One estimate has put the number of restaurants in London at around 6,000, but this seems very conservative to me. In truth nobody really knows, especially given the high turnover rate. That eating out in this city is immeasurably better than it used to be is not in question, nor is the fact that its variety is now unsurpassed anywhere: the best restaurants in Paris and Rome are still resolutely French and Italian. Unlike them we're certainly not marinated in our own way of doing things. But food and the places where it's served have now become fetishised in London. I have been rereading American Psycho, Bret Easton Ellis's attack on the vacuous obsession with all things superficial in yuppie Manhattan, in which (alongside the wholesale pornographic carnage and detailing of designer outfits) entire pages are given over to menus, ever more gimmicky culinary creations and the desperate need simply to be part of it all. That novel is more than 20 years old but in the intervening years the mania has skipped across the Atlantic.

Oddly enough it is not painting, dancing or actually creating something new which most people mean when they talk breathlessly of the dynamism and "vibrancy" of London, but the act of sitting down and eating at a table. One walk through Soho will show you that London's energy is really far more about the noise of packed, hugely overpriced restaurants than it is about forging new ways of thinking or creating. The hubbub of the restaurant scene gives rise to a sense that something is actually happening, and that one is in the middle of it. Perhaps, like fashion, food has rushed into the void where meaningful creativity used to be. It is also something we can all have an opinion on, our taste not subject to the need for expertise and knowledge. It is a shortcut to sophistication. What is lost in all of this, to give in to nostalgia for a moment, is a sense of occasion.

So much part of everyday life has eating out become that not to be able to do it at least once a week is seriously taken as a sign of shockingly straitened circumstances, probably even outright poverty in some people's eyes. What it also shows is that the more transitory a place becomes, the more atomised, the more filled with single people who need to pass the evenings socialising, the more restaurants you need. Being a single man, I know this only too well. Although in my case, I found a place I liked, in a little street in Covent Garden, and have stuck to it for 30 years. I have no idea where it rates on the gastrometer, and I couldn't care less.