So you'd like to run your own restaurant? Well, of course you would: you hold fabulous dinner parties and your friends are always raving about the food. They adore that thing you do with lamb, and the ginger-spiced beans you serve on the side, and your ironic take on the pavlova. And each time, as your guests leave, sated and content, you stand by the door waving them off and think: why the hell am I giving this stuff away? Why don't I do it for a living? Pack up the job, dig into savings, touch the mother-in-law for a loan. It will be a gas. I'm a natural.

Stop! This is the story of three groups of people who also decided to open their own restaurants: Iqbal Wahhab, Jonathan and Jane Wright, and Richard Neat. None of them are amateurs like you. They are all old hands, with decades of experience in the restaurant business between them. They know what they are doing, which is handy because the combined cost of their dreams is now close to £4.5m. Yet for all their professionalism, their detailed understanding of the money to be made from human pleasure, none of their plans has gone smoothly. Each has faced their own peculiar disasters and their crises and their setbacks. And each of them will tell you exactly the same thing: that when it comes to the restaurant business, the very last thing you get to do is turn on the stove and start cooking.

Some time next week, they will do exactly that at a new restaurant on London's Great Smith Street, near the Houses of Parliament. Probably. Where the Cinnamon Club is concerned, a little caution is wise, so often has its launch been postponed. There are many reasons for this, not least the big mouth of the man whose project this is, Iqbal Wahhab. For years Iqbal, a former journalist and public-relations man, has nurtured a dream: to open a restaurant that takes Indian food to new levels of sophistication. He has long wanted to own the first Indian restaurant in Britain to gain a Michelin star. 'I had seen the scale of service at Michelin-starred restaurants,' he says, 'and the kind of presentation, and I wanted to bring that experience over to Indian food. I knew it could be done.'

In late 1997, he formed a company, Indian Restaurants Ltd, raised £100,000 from investors and found himself a chef, Vineet Bhatia, who had been at the well-regarded Star of India in Fulham, London. 'I told Vineet "I don't want poppadoms at the Cinnamon Club",' Iqbal says. 'Vineet understood immediately. It's a cluttered start to the meal, and it's associated with the lager brigade. I don't want that.' Lager would not be available by the pint at the Cinnamon Club.

Soon they had a location for their restaurant on Kensington High Street: 5,000sq ft of space looking out over Kensington Gardens. It was just the thing. The budget was set at £1.1m-£700,000 to come from investors, the rest from the bank. That was how much Iqbal reckoned his dream would cost.

Then, a few months later, he kicked over his own apple cart. He wrote a column for Tandoori Magazine , which serves the Indian restaurant sector, in which he criticised the standard of service at most curry houses. 'Walk into any Indian restaurant,' he wrote, 'and no matter how posh, more likely than not you will be greeted by a miserable git.' The effect was almost instantaneous. 'One guy wanted to invest £500,000 but he said he couldn't now because he was Bangladeshi and the community had turned against me.'

The financing fell apart because everybody had been waiting for the big investor to put his money in before getting involved. They lost the High Street Kensington site - now a branch of the Japanese noodle chain Wagamama - because they couldn't pay the rent. And then Bhatia gave up waiting and took a new job as head chef at Zaika. 'By Christmas 1998, we were restaurantless and chefless,' Iqbal says. 'How I regret writing that column. It was just something I did in a rush.'

Two years in the wilderness followed, as he looked at site after site, placed deposits on some and was rejected by others, until he came across the old Public Library in Westminster, a grand lump of red-brick Victoriana with two floors and a mezzanine gallery. It had parquet floors and wood panelling. It would be the perfect place for an upmarket Indian restaurant with no poppadoms. The lease was up for grabs and every other major player in the London restaurant business - the Conran group among them - had designs on it. Iqbal's interest was rejected. He was a first-timer, the property agents told him. He didn't have enough money behind him. He was a risk. 'I had to force my way in to see the chairman of the company who owns the freehold. I told him the Cinnamon Club would bring him prestige.' He got the lease.

Now costs spiralled from that original £1.1m to the £1.75m it would cost to convert a library, but he managed to raise it. He parted company with his architects and the costs rose again, this time topping £2m. He managed to raise that, too. Then investors dropped out and the whole deal looked shaky. 'About a year ago, my brother took me out to lunch and said, "Set yourself a deadline for this". No one could have tried harder, but you've got to know when to stop.'

He didn't. In India, at a friend's wedding, he found a new chef, Vivek Singh, who was cooking at the Rajvilas Hotel in Jaipur, one of the best in the world. He arranged for 10 other chefs to follow him direct from India, plus a container-load of fresh herbs and spices which would be flown over every week. He drew up plans for 50 waiters and a members-only club. It was the year 2000 and, two years after he first thought his restaurant would open, Iqbal reckoned the Cinnamon Club would finally become a reality.

Only not quite yet. By the time we first met last November, the buzz was that Iqbal's great project - which has been muttered about in London restaurant circles for years - would finally open just before Christmas. So would it? 'Unfortunately not,' he says. 'We've had to put it back into next year. I'm looking at Valentine's Day now.' Why the new delay? 'We've had to find an extra £225,000 VAT on the builders' costs. And cash upfront for furniture.' He's raised the money, of course. Iqbal always seems to raise the money. The budget has gone to £2.4m. At this point, what he has to show for it is an old Victorian library on the outside and a building site on the inside. There is rubble everywhere. It will, he says confidently, be terrific.

In 1995, a new restaurant called Bank opened on London's Aldwych. It was sharp and modern and cool, cost £3m to get up and running, and set the record for a British launch. Since then, that record has been broken by China House on Piccadilly, which cost £5m, though the owners argue they got value for money because it is home to two restaurants. Either way, there is no doubt that the cost of opening restaurants has exploded, and the only place for those costs to go is on to the bill. 'Up to about five years ago, you could probably get away with opening a good neighbourhood restaurant for around £300,000,' says Ian McKerracher, chief executive of the Restaurant Association, who has done it. 'Now it's at least half a million.'

Partly, McKerracher says, it's the rents. But it's also staff wages: a fascination with food has led to a restaurant boom, and that in turn has led to a shortage of staff, who can demand bigger pay packets. 'You have to understand that in the restaurant business, you will spend 80 to 90 per cent of your time simply trying to keep your workforce happy.'

Jonathan Wright knows all about that. He has hair made for day-time television and a serious pedigree in the kitchen. He has been head chef at Raymond Blanc's Le Manoir aux Quat' Saisons and has helped oversee the 17 separate restaurants at the Raffles Hotel in Singapore. But all along what he really wanted was his own place which, like his hair, he could shape into a style of his own. 'I wanted to be my own person,' Jonathan says. In 1997 he and his then girlfriend, now wife, Jane scraped together £10,000 and found an investor to put in the same amount. 'But we couldn't find a site because we didn't have enough cash behind us.' They lost all their own money - plus all of their investor's cash. Now needing an income, Jonathan took the job of executive chef at Terence Conran's new London hotel, the Great Eastern, near Liverpool Street. 'I knew after three months it was the wrong job. All I did was sit in an office, dealing with staffing issues.'

So he quit and, like Iqbal, started looking for a site. 'We could have bought a de-listed pub but I didn't want that,' says Jonathan. 'I wanted something big enough to have a certain opulence. We must have looked at a dozen sites in and around Oxford, but none of them was right.' Finally, he and Jayne found a mock villa on the outskirts of the city. It was perfect. It would cost £1.1m to open it as their dream restaurant which, with great effort, they have managed to raise. They will call it La Gousse d'Ail - French for 'clove of garlic'.

Around us, deep-orange paint is still going on the walls. Lights are still being fitted into the ceiling. The bar is still being fitted. 'We'll be ready,' says Jane. 'Everybody's working round the clock.' At the moment, the real problem is staff: they just can't find enough good cooks, certainly not for the intense 'modern haute French' food they are planning. 'I had a pastry chef who arrived yesterday and who left today,' Jonathan says. 'He said he couldn't find his way to the restaurant from his flat. He was whingeing and moaning. He had to go. So me and my deputy, we'll do the pastry.' But, for all that, he's confident. He's sure there are enough people in Oxford willing to pay the £40 a head he'll be charging à la carte. In about four days time, he'll find out. The day before my visit, five days before the first paying customers were due, he turned on the new stoves in his new kitchen for the first time.

It is January and Iqbal is showing me around his building site. There is now a concrete staircase down to where the kitchens will be, though there are no kitchens to speak of, just a brace of industrial-scale tandoor ovens sitting alone in the middle of the floor. 'There's one piece of kit, the kitchen hood, which has to go in before everything else, and that's holding it all up.' As we survey the unfinished floors and the unplastered walls, the truth becomes blindingly obvious. You're not going to open on Valentine's Day, are you? 'No we're not,' he says. But isn't this just eating money? After all, his chef is already here and being paid. 'We're funded to see the project through,' he says. 'The budget has gone to £2.6m. And Vivek isn't sitting on his arse. He's sourcing ingredients. He's planning menus.'

But still, these delays must be infuriating. 'Look, the focus now is on what we need to do to make it work. It's not the time for recriminations. But believe me, heads will roll. We've started an in-depth analysis of the delays and where they came from and how much they cost, and I will be discussing it with my lawyers.' He continues showing me around. Suddenly he says: 'It's terribly frustrating. It's not just that I want my restaurant. There's credibility involved both with investors and with the media.'

It has been an interesting first few weeks at La Gousse d'Ail. On the day of the launch cocktail party, they were trying to fit two enormous glass sliding doors on the front of the wine store, which are a design feature of the restaurant. In the modern restaurant business, you need design features. The punters expect them. The glass was toughened but hadn't been allowed to cool for the full five days and, as they were being fitted, exploded across the room. 'A few of our builders were cut,' Jane says. The piping in the kitchen above where the food goes out also sprang a leak on opening night, but they solved that with a couple of bowls. The more serious problem was - still - staffing. Within a week, they had parted company with their restaurant manager. 'The public loved him, but on the management side it was just too much. We also lost a couple of the younger chefs who simply couldn't do the job to the standard we wanted.' So they are all working round the clock in the kitchen to keep up.

The menu has seen some changes, too, with the withdrawal of one starter, a ravioli of quail. 'It was the most expensive and the least selling,' Jonathan says. 'It wasn't necessary.' So what's going well? 'The best starter is roasted scallops with pan-fried ceps, and the main course is the crispy duck with spiced figs. But you can never know what's going to be popular.' Any other problems? 'I've had to ask one table to leave. They were an hour late, and there were 10 of them instead of six, and then they wouldn't come through to the restaurant. They started complaining when we tried to get them to the table. One of them was leaning over the cheese with his burning cigarette. We don't need that.'

The chef Richard Neat is now on to his fifth restaurant launch, 'so I should know what the hell I'm doing by now,' he says languorously. (He does almost everything languorously, except cook.) Even he and his partners, though, have been bugged by the same problem affecting almost every restaurateur in Britain: the search for a location. 'Over the past year we have looked at loads of properties and kept being second on all of them,' says Richard's business partner Robert Saunders. 'There was a former Japanese house of ill repute in the West End that we wanted, but that went. And then there were the 35th and 36th floors of CityPoint tower in the City of London. We really wanted that one.' Finally, Saunders heard that the second floor of the Oxo Tower, on the south bank of the Thames by Blackfriars Bridge, was up for grabs. It had previously been a restaurant called Bistro Two, was therefore fully kitted out (the first rule of opening a new restaurant: find an old one - it's much cheaper) and had the added interest of being a few floors below the well-known but often criticised Oxo Tower restaurant. 'I brought Richard over to see it on a wet grey day when the colours off the river were just unbelievably awful. He didn't get it at all.'

So they carried on looking and 18 months after they first started planning their restaurant they have finally settled on a location: the second floor of the Oxo Tower. It seems the colours are not that bad after all. There are lots of expensive company headquarters nearby, hungry for business lunches, there's a nice view of the river, and it is a landmark building. What's more, there's space enough for both a gastronomic restaurant for 120 and a more relaxed bistro seating 150. It would need a staff of more than 70 and would use the two fully functioning kitchens. It's ambitious stuff, but then it has to be: Richard Neat has a reputation to live up to. In 1996, he became the youngest chef in Britain to win two Michelin stars (at Pied à Terre) before disappearing off to Cannes in the south of France (via India), where he became the first British chef to win a star in France. While the Cannes restaurant will continue, the new place marks a return to the capital.

'I want to do something intricate and clever,' says Richard. 'I enjoy intricate. Simple bores me. Furthermore, you attract a more exotic breed of chef by doing intricate.' There will also be a few innovations and a few retro touches, he says. For example, all prices will include service. On the retro side, Richard announces that he wants to bring back that great 70s favourite, the sweet trolley. 'The thing is, if you can see what's there you're more likely to have pudding, which has to be good,' he says. 'We can lay out some great old-fashioned tarts and flans.'

Their vision - dishes such as truffle and asparagus soufflé or rabbit in an olive sauce in the restaurant - will cost the punters at least £100 for two (significantly less in the bistro). Is Richard not concerned the prices will frighten the customers away? The chef sighs. 'You have to look at costs,' he says. 'Wages account for 25 per cent of the total. Rent is another 5 per cent. Then there's the VAT, which we don't see any of.' He runs on and on through the various sums, the profit margin slicing thinner than bresaola as he speaks. A top chef must, it seems, know his numbers as well as his sauces. 'It's not like chefs are thieves,' he says. In any case, he adds, while the pricing may be standard for London, the quality will be much higher. Anybody who has tried Richard's cooking knows it is not an idle boast. The cost of this dream is - like the others - set at £1.1m. Last October, they set about raising it, with the hope of opening their doors this month.

Three months after opening, La Gousse d'Ail in Oxford is, to all intents and purposes, a success: its food has been generally well received, even if one critic suggested it was trying a little too hard. The service, though, has been praised to the stars; as far as customers are concerned, everything there is working beautifully. In the kitchen, however, it's another story. 'We're at least four cooks down at the moment,' Jonathan Wright says, as he plates up dishes during the lunchtime rush, carefully positioning confit duck legs and fillets of cod on their plates.

'What that means is that we're on our knees when it comes to preparation. The service itself is going perfectly but we're all having to get in here at ungodly hours to get ready. We don't have time to stop.' There is, apparently, a shortage of 15,000 chefs in Britain at the moment and La Gousse d'Ail is suffering. They still don't have a pastry chef. As for bookings, they are brilliant in the evenings, less so at lunchtime, for which they have introduced a few bargain deals to entice in the punters. But these, they say, are the details. Despite the staffing problems, the exploding glass doors and the rare troublesome customer fagging away over the Brie de Meaux, this is what they hoped for. 'Our investors are happy,' he says. 'And so are we.'

Richard Neat's investors are also happy, though there are slightly fewer of them than they hoped for. They will not say exactly how big their budget is, but they haven't reached the £1.1m they originally intended. It will still be a fully fitted out restaurant but 'It will be a work in progress,' says Richard. 'Our customers will be able to watch the restaurant develop.' One thing is certain: for the number of covers, the scale of operation and the location, the Neat launch represents the best value for money for its investors of the three. There is one disappointment. They have concluded they can't include service in the prices as they hoped. 'If it's included in the price, it has to incur VAT, which service added to the bill doesn't,' says Robert Saunders. 'That will mean around an extra 2 per cent on the bill, and we don't want to do that. It's bloody irritating.' On the plus side, they will still do the sweet trolley. They will start wheeling in April when they open their doors. Then again, it may be May.

As to the Cinnamon Club, 6 March has been and gone and the restaurant has not opened. 'It's going to be 21 March,' says Iqbal. 'Definitely.' There were no specific delays this time. It just all took longer than was expected. But then it always has. Now, though, it really is happening. They even have a menu: there will be sandalwood-flavoured Tandoori chicken breasts and home-smoked lamb kebabs. There will be turbot in a Kerala red-curry sauce and wild-boar chops with Indian rice vermicelli. And no poppadoms. It reads beautifully. It might even be the sort of thing that the inspectors from Michelin would go for. It could get the Cinnamon Club that first star for an Indian restaurant which Iqbal Wahhab so craves.

There's only one problem. In January Michelin announced its ratings for 2001. Two Indian restaurants, Tamarind and Zaika, were given one star each. To rub salt in the wound, the chef at Zaika is Vineet Bhatia, the first chef at the nascent Cinnamon Club all those years ago. 'Everybody knows I wanted to be the first to get a Michelin star, so there's no point denying it,' he says. 'But I'm pleased for them.' And then he says: 'I'll just have to go for two stars.' Only a fool would think he was bluffing; Iqbal Wahhab has a reputation for sticking with it.

• La Gousse d'Ail, 268 Woodstock Road, Oxford (01865 311 936). The Cinnamon Club, The Old Westminster Library, Great Smith Street, London SW1 (020 7517 9898). Neat, Oxo Tower Wharf, Bargehouse Street, London SE1.