Restaurants have been the canvas on which I have painted the most important scenes of my life – from falling in and out of love to job interviews, forging friendships, playing over family dramas, exchanging scandals and deciding who will live and who will die (oh, sorry, that was an episode of The Sopranos).
When I was in my early 20s, consuming platters of oysters amid the clatter of Les Deux Magots in Paris, or devouring Sunday morning eggs benedict on the Upper West Side of New York, restaurants opened up the world to me.
As newlyweds in London, my husband and I often went to a little bistro in the heart of Marylebone that he’d gone to since he was a boy. We’d turn up, Bruno the owner would hug us and find us a corner. We moved. He retired. It closed. You never know when it’s the last time you’ll go to a place. But in that year after we married, the Bistro du Village, with its coq au vin and crème brûlée, was as important to me as our little kitchen full of newly unwrapped Le Creuset and Spode.
If I wasn’t in the bistro, I was traipsing to the newest places, enjoying everything the Nineties and early Noughties London restaurant boom had to offer, from Quaglino’s and the Atlantic Bar to Hakkasan, Zuma and The Wolseley. Glittering pleasure domes, all.