Let's face it; St Valentine's Day is a bit of a mess. There were three martyrs called Valentinus in the late third century and nobody is quite sure which one the day is supposed to commemorate. There is no recorded association with romantic love before the Middle Ages, and in 1969 the Vatican took the saint's day out of the calendar altogether as part of an effort to remove saints of dubious pedigree.

Although there are relics of one or other of his bodies conveniently available in Roquemaure in France, in the Stephansdom in Vienna, in Blessed St John Duns Scotus church in Glasgow and in Whitefriar Street Carmelite Church in Dublin, they don't see a particular upsurge of visitors on February 14. Like many old festivals, St Valentine's day has gone the way of all flesh and been turned into a commercialised orgy by purveyors of insincere cards, garage forecourt flowers, uncomfortable underwear and, above all, restaurant owners - because on St Valentine's evening we feel we have to go out for dinner.

We get this atavistic herd urge - Valentine's day has become all about eating out, and failure to secure a reasonable booking for the night can be cited, if not as grounds for divorce, at least for weapons-grade recrimination for the rest of the year.

And so, for one blissful night, the balance of power shifts away from the whiny, demanding and fickle customer and into the hands of the restaurateurs. Along with the week prior to Christmas and Mothering Sunday this is a time they can be sure of filling every available seat several times over. And it's not just the quantity of customers that is different on this, the catering trade's most magical night of the year - it's also the quality. Over recent decades we've become more comfortable with restaurant-going. February 14 - "VD" as it is known in the trade - is no longer likely to be our only annual visit. But it is the night when restaurants see the most inexperienced diners. I don't want to make the industry sound too cynical. There are, of course, considerations of shareholder profitability and competition in a tough market, but the combination of guaranteed demand and undiscerning customers brings out, not to put too fine a point on it, a sort of crazed, vulpine blood lust.

The big-name restaurants and the small, romantic independents are booked up months - sometimes years - in advance, leaving the ordinary human being, who only got their brain into gear to book by December, entirely at the mercy of the chain restaurants and the Conranised gastro-barns. A request for a table for two at 8pm is usually met with a contemptuous snort but if, by some twist of good fortune, you've managed to find a place that's either so unknown or just flat-out awful that it still has a couple of vacant places, you'll be subject to a bewildering list of mean-minded restrictions: "We can fit you in at 6.30pm or 10.30pm"; "We'll need the table back in 90 minutes"; "You'll need to order from the set menu ... in advance ... online"; "Confirm by telephone on the day ... and we'll need your credit card details so we can charge you if you cancel or don't show."

To be fair, these restrictions didn't all come from the same restaurant - just the first three I called in late January. The fourth was kind enough to offer me a table "elsewhere in St Valentine's week".

And once we've secured our inconveniently timed and strictly limited tenure of the table next to the toilets, what's on offer? In the early 19th century, aphrodisiac menus were popular. "Turtle soup with ambergris, sole à la normande, reindeer fillet in cream sauce, salmis of veal, roasted young pigeon, watercress salad, asparagus in hollandaise sauce, bone-marrow pudding, port, Bordeaux, coffee and coca," was one suggested option. Not, I admit, the kind of thing likely to instill anything other than lethargy and flatulence in the modern diner but at least it showed flair, imagination and a degree of choice.

There's no choice available to participants in the modern "Valentine's experience". As one high-end chef, anonymous for obvious reasons, put it: "Everything shitty, cliched, and horribly 80s gets wheeled out: duo of lamb chops, cut to resemble hearts; coeur a la fucking creme. There will be at least one nancying, ninnying chicken dish, especially for the ladies, and steak, which will be ordered by 80% of the men. Well done, of course - medium if you're lucky."

It's pleasant to know that, as you enjoy your romantic dinner, catching your date's eye in the candlelight, your thoughts turning lightly to love, there's an entire kitchen brigade, in a murderous, sweating, loathing rage separated from you only by annihilative contempt and a flimsy MDF swing-door.

Your experience is unlikely to be enhanced by your busy server, as the Valentine's evening shift isn't an unalloyed pleasure for them either. Most of the waiting staff I spoke to agreed that while "no one wants to look a cheapskate by under-tipping and ruin their chances of copping off", they'll spend a fair part of their evening fielding ill-informed complaints from men who believe it "makes them look forceful and educated in front of their date". On top of that, one comments that "a restaurant full of two-tops is double the work", with twice as many separate orders and the restaurant rendered a nightmare to navigate.

So it seems that, apart from the proprietor, nobody in the restaurant is having much fun on St Valentine's evening. If St Valentine deserves to be patron saint of anything, it should be catering-industry shareholders.

Unless we collectively turn our backs on restaurants on St Valentine's day, things will only get worse. This is not necessarily as unromantic an idea as it might sound. There has to a better way to say "I love you" than getting industrially fed in an environment where the "atmosphere" consists of a tealight, a wilting rose and an intrusively sleazy soundtrack. Why buy into a Disney Date™ or a grand guignol parody of a candlelit dîner à deux?

Say it with spuds
A romantic Valentine's supper

"Oh," said the woman at the till when she saw the potato in my basket. "That's a rather funny-shaped one. Would you like to change it?" No, I wouldn't. This was exactly what I wanted. It was February 14, I was cooking a Valentine's dinner for my girlfriend, and that big spud in my basket was misformed in the shape of a loveheart. Perfect. This year, I was going to say it with potatoes. When I got it home, I sliced it in half, baked both bits face up, and then covered them in some julienned red cabbage braised in a little stock, cider vinegar and demerara sugar. Not only was this a love-heart you could tuck into, I thought to myself, it also contained no less than 40% of your recommended daily fruit and veg intake. What could be more romantic than that? With a smug little whistle, I lit the candles, put on some soft music and pulled them out of the oven. They smelled divine. Well, actually, they smelled kind of OK really - much as you'd expect potato and cabbage to smell like. If anyone had cooked them for me, I'd have been looking around for the main course. Or picking up the phone and ringing a pizza. Or running straight out the front door thinking: "My god, this person actually thinks this counts as a meal." But it seemed to go down a treat. "Mmm, lovely," said Emma, tipping out a rather large dollop of ketchup. That was last year. Since then, we've cycled to Land's End together, bought a house together, run off to get married in the Highlands, and we're expecting our firstborn in May. Take that restaurant-goers! Such is the power of the home-cooked meal put together with a little love. Such is the power of the cabbage-covered love potato.
Andrew Gilchrist