Many years ago, down a side-street in Greenwich, there stood a sign, positioned ambiguously midway between a restaurant and a brothel, which read: “36 different ways with herring”.

The restaurant’s short life span was abruptly curtailed on its opening night with several strokes of the mighty pen of Bartholomew Travis, one of London’s most influential critics at the time. “This deplorable excuse for an eatery,” he wrote, “is about as effervescent and adventurous as the tortured, damp squid that was tossed before my dining companion with all the decorum of a sack of rubbish being flung into a dustcart. The accompanying dead bluebottle (free of charge) looked more appetising than anything this third-class hovel is likely to raise. I suggest customers requiring a higher level of taste and variety in this neck of the woods look no further than the establishment next-door”.

This excerpt, from one of the more flattering paragraphs of the review, does not, however, tell the true story.

Bartholomew, a bon viveur, raconteur and all-round emmerdeur of the catering classes, had strayed from his customary Mayfair haunts at the behest of his friend and confidante, the feisty Lady Virginia Roebuck, who had wagered him the princely sum of fifty pence that he could not lower himself to descend south of the river and sample the delicacies of somewhere other than the likes of Chez Nico and Auberge Escoffier.

It had not been the most promising of inaugurations for the restaurant owner, when his head chef had called in sick that afternoon following a bout of food poisoning. As a result, he had promoted a somewhat indignant sous-chef to take charge of kitchen responsibilities, a man whom he discovered had little respect for anyone other than ladies with an ample bust, and, furthermore, whose prolific flatulence can only be described as bearing all the gusto and volume of the Woolwich ferry arriving in Newham. Indeed, such was the uncanny resemblance that, at one point, during the course of the evening, an elderly lady had enquired as to why there appeared to be the sound of a foghorn emanating from the kitchen and was told by the hapless waiter, in an effort to allay her maritime concerns,

“That, Madam, is the chef’s special.”

Matters were not helped by the vast number of reporters and photographers who had amassed on the pavement outside the restaurant in search of a glimpse of Lady Virginia Roebuck, one of their favourite celebrities. The press had come to nickname her “Ellie” on account of the fact that her three most saleable assets (legs, lips and leotard) all began with the same letter. To say these were the limits of her attractions is not entirely fair, since she boasted the unique ability to imitate an ostrich swallowing a whole pineapple in one go, with no more than the aid of a feather boa. Moreover, her mistaken belief that she was distantly related to a Tsar had somehow come to manifest itself in a strange tendency to express anger by swearing only in nineteenth-century Russian.

Bartholomew, as always, arrived fashionably late, regarded the menu with the look of disdain he normally reserved for tramps, earwigs and undercooked lamb, tossed it dismissively out of the adjacent window and marched with customary self-assurance into the kitchen for the purposes of ordering off-menu.

“Can you make a fish stew?” he barked, catching sight of the newly-promoted head chef, who was nonchalantly eyeing a pair of rissoles sizzling under the salamander. Without turning around, the chef casually wiped the sweat from his forehead and replied:

“No, mate. But I once made a goat very ‘appy.”

Having responded to the young man’s insolent disregard for his status by catching him a glancing blow on the skull with a readily available meat tenderiser, Bartholomew returned to the dining area, where he announced to Lady Virginia that they were leaving because he had a sudden craving for jugged hare, or any other dish involving an animal boiled in a sauce of its own blood.

The restaurant more or less died its embryonic death before Bartholomew’s savage and entirely fabricated review appeared in the first editions of the following day’s papers. As he and his female companion negotiated the throng of journalists (and subsequently paramedics) outside the building, it became clear from their comments that this eating-house would be forever plagued with bad publicity. The worst part of the evening for Lady Virginia came when she broke one of her high heels on a manhole cover (something that would never have happened in Belgrave Square), and a shower of expletives flowed from her mouth, replicating the sort of language Tolstoy might have uttered had a large anvil been dropped on his bare toe.

On the brighter side, the brothel had an extremely lucrative evening, for an inclement October.

In view of the circumstances, it was decided that the restaurant’s lunch session for the following day should be abandoned, and the dining area was carefully laid out for a large office Halloween party, booked by a group of people who had specifically requested that each table be decorated with black napkins. The morning after, having read a detailed review which included stories of rats knocking over salt cellars, snakes sliding through trifle and red wine mixed with household bleach, the party’s organisers promptly cancelled. Overwhelmed by the stress of nagging reporters and unavoidable bankruptcy, the restaurant owner suffered a crisis of confidence and emigrated to Malta, where he lived with his only daughter, and died several weeks later.

The restaurant remained frozen in time for some years, and the girls from next-door occasionally remarked on how they would peer through the window at the empty dining-room on their way to work in the early hours of the morning to see, with the aid of a beam from a nearby street light, an array of silent tables perfectly laid with black napkins, interrupted periodically by the echo of a persistent telephone ring.

At the end of his catastrophic evening the owner had found Bartholomew’s calling card, which had fallen out of one of his sous-chef’s orifices before they had lifted him into the ambulance. He called him and pleaded with him not to publish his comments.

“Do you know who I am? I am a poor widower who has invested his life savings in a business which you have single-handedly managed to sink,” he remonstrated.

“And do you know who I am?” replied Bartholomew, as he gazed drunkenly from his penthouse at the few tiny lights shining through the mists of Chelsea Harbour. “I am the man with the power.”

These words summed up the evolution of Bartholomew’s life. In the past he had simply been a critic of food. A man who had done no more than question the quantity of icing sugar added to a raspberry coulis, the quality of blanched almonds used to adorn a trout; in short, he was a fussy eater.

And then, one day, nouvelle cuisine arrived. Presentation and image prevailed over quality. Pieces of terrine the size of a sugar lump lurked nervously under a protective lettuce leaf on an expanse of virgin-white china. Bartholomew gained significant notoriety by waging war on these delicate and over-priced creations and would frequently attempt to fill his ample frame by making several dozen orders for precisely the same dish, thereby causing chaos in the kitchen.

The public loved it. They saw him as a sort of rebel, a man championing the cause of the exploited diner. He came to realise that he had suddenly acquired a significant degree of control, in a world where words could inflict far more damage than the proverbial sticks and stones. As the years went by he focused his energies more on how the catering establishments pandered to his every beck and call, and less on how he responded to the genuine content of their culinary offerings.

Lady Virginia watched him metamorphose into a power-crazed, gastronomic despot who would stare at a crumb on the tablecloth before him, counting the seconds it took a member of staff to come and brush it away. On one occasion, after hearing of the death of his favourite waiter, he had enquired into the possibility of having him stuffed and mounted in his hallway. On another unfortunate day, a military coup had forced him to cancel a restaurant reservation in Bolivia. Since when had the presence of soldiers and mortar fire on the streets of Cochabamba been sufficient reason to sabotage a damned good casserole, he had exclaimed, furiously launching a still-life by Velazquez over his balcony.

His demands were not always met with sycophantic acquiescence. Some time after the incident in Greenwich had been consigned to one of the little black books gathering dust on his desk, a North African lady of the night had accosted him one afternoon in Berwick Street market. This unseemly event had led to an altercation resulting in the lady in question putting an evil curse on him. Lady Virginia, who was highly superstitious, suggested perhaps that he retire from the limelight, lock all doors and windows and spray holy water on his bedsheets. Bartholomew dismissed the suggestion with a sneer.

“On the one hand, I have a doctor feeding me rubbish about cholesterol, and on the other, a Moroccan prostitute spouting mumbo-jumbo about how my life will end in a sea of torment. It’s all stuff and nonsense!”

At which point, he clutched his chest and keeled over on to a weighty biography of General Pinochet that was lying on his coffee table.

It was a stroke that signalled the beginning of the end. Paralysed from the neck down, with only the temporary ability to manoeuvre his right arm, he became permanently bedridden in his apartment with no more than the aid of a servant cum cook, whose culinary expertise, as recommended by his specialist, seemed to extend little beyond cabbage soup and broccoli juice. For a man whose entire life had been steeped in fine dining, this was the ultimate torture.

He was also, it seemed, abandoned by friends and enemies alike. Lady Virginia completely forgot about him, found herself another dining companion in the form of a wealthy Russian veterinary surgeon, and met an untimely death during an impromptu ostrich impression at the annual banquet of the National Zoological Society.

Bartholomew began to lose a considerable amount of weight, to the point that light-headedness drifted into moments of hallucination. Mirages of succulent chicken and honey sweet potatoes gradually refocused into the reality of green vegetable juice and dry brown bread.

“At least give me some butter!” he screamed at his servant, via the intercom on his bedside table.

“It’s all for the good o’ your ‘elf, Sir,”  came the nonchalant, muffled reply through the speakers.

His frustration exploded into a torrent of abuse at this horrid, sadistic little man.

“Do you know who I am?” he cried. “I am one of the foremost, respected restaurant critics in this entire city.”

There was a momentary crackle over the intercom.

“And do you know who I am?” came the servant's voice, with the merest hint of rabid vindictiveness. “I am the man with the butter.”

There was nothing he could do. As Bartholomew gazed mournfully at the bowl of clear steaming broth before him, and the dead bluebottle and black napkin arranged neatly alongside, he suddenly wondered why it was, lying in a penthouse in Chelsea, that he could hear the sound of the Woolwich ferry coming from his kitchen.