It is a bizarre media paradox that restaurant critics are expected to strive, above all things, for anonymity. In almost every other profession I can think of, men and women strive to be recognised: young and ambitious doctors, lawyers, writers, soldiers, philosophers and trapeze artists long for the day when they will walk down the street and hear people muttering, “There goes Albert Blornch, the world-famous…” whatever.

But restaurant critics, in theory, do not. We are supposed not to want to be recognised for our work. We want to walk into a restaurant – of all places, the one where we are most likely to encounter people who give two sods about what we do – and be ignored. This is so that we can enjoy an “authentic” experience. And the only way to achieve this, at a time when food dominates so much of the media, and when people are so desperate for gastronomic guidance and so quick to idolise the commentators they read and hear, is to be dull. To remain steadfastly unadmired. To be unoriginal, unexotic, humdrum, unphotogenic, fat, old, weary and bad.

Because if you’re any good, people are going to take an interest. If you stretch yourself at all out of the confines of your home newspaper or magazine, complying in your own little way with the “expand or die” business model (taking that expansion metaphorically rather than endomorphically), if you allow yourself to be sought-after, heavily remunerated, generally frotted and buffed, wooed by television, courted by big business, and lusted after by women and men of all ages on all the continents, then you’re going to get recognised. But not always, and not by everyone, not by any means.

So it is always a shame when one’s more anonymous colleagues (anonymous only for the reasons given above, yet treasuring that anonymity like Banksy, like J.D. Salinger, like the unbearded, hard-drinking, titty bar-frequenting head of an al-Qaeda sleeper cell) get all frothed up about it. And make fools of themselves.

Like the restaurant critic who went to Osteria Emilia the other week, spotted me there, and made his sighting of me (ooh, look, it’s Giles Wotsisface off of that frozen peas advert, I bet they’re really laying it on for him, I bet it’s like being Rod Stewart, I bet he’s having a really, really great time, much better than me, the bastard) the centrepiece of his review.

“Sometimes it’s good to be a covert reviewer, I reflected as I ate lunch at Hampstead’s Osteria Emilia,” he began. “While The Times’ restaurant critic Giles Coren was allowed to order off the restaurant’s evening-only à la carte menu, unrecognisable me and the rest of the diners were encouraged to stick to the abbreviated list of lunch dishes… I didn’t have the brass neck to demand anything off the unavailable à la carte... I might not have received the red-carpet treatment, but my experience was rather more representative of what a real punter can expect…”

Except that if this fellow, who writes for a widely read if not particularly highbrow newspaper, had spent a bit less time gawping at me and a bit more looking at the menu in front of him, he would have noticed that underneath the list of lunch options it said, “Some dishes from the à la carte menu are available on request.”

Oops. Carefully reading the menu is really all you have to do in this job. And yet he failed to do it. And thus failed to test the restaurant’s wares properly, and founded his whole article on a misconception. Heroically incognito, bedded- in like a war correspondent in Kandahar, he could not perform the basic requirements of any journalist.

Oh, and they had no idea who I was. When I asked for a copy of the menu to take away at the end of the meal they refused, fearing that I was a rival restaurateur looking to skim ideas. So he was wrong there, too.

I say all that as a preamble to blushingly admitting that when Jamie’s Italian, in Oxford, told me that they did not take bookings, I called their PR company and asked if a table for 11 could be reserved for me the following Saturday. I have never done that before. But I was taking my five-year-old goddaughter, her two younger sisters, another toddler, and six adults, including three pretty stressed parents, and was, simply, buggered if I was going to queue down George Street in the height of summer, jostled and barged by fat Americans looking for Tower Bridge, and possibly not get fed.

I guess it was wrong. Sorry. I mentioned that I’d done this at a meeting of restaurant critics the other day and they clucked and tutted like a coopful of old pigeons, and long lectures on the importance of anonymity ensued.

Screw ’em. It was that or nothing. And I was keen to try Jamie’s Italian, the first in a planned nationwide roll-out by the former naked, now fully dressed chef.

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