In the only photograph I have ever seen of him, Dr Hilary James – definitely not to be confused with Dr Hilary Jones of GMTV fame – is wearing Michael Caine glasses, an open-necked shirt, striped strides and espadrilles. Posing beside a brimming flowerbed at the height of an English summer, he looks quite stylish, albeit in a forbidding late-1960s sort of a way. It’s the kind of image – distant and rather cool, temperature-wise – you used to find on the dust jacket of a certain kind of novel (“The author, pictured at his home in London”), which is why, perhaps, it immediately makes me think of grammar school-induced class war, plentiful extramarital sex, and dirty Le Creuset saucepans.

Alas, I’ve no idea what school James went to. Nor do I know much about his sex life. But I suspect he probably did own a number of Le Creuset pans, for, although by day he was a psychotherapist at the Middlesex Hospital (or possibly a psychiatrist: I’ve seen him described as both), by night he was the cook at his own restaurant, Le Matelot, in Elizabeth Street, Kensington, which opened in 1952. Inspired by Elizabeth David and various places James loved in the south of France, Le Matelot was, by all accounts, a somewhat singular establishment. On eBay, I found one of its plates, on which there pranced three muscled sailors; the seller had confidently labelled it “gay interest”. Among the restaurant’s fans were Fanny Cradock and her husband Johnnie, who would eat there on Christmas Eve, when James apparently liked to wear horns as he prepared the coquilles St Jacques. In a review published in their Bon Viveur guide of 1955, the Cradocks praised the “delightfully uninhibited” staff, one of whom, wearing coral jeans, had bared her midriff as she poured champagne.

James wasn’t the only amateur cook attempting to transform London eating in the years after the war. Among the others were Walter Baxter, a failed novelist who opened the Chanterelle in Old Brompton Road, and whose garlic bread was much celebrated; Bill Stoughton, a failed actor who ran a restaurant at the Watergate Theatre Club in Charing Cross, where he delighted customers (I’m not joking) with tinned kidneys in a wine and mushroom sauce; and Nick Clarke, an old Etonian who bought a Chelsea transport cafe, and turned it into a bistro famous for its boeuf en croute.

James is perhaps the most recognisable type to us today: a clever man with appetites, a self-taught cook in the tradition of, say, Alastair Little or Fergus Henderson. (He had a touch of Basil Fawlty about him, too. When a couple complained at a restaurant he opened later – the Forge at Plaxtol, in Kent – he instructed his staff to remove everything from their table, and asked them to leave.) Unable to find the food he wanted to eat, in the style in which he wanted to eat it – how he hated waiters in dirty tailcoats – he simply got on and made it himself. Unsurprisingly, having been born of passion and instinct rather than commercial greed, his venture was a hit. In 1954, he had to open another restaurant, La Bicyclette, almost next door to Le Matelot, simply to absorb the customers he turned away every night. Its speciality was chicken-in-the-basket with sweetcorn pancakes.

I discovered the long-forgotten James courtesy of a rather odd little book from 1975, bought on Abe for a penny after Simon Hopkinson recommended it to me (British Gastronomy: the Rise of Great Restaurants by Gregory Houston Bowden, if you’re interested). And yes, as you’ll perhaps have guessed by now, his exhumation here is all part of my ongoing obsession with the restaurants of the past. (So what if the V&A isn’t interested? Maybe Radio 4 will bite.) My enthusiasms aside, however, he does seem to have been rather a splendid figure – a character from a certain kind of novel, if not the author of one. I keep wondering: could such a man, a chef-shrink (or a shrink-chef), exist today? My guess is he couldn’t. Full as London and other big cities are with young men and women running food businesses, most of them must devote themselves to it full time; they’ve no choice if they’re to pay their extortionate rents. These days, James would probably just enter MasterChef – though looking at him again now, an aesthete if ever I saw one, I’m certain the real Hilary James would have blanched at the likes of Gregg and John. Not for him, their hammy gurning and lame adjectives. In their contrived kitchen challenges, he would have seen only futility and frightful bad taste. OFM