Restaurants are the new lounges

The bill was written in pencil at Elaine's restaurant. The legendary bistro on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, where Jackie O toyed with an endive leaf and Woody Allen made jokes about the spaghetti, was not noted for the quality of its cuisine. And when the customers complained, as they invariably did, the waiter would turn his pencil around and rub out the offending dish. It kept both kitchen and regular customer happy.

For eating out in Manhattan was never about the food. The average city restaurant in New York performed the same function as the bar in a one-horse hick town. They were used as a rendezvous. They were for smart dinner parties, casual meals and solo drinking. They were pick-up joints when one was feeling frisky yet offered neighbourhood comfort when the blues struck.

Elaine's was the classic small Italian restaurant, albeit with a celebrity clientele, that was the perfect local hangout. And if the chef changed (or even if there was no chef at all), the customers would hardly have noticed.

Which should give some hope to some London restaurants, after yesterday's report that there are thousands of vacancies across the capital for restaurant and catering staff. The problem for the ever-burgeoning restaurant market is so serious that Anton Mosimann and fellow chefs held a crisis lunch to discuss the problem.

The top chefs offered several explanations for this skill shortage - the disappearance of domestic science from schools, the long working hours, even the celebrity chefs themselves ("because they create the false impression that catering is the road to stardom"). But they have overlooked the actual reason: London is daily getting more like Manhattan in its lifestyle. Londoners are living in restaurants, despite the poor service and very often second-rate cooking due to lack of staff.

As our actual living space gets more and more expensive - as well as smaller - the local restaurant has become our front room. Developers are now building London houses and flats with tiny living rooms and even tinier kitchens. Our homes are bird perches, useful only for sleeping and changing clothes.

"The developers are following the lifestyle of the new Londoners," says Yoland Barnes from the estate agents FPDSavills. "There is a far smaller demand for big kitchens and living space because people are spending more and more time in restaurants and bars."

According to the American restaurant and lifestyle PR Jori White, Londoners now go out to eat straight from work. "The London dinner party is dead as far as this generation is concerned," she says. "It is partly because you can now get a decent meal for around £25 a head, but mostly because people's lifestyles now include a selection of restaurants they know well. Over the past five years London has become more and more like Manhattan, with many people using local small restaurants much more regularly."

The large-scale central London restaurants of the past decade may be wallowing in self-pity following 11 September, but local restaurants are booming. Tom Conran - who foresaw the rise of the gastropub when he opened The Cow in Westbourne Grove - has now opened a small restaurant, Lucky Seven , in the same neighbourhood. It is modelled on the American diner, a small eaterie producing excellent upmarket cafe food for a fashionable, yet local, clientele - just like Elaine's, in fact.

It was at Elaine's where the Australian journalist Steve Dunleavy fell in love with a Swedish heiress Elizabeth Mosely. Minutes after they met at the bar they were so taken with each other that they left and fell upon a snow bank outside the restaurant in order to consummate the relationship.