What makes a restaurant hot? I can't work it out. Sometimes a place will open, you'll hear that it has a great pedigree and it'll get fantastic reviews ('I put a spoonful of mousse in my mouth and heard the angels sing!'), but when you decide to try it, it's worryingly easy to get a table, and the only other diners are a group of pissed mobile-phone salesmen. Six months later, it quietly closes, and next time you pass, it's Tesco Metro. You buy a loaf and mourn the passing of the excellent broad-bean-and-pancetta salad that you once ate in the same spot. But then there are other places that, just as mysteriously, are booked up even before they've opened, so that by the time the critics arrive, their no-doubt perfectly valid observations just sound snitty ('the lobster will stay with me for a long time, and not in a good way'). At these restaurants, the only table available to mortals like you within the month is at 5pm or - even handier! - midnight on a Sunday, and located beside a flapping kitchen door. You book a table for 8pm on a Thursday in three months' time. When the date finally arrives, you try not to let the apparently unavoidably flapping door put you off your fruits de mer. In the middle of the room is Kylie, picking at a bowl of fries. Hers are doubtless warm; yours turned up stone cold.
Which scenario is the most absurd? I'm not sure. But it's very bewildering. It's more than 20 years, now, since I first grasped that some restaurants are cooler than others, and that this information is in the ether rather than on the Ten O'Clock News, and yet still I don't get it. The rationalist in me is infuriated. I became aware of the phenomenon at the age of 18. Having spent the previous year drinking Nescafé in front of the telly, I'd joined a new sixth form where - ignominy! - I'd had to drop down a year. My new school was posher than my old one; at least two of the girls were called Annabel, and they had clothing allowances and the use of their mother's runaround. Within days, I heard them talking about somewhere called Baldwins Omega. I was puzzled by this. Did it have something to do with Mike Baldwin, star of Coronation Street? Or was it, perhaps, a car showroom ('Omega' sounded a bit like 'Chrysler')? No. Baldwins Omega was - and is - Sheffield's 'finest banqueting and neighbourhood luncheon restaurant' (I quote from the website), and just the place for an 18th birthday dinner/snogfest, events that this lot were invited to every week. It was, in middle-class Sheffield circles, hot, hot, hot.
I asked my mother about it, and imagine my surprise when she curled her lip. Once, on a trip out, she detoured so I could gaze at it. Now I knew why she had looked disparaging. From the outside, it's a seaside bungalow on speed. To this day I haven't been inside - not cool enough! - but a virtual tour on the internet confirms all that my mother told me: the floor coverings are, well, practical, the lighting not exactly flattering. What Baldwins Omega did have, however, was word of mouth. The right people - the Annabels - liked it. Useful to get this learnt.
Later, when I moved to London, the Omega Syndrome was a constant of metropolitan life. In my first few years here, 192 in Notting Hill was the place (Bridget Jones's favourite) and then Quaglino's. The latter had a problem with people nicking its ashtrays, not because they were especially desirable; it was just so hard to get a table that people wanted proof that they'd actually been.
The current hot spot is Scott's, in Mayfair. This was inevitable, I suppose, given that it is part of the group that also owns The Ivy (then again, it strikes me as odd that such a lusted-after destination is basically part of a chain). Also, it has a fine pedigree, being where Ian Fleming once ordered his Martinis. Recent guests include Mick Jagger, Leonardo DiCaprio and, erm, Geri Halliwell (who, given her reputation for extreme diets, is proof positive that the menu is almost - if not quite - irrelevant in a truly hot establishment).
In spite of my familiarity with the syndrome I have named Omega, I've been determined to visit Scott's ever since it reopened - the glamour! The oyster bar! The possibility of seeing Roger Moore and his wife, Kiki! - and duly booked it for my husband's birthday. Point one: we were by a door, albeit not the kitchen's, and it flapped. Point two: the first two bottles of wine we ordered were not available. Point three: my sole-and-shrimp dish came sans shrimps. Point four (I'm just being bitchy now): the women were wearing too much make-up. But did we have a good time? Of course we bloody did. We felt the reassuring hum of urban fashion vibrate in our knives and forks, and loved it. Which is why, last week, I rang Scott's switchboard again. I expect you can guess what they told me.
· Scott's, 20 Mount Street, London W1 020 7495 7309
