobody — with the welcome but miniature exception of Tom Conran — has managed to open a halfway decent Yankee diner in Britain.

Now Automat has arrived on Dover Street — and they still haven’t. It has a subtitle. They say it’s an “American Brasserie”, which is like advertising German haiku or Saudi 18-30 holidays. The menu is a lame collection of easy-eating party food, most of which calls for a molehill of mediocre talent to prepare, but which the kitchen effortfully fails to surmount.

We started with chicken noodle soup, which my guests said was scalding and renal, and an iceberg-wedge salad that wouldn’t have sunk the Titanic, but might have bored it into scuttling itself. The gulf in the Gulf shrimp was between the flaccid pink infant willies and any eating pleasure or flavour. The soft-shell crabs were just that: big crabs with unfeasibly soft and unpleasantly impenetrable shells. I ventured a hamburger and got no further than one bite. This must be a first: a place where the frying fat tastes like it’s older than the restaurant. It was truly hateful, not least because, with so little effort and commitment, and diligent sourcing, it could have been so good.

I’m not going to name our guests, because I don’t want them to be associated with this place, and because a man whom I assume was the owner made such an oleaginous, starstruck fool of himself. It would have been nauseating in Los Angeles. It was projectile offensive here. At least his staff had the grace to smirk and roll their eyes behind his back. Sadly, they weren’t as attentive when it came to serving the food.

I did something I hadn’t done for ages: I aborted dinner and took everyone to the Wolseley instead. The bill for half an uneaten meal, with a £37 bottle of wine and only one main course, for five people, was £157.

By the way, the most successful restaurant concept ever was Damien Hirst’s Pharmacy. The food was forgettable. The fixtures and fittings went for millions.

020 7499 3033

Mon-Sun, noon-midnight

Times Recommends

• Britain's Top 20 seaside fish and chip shops
• Ice cream makers: the scoop of the century
• British berries make super sorbets