Glitterati gourmets revealed

With Chris Bodker's daring juxtaposition of his new five-storey restaurant and hotel complex, West Street, near to the mother of all celebrity haunts, The Ivy, the role of the celebrity restaurant in London is brought back into sharp focus.

The Zagat Guide with its snappy, albeit facile, slogan-like analysis put it well enough a year or two ago when it said that London's restaurantgoing public wanted "Hot not haute". Whatever chefs and gastrobores may want you to believe, most of the people who go to fashionable restaurants could not give a damn about the food - as long as it is not actively poisonous. Instead they are more concerned about getting a good night out, an experience that includes catching a glimpse of a celebrity.

The fashionable restaurant is as much a part of the career celebrity's workplace as the football field, the film set, the theatrical stage or the concert venue. Their work is not finished when they walk out of their dressing rooms and into their limos. They are expected to make an entrance at one or other of London's celebrity restaurants, in effect Nobu or The Ivy.

After all, part of the point of seeing Nicole Kidman naked in The Blue Room when it was on the West End stage a few years ago, was that you could also see her dressed and enjoying dinner at The Ivy an hour or two later.

At one time footballers would have headed for the pub; journalists would have gone for the Garrick; luvvies to the comfortingly shabby surroundings of the old Ivy before it was made over by Jeremy King and Chris Corbin; and members of the Establishment to their clubs. Now they all find themselves ingredients in the tossed salad of contemporary celebrity and they make their way dutifully to dinner at The Ivy or lunch at Le Caprice.

In reality, places like The Ivy, Le Caprice and Nobu are de facto clubs, operating a hidden apartheid allocating tables to "members" graded according to an unwritten and, one presumes, constantly evolving hierarchy. Nobu has one telephone number that is listed in the telephone directory and is almost permanently engaged, and another that it gives out to the sort of customers it wants to have sitting at its tables. To get a same-day table for dinner at The Ivy, if you are a non-celebrity, is even more difficult.

It will be interesting to see how it will react to the presence of West Street a few doors down.

The heydays of London's celebrity restaurants:

LATE 19TH/EARLY 20TH CENTURY: CAFE ROYAL

Arguably London's first celebrity restaurant where the Graham Norton of his day, Oscar Wilde, held court with artists, writers and flaneurs.

1929-1970s: QUAGLINO'S

In the early Thirties Edward VIII, when still Prince of Wales, made this one of his favourite West End haunts and, as the most fashionable man in Europe, the rest of the fashion crowd followed, including Kings Alfonso of Spain and Carol of Romania. However, by the Sixties it was getting a little seedy. "Full of old Harrovians thinking they were going to pick up someone like Zsa Zsa Gabor," says one veteran of the Sixties scene. In 1964 it was sold to Trusthouse Forte. It closed in the late Seventies and was reopened by Sir Terence Conran in 1993.

1938-1989: THE WHITE TOWER

Opened in 1938, it introduced Britain to taramasalata and was popular with everyone from Alec Guinness to Barbara Cartland. During the Second World War, Nicholas Henderson - later British Ambassador in Washington - rented the flat above the restaurant, which had once been Augustus John's Studio. In 1971 the restaurant had its starred entry in the Good Food Guide dropped for serving frozen peas; the news was greeted stoically by owner John Stais. "Thank God," he is reported to have said, "we were becoming so crowded that we had no room for regulars." His widow Eileen sold the restaurant in 1989. It is now Bambou, a Vietnamese restaurant.

1960S-1980S: SAN LORENZO

In its day it was as hot as The Ivy is now. However, in 1977 the "It couple" of the time, Mick and Bianca made a brief appearance and then left, with Mick saying, "I thought this was a restaurant, not a fashion show." San Lorenzo can still yield up the odd paparazzo snap.