A press release informs me that Browns is 40 years old. Forty? It gave me quite a jolt. It's horrible now – last time I had the misfortune to visit one of its 27 branches, the chicken was rubbery and the chips were cold – but when I was a student in Oxford it was quite the thing. Good-looking waiters in white aprons, generous jugs of Pimm's, crisp side salads in wooden bowls with a choice of dressing including – the wondrousness – blue cheese. In 1988, these delights we had not much seen before.

Nostalgia washed over me, warm and plangent. Being able to measure out my life in restaurants (as opposed to coffee spoons) makes me feel old. Oh, the trends that were there: the fads, the failures and, before that, the paucity. It's almost touching to think of it, the way we used to eat, though there's not a person alive who'd go back. And so, in the manner of one of those really annoying high-concept novels – only shorter – I thought I'd get this strange timeline down for your delectation. My life in restaurants. Do you remember? I bet you do.

1 The first restaurant I went to was not really a restaurant at all, but a Dining Room. It was in the Wasdale Head Hotel, Wastwater, to which my father used to take me as a girl. I had to put on my best lilac kilt for dinner. The starter was always the same: a tiny glass of fruit juice or – push the boat out! – celery soup. The main course was meat, roasted. Pudding was fruit salad or trifle, though either way, what you mostly ended up with was a lot of tinned mandarin oranges.

2 When I was eight, I was allowed, for my birthday, to take some friends to the Berni Inn at the Norton roundabout in Sheffield. Every Berni Inns dish came with three button mushrooms, and every adult always had an Irish coffee at the end of their meal. I couldn't understand their delight in this delicacy, which seems, looking back, to have been almost sexual. But now I'm 44, I really get it: the pleasure of all that boozy warm froth on one's upper lip. Nice.

3 Abroad. I went to the Loire first, in my newly married mother's Datsun. This was the first time I tasted proper cheese, butter, yoghurt and fizzy water. Later, we went to Gascony, where I ate at what I then considered to be the world's best restaurant: La Rapière, in Mauvezin. Confit de canard and prune and Armagnac ice cream. Nothing like that at home.

4 University. See above. Plus, Pizza Express. Hard to believe now, but in 1988, I thought doughballs as exotic as David Sylvian (which is to say: very exotic indeed).

5 To London. I arrived in 1991. It was the era of 192, the insufferable Notting Hill media watering hole, and of Terence Conran; Quaglino's, which we might call his restaurant zenith, opened in 1991. I went to the former once and what I remember is many, many puy lentils. I did go to Quaglino's, too. But, embarrassingly, not until 1998.

6 To Glasgow. I lived close to the Ubiquitous Chip. Langoustine and haggis: what was not to like? Scotland seemed to be ahead of London in several foodie ways, and I longed to visit the Altnaharrie Inn, which had Michelin stars, a stern, no-choice menu featuring foraged foods – the prescience! – and could only be accessed by boat. Sadly, the closest I got was Ullapool, where I reported on a drugs cheat at the Highland Games and ate nothing but a Cornetto all day.

7 Back to London. All was now very earthy: St John, Moro; chops and chickpeas. But I was working such long hours that I spent most of my time first in a Wapping sandwich bar – its owner cleaved to sun-dried tomatoes like a soap star to a bubble perm – and then in a branch of Cranks in Canary Wharf. Sort of like The Good Life, but minus the anaesthetising nettle wine.

8 2013. Just now, my favourite restaurant is the Quality Chop House in Clerkenwell. I'm spoony about it because I was wooed there by T, but the food is the tops, too – grown-up and delicious. Not a bad marker for the mid-point of my restaurant eating life. And I'm clearly not having a midlife crisis, else I'd be somewhere more modish: queuing on a sticky pavement outside Meat Liquor, probably, while worrying quietly about my trainers.