Books of the Year II – further recommended reading from our regular reviewers
Stephen Bayley When Dylan Jones told me he was writing a book about ‘restaurant culture’, I pompously thought it might be an analysis of interior design, from Boulestin to Terence Conran, with notes on the waves of fashion that replaced pink prawn cocktail with charred wood-grilled sardines. But he has done something rather better. Table-Hopping: The Secret History of London Restaurants – from Langan’s to the Wolseley (Little Brown, £30) is an oral history. Jones, who made GQ into a stellar institution, has interviewed all the rascals and victims of the recently past London scene, so much of which he orchestrated. If you want to know who snorted what or who shagged whom in the Groucho’s loos, this is your ideal book. Unputdownable.
