Eat Your Words

It’s a difficult task to evoke a world that is so fully formed, so debauched and scandalous, without making the reader feel like they are sitting on the sidelines, missing out on all the fun. But in Table Hopping: The Secret History of London Restaurants, from Langan’s Brasserie to the Wolseley, Dylan Jones grants you the best seat in the house.

His book tells the story of London’s hospitality scene, from the birth of the modern British restaurant (Langan’s Brasserie in Mayfair in 1976, he argues) to the present day, taking in private members’ clubs, celebrity chefs, the birth of the gastropub, molecular gastronomy, the role of the critic and the rise of pop-ups.

It is, of course, more than a history of restaurants. It’s a social history, a society history, and all the more delicious for that. A former editor of GQ and the Evening Standard, Jones is an old hand when it comes to chronicling social scenes of the 20th century. He was there, right in the thick of it, and brings the era to life with economical wit. The financier Mark Cecil is a ‘Chelsea gadabout turned banker’, while Julie’s, a restaurant in Holland Park, appealed to ‘what was left of the closet west London intelligentsia – the kind of people who worked for the BBC, wrote difficult novels, or sold art nouveau furniture’.

The book’s cast list is dizzying – regulars at Langan’s included David Hockney, Jack Nicholson, Bobby Moore, George Best, Elizabeth Taylor, Richard Burton, Muhammad Ali, Peter Sellers, Sean Connery, Roger Moore, Richard Harris and Liza Minnelli – but Jones doesn’t pull his punches. On the first page there is a