Dylan Jones, past master of the long lunch, saw the music world from a restaurant table

London restaurants were where musicians, actors, writers and TV stars were seen “and how you knew where they were in the days before social media”. They were a form of theatre with a shifting cast and a way of gauging celebrity status. Dylan Jones – who’s lunched long and hard in the heart of the media – sees that vanishing world as a measure of changing times and fashions in his toothsome new book ‘Table Hopping: the Secret History of London Restaurants’. And pulls up two chairs for us here to look back at …

… the birth of pop culture at the Speakeasy, Ad Lib and the Bag O’ Nails

… Hockney, Jagger, Lucian Freud, the Sex Pistols and Ian Dury’s public beef with Omar Sharif

… “restaurants were about learning how to behave in public”

… Jeffrey Archer and Michael Winner fighting over Lady Di’s table

… Michael Caine and Peter Langan creating the first internationally known London restaurant

… the agony of celebrity hierarchy: “the Beckhams couldn’t get the top table as it was reserved for Harold Pinter”

… Alex James, Damien Hirst and Keith Allen’s “bar tab as long as a bog roll”

… Malcolm McLaren’s doomed Hammer of the Gods movie with Daniel Day-Lewis as Plant, Gary Oldman as Page and Robbie Coltrane as Peter Grant

… “AA Gill could close a restaurant”

… Anthony Bourdain, Marco Pierre White and the rise of the rock’n’roll chefs

… and how the ‘90s are the new ‘60s “where everyone felt they were in the Green Room”.