London has become the best place in the world to eat out. Of course, there are a thousand other cities with marvellous food, but for organic vitality, ethnic variety and nose-to-tail creativity, London is unmatched. New York and Paris are parochial by comparison.

Two new books locate the source of this revolution of taste and aspiration in the 1980s and 1990s. But, like the Zen paradox, this is both true and untrue. Waves of immigrants immediately raised postwar expectations. It is estimated that 80 per cent of the ‘Indian’ restaurants which dominate high streets are in fact Bangladeshi and that most of the owners arrived from Sylhet immediately after Partition. The Empire struck back.

Before that there were the Italians in the 1950s and 1960s, epitomised by Enzo Apicella who, among many other fine things, designed Pizza Express, which launched in 1964. Six years later, Terence Conran opened the Neal Street Restaurant in Covent Garden, making a symbolic bond between modern design and good food that has not yet been broken (despite the collapse of his restaurant business). 

Jeremy King’s name may not be known beyond London, but to sociable metropolitan flâneurs he has the status of a demi-god. (Indeed he once had a popular maitre d’ called Jesus.) No Reservation is a book of charm and sincerity, if occasionally a little repetitive. It is also in a nice tradition of instructive........

© The Spectator