From bold dining concepts to Instagrammable interiors – why today’s openings aren’t just about the food.

Restaurants open and close daily, but only a handful attract the heat-seeking radar of critics, “opinion formers” and the gibbering clickerati that comprise the foodie community. A great deal of effort and a quite stupendous amount of cash is expended getting a restaurant into this elite wing, but, when a successful launch can be followed by months of solid bookings, it’s a very important investment that can mean the difference between a restaurant achieving take-off velocity or ploughing ignominiously into the turnip field at the end of the runway.

It’s always a fool’s game to predict the future, but it’s simple to spot the more unhinged trends that have developed in recent months. So, while we don’t suggest you take any of these to your backers as part of your business plan, here are seven things to note, with a raised and knowing eyebrow, when you’re eating in an Important New Restaurant.

Perhaps the most exciting thing about the restaurant scene in the UK right now is that you can go out and eat pretty much anything you like. You can have pho, arepas, gumbo, jollof, liver and onions or foie gras, rice, peas or rice and peas… all in the same street – just never in the same restaurant, with any luck. Back in the 18th century, the original Parisian restaurants “shared” menus. They were big, printed books that listed all the ways a civilised person could possibly want decent ingredients prepared. Today, we have a different approach. In the constant battle to “differentiate” their “concept”, restaurateurs tend to choose one thing at which they hope they can excel. Initially this was thrilling. A proper grown-up restaurant that specialised in fried chicken, sourdough pizza or excellent hamburgers was an innovation that delighted us with its wit and iconoclasm. Now our restaurant quarters are full of them, and we realise, too late, that this is precisely the same “innovative business strategy” that gave us KFC, Domino’s Pizza and McDonald’s.

Restaurateurs, PRs and the food media are incurable neophytes. We want constant innovation or, like small children, we get bored easily. Such is the way of the modern foodie. Customers, on the other hand, quite logically like a degree of recognition before they part with their cash. Chefs define themselves by the personal imprimatur they place on their food; their customers value authenticity. The ideal restaurant, therefore, will combine something totally familiar, ideally “traditional and authentic” with a “twist” from a chef with profile. It’s a proven, successful strategy and will be around as long as humanity goes out and exchanges money for food, but it puts the person responsible for the menu in an appalling dilemma. There are now, we’re starting to suspect, only two reasons a restaurant idea can fail: being insufficiently familiar or being insufficiently different.

Someone, somewhere is obviously rationing letters of the alphabet. New restaurants, such as Brat, Rovi and Kiln only get four letters each. Perhaps Bao was at the end of the queue. Obviously, the monosyllable has a certain minimalist charm. It communicates a kind of stripped-back, no-nonsense directness. “There will be no faff here at BONG! We are serious”, but we fear it’s a self-limiting strategy. Restaurants spring into being at a terrifying rate, there are only 358,800 four-letter combinations available in our alphabet. And I’ve already registered “Fhng!” for my authentic fishfinger-sandwich concept.

There’s a definite feeling out there that if something isn’t actually on fire in your restaurant, you’re somehow being short-changed. Perfectly acceptable gas ranges are being dragged out to skips, replaced by the kind of equipment that our Neolithic forebears could have incinerated elk on. I’m right up for a bit of grilled meat or fish and I’m even there for the omnipresent scorched cabbages and brassicas, but there’s the inconvenient historical truth that before 1840, when Mr Alexis Soyer installed the first gas cooker at the Reform Club in London, the biggest killer of kitchen staff was smoke inhalation. Fire symbolises the chef’s commitment to simplicity, it honours the traditions of the craft, it provides theatre in the dining room and imparts smoky deliciousness to the food. Mainly, though, along with the beard, the full-sleeve tatts, the £3,000 Japanese cleaver and the slaughterman’s leather apron, it looks bloody marvellous on the cover of Observer Food Monthly.

Natural wines are the very bleeding edge of restaurant hipsterdom at the moment. These are wines made without any of the modern interventions that created reputations for large commercial winemakers. At one level this is an entirely rational development. We have come to believe that beer is not best made by large companies, but by loose collectives of ferociously artisanal young people who’ve recently quit their day jobs to make boutique beers that shrivel your face with their interesting hops and funky ferments. Surely, they reason, the same refreshing iconoclasm must be desirable in winemaking. But, because natural wines are made by artisan, craftspeople in small batches, there is no predictable correlation between grape type, style, winemaker and the taste or quality of the wine in the bottle. Natural wines showcase the talent of the renegade winemaker and display the brilliance of a superb sommelier… about 50 per cent of the time. If you like those odds and are willing to put up with stuff that tastes like it was brewed by your uncle in his garage the other times, then go for it.

Mr Claude Debussy famously composed by starting with a full range of tones and subtracting anything that wasn’t vital. Designing a restaurant has, for the last decade or so, been a similar process. Start with a reasonable dining room. Remove flooring materials, wallpaper, paint, plaster. Light everything with bare bulbs. Source 30 chairs from a Methodist church that’s closing down in Wigan via eBay and, once you have the sort of environment they’d use as the set for a terrorist hideout at the tired-end of the Jason Bourne franchise, you’re cooking with gas… or, more likely, sustainably sourced Eastern European vine clippings. This look has the advantage of being cheap, of hinting at a kind of fashionable pop-up impermanence, even when it’s applied to the most egregiously corporate chain of coffee shops, but it also means that kebab shop next door can, by the application of 50 quid’s worth of plasterboard, two Ikea cushions and a tin of paint, appear as attractively decadent as the stately pleasure dome of Kubla Khan.

To make a restaurant stand out in a crowded market place, to achieve a certain salience, to be talked about, it’s got to be Instagrammable. Let’s not be prim here. It’s too easy to sound like an old git, complaining about millennials shooting their food before they taste it, but, you know what? The chef has knocked himself out to make it look good, you’ve dropped a chunk of change to have it brought to your table, you’ve got an £800 phone that could make your cat’s litter tray look like Mr Alain Passard laid it out with tweezers. Damn right you’re going to tell all your followers what you’re having for tea and not a soul will blame you. And that, I suppose, is the final thing to know about a notable restaurant. It’s all down to you. You have the power and, for all the design, imagination, creativity and publicity, it doesn’t mean a damn thing until you have a great meal… and tell all your friends about it.