You know how last week I was saying that the London restaurant scene is so hectic that quite often restaurants open, rage hard, gradually quieten down, and then close for ever in the short space of time between my writing them on my “to do” list and my phoning to book a table? Well, something a bit like that just happened again, in the weirdest way.

I’ve got this stack of restaurant press releases, you see, which sits under the radiator in my study, and is usually sorted into rough order of how much I mean to go to each place. It’s a backlog pile, and only when the stack of “newly opened” restaurants on my desk runs dry (which is rare at the moment) do I turn to it.

But just now I came in here to write a review of L’Autre Pied, and when I went over to draw the curtains (at this time of year it grows dark round about writing time) I looked down and saw that on top of the stack was a press release from a restaurant called Blandford Street, headlined “Stylish and Serene Summertime Dining for London’s Foodies”.

“That’s funny,” I thought. “L’Autre Pied is on Blandford Street.” And so I checked the exact address and discovered that L’Autre Pied is not only on Blandford Street, it is in what used to be Blandford Street, on Blandford Street. Evidently the summertime dining was not quite stylish and serene enough for London’s foodies. And it had to close.

And so I plucked the press release from its place atop the stack, and as I carried the limp, papery soul of the defunct eatery over to the recycling bin, I found myself reading it (a thing I very rarely do with press releases) and feeling immensely moved by the dramatic irony of it all.

“An imaginative yet unpretentious blend of Modern British and European dishes in a relaxed environment,” it gaily boasted, with all the hubris of a restaurant unaware of its impending doom. Was it not, perhaps, as imaginative, relaxed or unpretentious as it had thought?

How sad to hear a place you know is already dead advertise its “now legendary Mixed Grill of Fish with Proper Chips and Tartare Sauce”, a dish which is only now, at last, legendary in the literal sense – existing merely as a rumour of forgotten glory in the hushed whispers of schoolboys.

This, I thought, is how it must have been to receive a letter from one’s lover weeks after learning of his death on the Western Front.

Or not. One doesn’t want to tempt fate too much with quotation of press releases, since the one for L’Autre Pied, which I also have in front of me, repeats such words as “modern”, “European” and “relaxed” as if their talismanic quality had been to no degree compromised by their failure to help the last place. Indeed, where Blandford Street promised “a discreet private room”, L’Autre Pied promises “private dining… discreetly placed”; where Blandford Street had a “bespoke dining service”, L’Autre Pied has “bespoke furnishings”.

Modern, European, relaxed, discreet, private, bespoke… I mean, where isn’t? Still, I guess there are only so many words to go round. And the truth is I’m rooting for this place on account of having plenty of time for the place off which it is a shoot, Pied à Terre in Charlotte Street.

Pied is the double-Michelinned headquarters of bushy-eyebrowed Australian wizard Shane Osborn (who took over there after Tom Aikens’ departure in 1999 following the most famous hot-knife branding of a trainee since… no, actually, that’s the only one I can think of) and David Moore, whom I narked off in my youth with a bumptious review but now get along with famously.

They told me at Pied, when I phoned to get L’Autre’s number, that it, L’Autre, was more of a bistro, less formal, livelier than the mother ship, and I thought, “Good-oh”, because much as I admire Pied, it is a bit too much of a temple to be right for regular visits. I was also appealed to by the apparent Franglais of its name, which put me in mind of Miles Kington’s famous columns in Punch in the Eighties, when rarely a week seemed to go by without the boot being put firmly sur l’autre pied…

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