You know how everyone grumbles when oil prices fall but then the market change is not reflected in lower petrol prices at the pumps, and they get someone like Robert Peston on to say, “The thing is that the oil, or at least the option to buy the oil, is all bought yonks and yonks in advance, so that the petrol costs we are seeing now reflect oil prices from as long ago as three years back and it will be a long time before the current price is reflected on the high street…” And you’re like, yeah, yeah, whatever, go take a bath, Bob, I’m only here because I’m waiting to see that cute Welsh chick do the weather report? Well, it’s just the same with restaurants.

The parallel is a good one. The malarkey of getting crude out of the ground, turning it into fuel and getting it into a nozzle on a forecourt (which exists mostly to trick you into buying whiffy tuna sarnies that you throw away after one bite on your way back to the car) is so slow that it takes a long time to respond to the prevailing financial atmosphere, just as is happening with the restaurant business now. Just when the whole financial world has fallen to bits and nobody has any cash at all (and a night out is where we head down to the BP forecourt to dig half-eaten sarnies out of the bin), we are setting world records for restaurant openings – huge, flash, spend-money-for-fun restaurants – as if it were November 2005, not 2008.

The great oil-tanker of restaurant ambition and confidence just can’t turn round in so small a space. Over the past few years greedy men have been buying spaces, building restaurants, developing “concepts”, hiring staff, taking on PR firms… and so now, despite everything, these places just keep opening.

Only this morning I got a press release announcing the arrival of Sushinho, “an entirely new culinary experience inspired by two very unique cultures – Brazilian and Japanese. It will take the regular sushi restaurant offering and infuse it with that quintessential Brazilian-ness.” Wow, just what the world needs at this exact moment. I hope they like sushi and samba down Marshalsea Debtors’ Prison.

And what about Westfield, the massive new shopping-and-eating mall in Shepherd’s Bush? I got a press release just now boasting, actually boasting, that it had cost £1.7 billion to put together. Nice one. A £1.7 billion investment in that delightful modern philosophy that is “retail as leisure activity”. Ho, ho, ho.

The press release told me that Westfield will have 49 restaurants. Very useful at a time when your punters, if they finally decide they can rustle up the bus fare to come and have a look around, are all going to be eating at home (bread, pasta, cheap carbs for fuel) before they leave.

So I am afraid they are just going to walk straight on past Bamboo Basket, Nineteen Ten, Comptoir Libanais, Caffe Concerto, Ooze, Square Pie, Crepeaffaire, Tiffinbites, Birleys, Tossed, Croque Gascon, Pho, Yo! Sushi, the Meat & Wine Co, Ito, Kitchen Italia, Gourmet Burger Kitchen, Del’ Aziz, tibits, Leon, Wahaca, Ciao Baby Cucina, Wagamama, Esca, the Real Greek, Fire & Stone, Yauatcha, Nando’s, Pizza Express, Byron, Atrium, Napket, Apostrophe, Sacred, Butlers Chocolates, Benugo, Costa, BB’s, Eat, Champagne Bar, Buttercup Cakes and the Merry Chocolatier, plus four that are (can you bear the suspense?) unannounced.

I don’t know if that was 49, by the way, I’m too poor and hungry to count that high. But if it’s not, it’s because a handful have closed in the time between my writing “49” and getting to the end of that last paragraph.

Some of those I listed are old favourites, but a good half have been flagged up to me as new “concepts” that are really just the same old paradoxes reworded for a new generation of moron: “healthy fried shite”, “slow food in a hurry”, “MSG without the IBS”, “sushi-served-on-the-bums-of-crack-toddlers-for-Russian-oligarchs-who-have-all-gone-home”…

It’s so sad: my diary (professional not personal) is just full of the grand openings of things that are going to die on their feet. Business plans that reflect marketing tactics created for a previous era. It’s like in the First World War, when the dictates of 19th-century military manuals sent infantrymen advancing towards machine guns, killing millions. These restaurants are just going blindly over the top, and there is going to be carnage.

Which is probably why people have gone mental for the Giaconda Dining Room in grotty old Denmark Street behind Charing Cross Road. GDR (coincidental abbreviation – this is not, thank God, an East German restaurant nostalgic for the Honecker years) is exactly what old-fashioned, honest-to-goodness foodies think ought to be opening at a time like this (and at all other times): a straightforward French corner bistro, using cheap cuts, packing a lot of people into a small space and smiling a lot.

It is very small indeed. So small that we had to grab our own wine from the shelves behind us to pass over to the waiter to open. But the staff are so sweet you don’t really mind spending most of the night snuggled up to some part of their anatomy. And, believe me, you’ve got more space than the poor lads in the kitchen. The menu, by contrast, is huge, probably 40 dishes, on a laminated bit of A4, and although I didn’t nick one (I didn’t have the elbow room to sneak it under my jumper), I see from my bill that no single plateful cost more than a tenner.

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