You may have noticed (I’m not sure how closely you monitor these things) that I have rather given up on reviewing local restaurants of late. Local to me, that is. All restaurants are local to somebody. Except the ones in Canary Wharf, of course. And the remoter brasseries of Gordon Ramsay Holdings, the ones on artificial islands off Dubai, the planned moon units…

I used to review the restaurants of Kentish Town, Highgate and Tufnell Park (or Kentish Park Gate as I hoped it might one day become) quite frequently. Partly because of the excitement that even an ordinary meal can generate when eaten within five minutes’ walk of home, and partly because I hoped to aid the area’s gentrification and boost the value of my house.

Gentrification didn’t happen, though, hard as I tried. House prices have rocketed, of course, thanks to the housing shortage, continuing low interest rates, grim middle-class acquisitiveness, and Primrose Hill being full, but things haven’t got any gentler.

Since I started in this job five years ago, the trebling in value of a house in NW5 has resulted in more crime, more violence, more 4x4s, more dog poo, more screaming children in poncey little uniforms, more mini-supermarkets, more litter, more social alienation, more muggings, more car and house alarms going off at three in the morning, more traffic wardens, more foghorn-voiced middle-class mummies howling at their children to come in from the garden before the zuppe di pesce gets cold, and more than a million pounds being asked – laughably – if you want to move in.

So I’ve rather lost interest in encouraging people to come here. You want to come, come. In fact, if you want my house, e-mail me with an offer that makes me laugh and it’s yours.

But don’t start doing reviews of local restaurants when you get here, I warn you. Because however much of a favour you think you’ve done the chaps you talk up, however much of a local hero you think it might have made you, the truth is that all you have really done is snubbed everywhere else, and made yourself a bogeyman.

I walk past maybe 20 eating places a day in my immediate neighbourhood, and whenever I review one of them I get 19 “What about us?” lectures over the following week from restaurateurs and landlords, standing at the doors of their establishments with their arms folded across their chests, as furious as jilted lovers and twice as abusive.

I’d love to tell you about Nuraghe, for example, the new Sardinian joint on Dartmouth Park Hill, which is all the current rage in these parts and much discussed over morning coffee at Café de la Paix (and also at Café Rustique, Tolli and Euro-Med, lovely places all). But if I tell you about Nuraghe, then I won’t be able to go there any more, because to get there I have to walk past Mamma’s Pasta, who will want to know why I didn’t write about them. And the reason I haven’t written about them is that their food is revolting, which I can’t write because it might make it awkward to go back, or even (more importantly) to walk past.

And also I’d have to say that although the pizzas at Nuraghe are fantastic (thin, crisp, properly Italian), some other dishes have been disappointing. And I wouldn’t want to say that, because it might make them sad.

And if I didn’t admit that there were things wrong with Nuraghe then I’d be in trouble with my friends at Pane Vino, the excellent Sardinian place opposite Kentish Town Tube station. But if I said that Pane Vino was much better than Nuraghe, I’d have to say it was much more expensive, too. And that might be taken the wrong way.

Pubs are even trickier. I started going to the Vine again recently, because the guy who cuts my hair in Kuttzone (which doesn’t mean I don’t still go to Head Jogs and Raze of Thunder) said the food had got much better. And it has. I’ve eaten well there a couple of times. Which is why the manager e-mailed wanting to know why I haven’t written about it yet.

I’ll tell you why: it’s because Jackie, up at the Junction Tavern, is a jealous type, and has done her nut before when I’ve mentioned other local pubs and not hers. And, indeed, the Junction is lovely. As are St John’s and, up to a point, the Bull and Last. The Tally-Ho wasn’t, so they pulled it down (which is so much butcher than just giving it a bad review).

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