It was the sort of restaurant that had a menu the length of your arm, and not a single thing on it that you unambiguously wanted to eat. Every simple food was mangled up with something mildly nasty or complicated. If you fancied chicken, it would arrive steeped in a mango-and-chive sauce. If you asked for a bowl of soup, you would find that the soup of the day was blood-orange-and-watercress. You couldn’t have got a bacon sandwich in Delauncey’s, but if you had, it would have been free-range bacon wrapped in warm ciabatta bread with a drizzle of chicken livers and a shredding of coriander. The customers were delirious with happiness. They would gladly have eaten their own spleens if it came served in a basil mousse with an ugli fruit twist.

Our customers were finger-snapping men from the City in charcoal suits and pinstriped shirts, who – to show that time was money – always made a point of ordering from the Express Menu, which took expressly seven minutes longer than the ordinary menu. We had tipsy, highlighted women, fresh from their body maintenance classes, pushing endive-and-squid salads through the automated gates of their bright white smiles into gym-hard stomachs. We had ladies who lunched, and PR girls who launched, and market investors, and business assessors. And I worked behind the bar.

My introduction to Delauncey’s was Harry Smiley’s friend, Francis the chef, a six-foot-four Molotov cocktail of bonhomie and menace. Long nights of excess had left a dull patina on his native robustness: he looked like a thinner, rain-damaged Luciano Pavarotti. Francis moved in a fug of flashing, yellowing teeth, baroquely foul curses and swishing knives. When the restaurant was full, and things were heating up in the kitchen, a vein on Francis’s forehead would begin to bulge and pulse in a kind of samba rhythm as his huge hands flew efficiently and ominously in fifteen different directions.

The freedom which Francis afforded his hands had got him into trouble in the past. He had slapped the most junior of the kitchen staff, a pale-faced French boy who was too slow at chopping the parsley, and sent him reeling into a pan of bubbling water. The boy was only lightly scalded, but the rest of the kitchen staff had squeezed their shreds of courage up into a communal ball and made a formal complaint to Mrs Delaney. Francis was made to say sorry to the quivering boy, wearing a forced, ingratiating grin that was somehow more frightening than his expression of rage. He looked like a hyena about to savage a baby gazelle.

‘I ap-ol-ogise for slapping you. It was very wrong of me,’ he said.

‘That is all right,’ said the French boy, nervously.

They shook hands.

Mrs Delaney said, ‘Well that’s that over then,’ and left the kitchen, satisfied.