The Reindeer restaurant is probably the most fashionable restaurant in the world. It's wildly exciting on every level. It's really hard to find; no detailed instructions regarding its whereabouts exist, presumably because that sort of thing is considered rather gauche in Very Cool World, but for the record, it's located above a grubby hip car park in East London.

Its presence is marked only by two reindeer-head cutouts, which flank the entry to the car park; and a charming top-hatted, frock-coated doorman, who stands at the bottom of the stairs that lead up from the car park, into the restaurant itself. At the top of those stairs, you are greeted by a succession of exotic creatures: an unfeasibly pretty piece clad in a crystal-encrusted mini-shift and Edie Sedgwick-alike woolly tights; an excellent drag queen; and also that rarest of creatures, a really good-looking ginger-haired man. Beyond them, the high-ceilinged, 250-seater restaurant space glistens like a mountainside after a fresh fall of snow. It was designed to be the dernier cri in non-trashy, non-themey winter wonderlands. Pablo Flack, the restaurateur behind it, was determined that it would be very Christmas, yet absolutely not Christmassy. 'Tinsel,' he said, 'is soooooooo banned.' Then he got designer Giles Deacon to design the plates, and super-stylist Katie Grand to do the crackers.

But what makes the Reindeer really cool, is that it won't be there for much longer. It's a guerrilla restaurant, a pop-up affair, which opened on 1 December 2006, and will close six days from today, the day before Christmas Eve. Furthermore: you'll never eat there, and neither will I. When I popped in, on a lunchtime in the opening week, the clipboard-wielding exotics informed me, in the nicest way possible, that I did not have a hope in hell of getting a table, at any time or on any date. No, they would not take my details and ring me if there was a cancellation, because there wouldn't be.

I didn't mind a bit. Getting knocked back from the Reindeer is a rite of passage in almost-cool circles this month. Everywhere I go, people are sharing their How I Got Turned Away From The Reindeer stories, and swapping wildy elaborate plans on how they might wangle it next time. No one's sure why they want to go so badly. At the time of writing, reports on the quality of the food had yet to filter through. And most unusually for a hot destination, no celebs of great note had graced the premises. But where the Reindeer's concerned, such matters are irrelevant. It's cool because it is, and because it won't be around for very long, and that is all there is to it.

I think this kind of thing - the insanely fashionable restaurant kind of thing - makes the world go round. Much bile has been spouted over the sneering exclusivity of such ventures, the ruinous pricing, the gratuitous courting of a celebrity clientele. But so what?

The most marvellously exciting thing that happened to me all this year, is that I went to lunch at the super-soft-launch (that's the launch before the official soft launch) of London's St Alban restaurant. It was all boarded up outside and the staff were in their civvies and the loos weren't really working, but it was great! In fact, that rawness added to the experience hugely. That and Loyd Grossman, who was holding court from a centre table.

I hadn't actually heard about St Alban (the latest project from Jeremy King and Chris Corbin, the men behind the Ivy and also the Wolseley) until about an hour before I settled myself into its closeted, upscale airport-lounge-inspired depths. So, within the space of a day, I learnt about the restaurant, came to appreciate how hot it was, went, ate, and then started saying things like: 'Have you been to St Alban yet? No? Oh, you really should! What do you mean, you haven't even heard of it?' to friends and colleagues. How fun!

I adore fashionable restaurants, whether I get in or not, because they are contrary to this modern notion that it's The Food That Matters. From back-to-basics recipe books like Simon Hopkinson and Lindsey Bareham's The Prawn Cocktail Years, to the soaring popularity of farmers' markets, to Heston Blumenthal, whose latest TV show is all about simplicity in food - that's the underlying message. But I think it's wrong. Eating out should not be about food. It should be about scene. About excitement and occasion, about dressing up, and proximity to pretty people on whom you might eavesdrop, over whom you might speculate.Scene is what fashionable restaurants do so well.

I'll never make it as a restaurant critic. The reviews I have done, have been thorough assesment of the loos, cutlery style, and the handsomeness of the waiting staff- and nothing to do with the scoff. I know that the critics will probably slam the Reindeer; some have already started with St Alban (although they haven't been able to fault the food, only how elusive a reservation is). But then, the critics always miss the point. Here's the point: good restaurants are theatre and flirtation and fancy; and the food can go to hell.