How does something that starts off great stay great?

If you’ve watched The Idol, a TV drama about a tortured pop star, you probably felt the same as me: its fascinatingly risqué and entertaining first episode quickly plummets into sleaze, presumably to cover up the poor acting and weak story line. It’s probably the most slated thing running at the moment.

It’s the same with restaurants. In St James’s there used to be a space called Sake No Hana – an expensive place which had as its differentiator that it didn’t serve western wine, just the fermented Japanese rice wine called sake.

At first people flocked to it, in The Emperor Has No Clothes way. But soon customers complained so the owners then brought in Champagne, though just Krug at £30 a glass. It wasn’t enough so they then brought in a beer – at £20 a glass and then eventually a wine list. The restaurant kept the same name even though the claim was no longer true. Each year fewer and fewer people went. The owner had deep pockets and plugged the losses. He invited me to have lunch one day to give him some advice on what to do with it.

I told him he should shut it down. He didn’t like it, but eventually he did.

There’s a magic, a mystery, a largely undefinable art in making a restaurant great. In New York, Danny Meyer has the city in his palm by giving people what they want, just better than others do – the formal but friendly Gramercy Tavern, beer, wings and ribs at Blue Smoke, the burger brand that everyone secretly wishes they had created in Shake Shack.

London’s equivalent to Danny has for the last few decades been Jeremy King, who with Chris Corbin put exceptional service on a pinnacle at The Ivy, Le Caprice and then the Wolseley group. Food has always been the point for Gordon Ramsay and given the rate of knots at which he’s growing who’s to question him.

I can’t help feel, though, that we need to re-consider what greatness looks like and that starts by us understanding ourselves better. We have, in recent years, managed to simultaneously become both deeper and shallower – deeper in that we expect restaurants to treat their teams with respect (Darjeeling Express) and have the most rigorous sustainability standards (Fallow) and when they do, we join their queues.

Our shallowness erupts when groups like Big Mamma open another successful outlet where “experience” is key – theatre in how dishes are presented (Salt Bae is another example) to how places are designed so cleverly that by you making yourself look on trend on Instagram and Tik Tok, you are doing their marketing for them. That’s a clever business model.

And so what do we make of this? Here’s my prediction: in future, restaurants will be successful if they are both deep and shallow. But that’s not to confused with being deeply shallow.