It’s funny, I’d completely forgotten that my friends used to call me “Smiley”. I was sitting here, wondering where to go for dinner, and with whom, and how best to lever the evening into my campaign for smilier restaurants, when the phone rang and a voice said: “Hi, Smiley.”

Smiley. Only my friend Matt, whose voice it was on the phone, calls me that now. And his girlfriend, Sarah. And their oldest child, Maya, my goddaughter, who runs excitedly to the door when I go round, shouts: “Smiley’s here!”, and then heads off to do whatever little girls do until their godfather, who has only once bought them a birthday present, and doesn’t seem to observe Christmas or Easter, has left.

But there was a time when everybody called me Smiley: I was 18, new at university and interested only in hash, reggae and the girlfriend I’d come up from London with. Smiley Culture was a briefly successful reggae man and DJ whose track Police Officer, a tale of weed-smoking and run-ins with the law, I felt, spoke poetically for my generation. So my new friends called me Giley Culture, shortened to Smiley because I smiled a lot (but only because I was stoned).

And then the girlfriend left, and I stopped smiling. Sat alone in my damp room and shivered. But people carried on calling me Smiley because the joke was that I never smiled. Ha ha.

And now I smile sometimes, and sometimes not. So what I want most is for other people to smile. I want doormen, when they see me, to smile broadly and open the door. Don’t look me up and down and scowl as if it’s you whose first girlfriend ran off with both your housemates. If you’re that sad and angry, don’t come to work. I’m about to do a hundred and fifty quid on supper and for that I want you looking pleased to see me.

And smile when you’re looking for my reservation in the book. Smile like you hope it’s there. Don’t frown and dither as if you’re hoping I’ll die before you find it, saving you the trouble of seating me.

Smile when you offer me a drink. So your dad died last year. Deal with it when you get home.

Smile when my girlfriend complains that the carpaccio is raw or the gazpacho is cold. Smile and say the right thing. So your first novel tanked and your bedroom’s lined with the unsold copies. I’m here to eat. Smile, and write a better book next time.

I decided to take Matt – as he was on the phone anyway – to Café Boheme, which is owned by Nick Jones, the smiliest restaurant and nightclub tycoon in the world (men in his line of work are more often joyless starers, their minds elsewhere, wondering whose bed to put a horse’s head in next).

People had been talking about Café Boheme for a couple of weeks and for some reason I thought Jones had just bought it. As it turns out, he’s had it for ever, but has recently done it up into more of a classic brasserie, and Henry Harris – whose food at Racine in Knightsbridge has been one of the best things about having my own teeth these past four or five years – has come into the kitchen as part of a general role in Jones’s Soho House group of clubs and restaurants and things.

The guy on the door did not exactly smile per se, but he didn’t headbutt us, which is quite smiley for a bouncer. And the poor fellow does have to stand all night on the corner of Old Compton Street, the most sexually charged road in England, where an unguarded smile can lead to all sorts of terrible misunderstandings. Indeed, from our window seat in the corner, the view of new arrivals at a club called G.A.Y. being frisked on entry was an opportunity to witness as much smiling as one would expect to encounter in a lifetime.

It’s loud and clattery and quite dark in the bar on the way in – wooden chairs clacking on white tiles – and one loiters a bit in no-man’s-land before being seated, but considering the slim goodlookingness of the staff, and the din, and the general Frenchness of it all, it’s pretty damn smiley. You don’t expect happiness in a French restaurant. I lived in France for a year, eating out three times a day, and didn’t see a waiter smile once until the day my slightly pissed girlfriend (a different one, also long gone), who had popped out to buy cigarettes, failed to spot a glass door on her way back in, and broke her nose on it.

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