Twenty years ago, when my brother and I were young men about town working and dining out in London and New York and thinking about setting up our own restaurant guide, the culinary landscape was very different. But it is not so much the differences between the two cities in those days that would strike a contemporary restaurant-goer but, paradoxically, their similarity.

Both London and New York were, essentially, parochial. There were none of today’s outposts of great Gallic chefs, say, in either city and certainly no upmarket international “concepts”: Nobu, the pioneer, had not yet been invented, still less gone international.