Table Hopping

The colorful history of London gastronomy as told by acclaimed GQ editor, restaurant insider, and New York Times bestselling author Dylan Jones.

In October 1976, the London restaurant world was turned upside down when Michael Caine, celebrated chef Richard Shepherd, and entrepreneur Peter Langan opened Langan’s Brasserie, a celebrity hangout that would revolutionize the capital’s dining scene. This soon became the most celebrated restaurant in the city and helped turn London into an internationally recognised culinary hot spot.

London never looked back.

In the five decades since, the city has become a global culinary capital—a multi-cultural hotbed of super chefs and gastronomic ingenuity, monstrous egos and appalling kitchen behavior, controversial reviews and scabrous critics, as well as dictatorial maître ds, inter-restaurant feuding, ridiculous trends, scandals, tricky customers, financial shenanigans, global media attention, and much more.

The restaurant scene in London over the last fifty years has been one of the country’s most successful examples of Britain’s soft power. During that time the city has become the center of the culinary world, eclipsing Paris, New York, and all points in between.