Why are swanky restaurants so bland these days?

In the early Nineties I moved to New York on a whim after reading The Bonfire of the Vanities, Tom Wolfe’s seminal 1987 novel about ambition, social class and greed in Manhattan.

I quit my starter job in investment banking, took out a loan and jumped on Virgin Atlantic, imagining a future strutting down Manhattan’s Yellow Brick Road (aka 5th Avenue) in top-to-toe Calvin Klein and trainers on my way to some fancy job.I fell back to earth fairly quickly.

New York was savagely exciting back then but you needed to be a certain kind of person to survive in that fire pit of a city, and it wasn’t me. I was back in London within months.

But there’s one memory I retain fondly: the nights I spent in Le Bilboquet, a restaurant opposite the studio apartment on 63rd Street in which I was crashing, and which my flatmate and I would visit almost daily.

It was small (35 seats) and cosy, and the food was delicious. 

The Sunday Times. To read the full article click here.