Why we shouldn't worry

The news that McDonald's has taken a 33 per cent stake in Pret a Manger neatly illuminates the nature of our high streets.

Pret is as much a part of the contemporary London streetscape as the Lyons corner house was for a previous generation. With its casually uniformed staff, its quasi-industrial ambience, its vaguely exotic, vaguely healthy food on the hoof, it has changed the way we graze today and added value to the concept of a snatching a sandwich in the office, turning it into what has become known as desktop dining.

With Pret a Manger's high street blitzkrieg, doubtless many little sandwich shops and coffee bars have shut; and therein lies the microcosm of eating in the capital. It is increasingly becoming a franchise affair. People no longer talk of opening a restaurant: they speak about "rolling out a concept".

In the past, having a restaurant was a personal, vaguely altruistic affair: one fed, cared for and looked after people. After all, if you think about it, putting food into people's dietary tracts is a fairly intimate business. But now it is just a business, or more correctly an industry. Gap, Dixons, Hennes, Accessorize, Tesco Metro, Space NK, Sock Shop - why should it be any different with what you eat?

The kind of people who once spotted a gap in the market and opened their own restaurant now work as brand managers for some big food and drinks operator. All Bar One, launched by Bass, is a prototypical example of a non-specific thirtysomething hang-out, a sort of scrubbed-wood, chargrilled Starbucks with booze.

Alternatively, a gimlet-eyed operator like Laurence Isaacson of Groupe Chez Gerard will spot the potential lurking in a restaurant, as he did with Livebait, an interesting fish restaurant near Waterloo which he bought and turned into a chain that fits neatly into his uber-group of mid-market eateries: Chez Gerard, Richoux, Bertorelli's etc.

Historically, in this country we have tended to identify chain-eating with deep-fried filth. But increasingly it need not be that way. Operations like Nando's, the cheerful chicken joint, might not have made it into this year's Guide Michelin, but I would tend to think that Nando (if he ever existed) treats our feathered friends with more respect and wit than our old chum Colonel Sanders.

In modern restaurants, the chain is increasingly the thing, and operators are becoming more cunning about how they present them to the public. If you live in W9, you might think Red Pepper is your local cheap(ish) and cheerful Italian, but it has branches everywhere, called things like Purple Sage or Lemon Thyme.

Claudio Pulze, the restaurant impresario who during the Nineties helped launch such talents as Giorgio Locatelli at Zafferano and Gordon Ramsay, is an adept player of the chain game; with his group the Cuisine Collection he offers everything from curry to tapas. It is, however, Belgo that is perhaps the prototypical restaurant conglomerate.

Belgo has grown from a novelty quasi-monastic mussels 'n' chips operation into a sprawling culinary empire that embraces Strada, your local cheerful wood-fired pizza bar, Vietnamese food at Bam Bou, couscous at Pasha and chic fish cake at three of London's smartest eateries, Le Caprice, The Ivy and J Sheekey.