A recent dinner at Pied à Terre for “Richard Neat’s Week” was an extremely memorable meal, as the renowned chef spent seven days in its kitchen cooking some of the classics from his back catalogue to celebrate the 25 years since he earned Michelin stars for the London-based venue.

This was a tasting menu-only affair and rightly so, because it would have simply been too tough to select a mere three courses from his lengthy reprised repertoire. It was much better to be able to get a taste of everything. My wife and I were able to each sample a different ten-course tasting menu and obviously share the dishes – giving us a considerable 20 courses to try.

I’ve long been a fan of the tasting menu and the very best meals I’ve enjoyed have undoubtedly involved this procession-of-dishes option. This is because the tasting menu has often been chosen at particularly flash restaurants, where it is extremely tough to secure a table, or it has been at overseas establishments I’ve travelled to and which are undoubtedly once-in-a-lifetime meals that therefore justify going the whole hog.

The first memorable tasting menu experience I can recall was in mid-2005 at Tom Aikens restaurant in Elystan Street in Chelsea (recently reopened by former Square chef/owner Phil Howard) when Aikens was truly on fire and setting the pace for high-end cooking in the UK. To put my interest in the Richard Neat dinner in context, Aikens trained under Neat and ensured Pied à Terre held its Michelin star status when the head chef moved on.

Shortly after this meal my wife and I were due to visit Gerona in Spain and, just before flying out, I found out that renowned El Cellar De Can Roca restaurant was on the edge of the town – so we booked dinner. This was in the wonderful days before the World’s Top 50 Restaurants existed and created the phenomenon of year-long waiting lists. For a modest €60 each we chose the premium tasting menu because, why wouldn’t you? It ticked all the boxes of why tasting menus should be an absolute must in all the best dining rooms.

It has slightly irked me, therefore, that some of our restaurant critics have generally looked to call time on tasting menus of late. Apparently they are tired of them, in the same way they have had their fill of fine dining. “It’s so last year,” we’re informed. For people who eat out all the time, and have no trouble securing a table in the finest dining establishments, this might well be the case. But for the rest of us we simply want to maximise the dining experience at these special restaurants and, for me, this absolutely equates to the tasting menu.

The problem has been that far too many average restaurants have introduced a tasting menu option. So, even as one of their biggest fans, I have been reassessing their usage and have come to the conclusion I might have to be somewhat more selective about them in the future.

One of the reasons is to save myself from having to once more hear my wife groaning, five courses into a tasting menu: “How many more dishes will we be having?” To which my response is invariably “just a couple more”, knowing full well we’ve probably got at least three more before we get to anything bordering on dessert. Oh, and there might just be a bit of cheese slotted in somewhere.

But the main reason I’m going to limit their consumption is I’d like to return to enjoying a broader conversation at the table rather than just talking about the food (as much as I like doing this). There is no doubt a tasting menu takes over the dining experience. There are the constant interruptions from the waiters, with their explanations of each dish, followed by the invariable dissection and discussion I have about the dish (I’m told I can do this at great length).

Without the constant stream of tasting menu dishes being brought to the table, my wife and I recently enjoyed a very relaxed three-course meal at Galvin La Chapelle in the City of London. We’d jettisoned the idea of having the tasting menu and this enabled us to talk at length about non-food things. There was no constant reversion back to the food as each new tasting menu course was delivered.

This also gave me much more time to peruse and discuss the wine list. On taking the WSET Level 3 in Wine course, I’ve now moved on from boring my wife about the food to boring her with my new found (albeit limited) knowledge of wine. It is now five wines, rather than five courses, into a meal that my wife now asks me: “How many more wines will we be having?”

In London, they say, you’re never more than three feet from a cool new restaurant or hipster cafe and, in the name of research, I’ve tested a load of them for you. Here are my findings:

I don’t believe in naming and shaming so I won’t, but a recent visit to a cool, “small plates-type” place in Covent Garden was so unwelcoming it left me feeling hugely embarrassed in front of the guest I’d suggested the venue to. Being rushed through a meal and then asked to stand in the doorway to finish an expensive bottle of wine – so they could turn tables faster – only left a bad taste in my mouth. I do, however, believe in shouting about great service, so thank you to Hawksmoor Covent Garden for rescuing the evening with its usual exceptional and effortless hospitality.

A place near me in south London sells amazing pancakes. In fact, I could murder a couple right now. Problem is, this uber-cool little all-day cafe has the worst operational set up I’ve seen, meaning only one ticket can be prepared at a time, putting an average 45-minute wait between me and those tasty breakfast treats. Another haunt of mine makes really good avocado on toast. Well, sometimes. The problem is the spec changes every visit. The accompanying egg varies from raw to hard-boiled, despite me stating a preference which is neither, and on my last visit I was treated to a thick layer of pickled something artfully strewn across the top. Consistently different isn’t the kind of consistent I’m looking for.

A small, all-day restaurant near me has a wage bill that must eat every pound of profit it makes. This tiny space often has three people behind the counter, three in the kitchen and a very harassed-looking owner rushing around trying to hold it all together. Despite the abundance of help, I’ve still had to ask three times for the honey that goes with my French toast, and waited an age to pay at the end. I’ve given honest and helpful feedback when asked and been met with a blank stare. Clearly staff know they should be asking for feedback in an area full of locals, but have no idea what to do with it once they have an answer. It’s agonising to see a cafe or restaurant open then close within a few months because the owner’s love of food just hasn’t been enough to sustain an actual business.

There are all sorts of ways of getting great food now, the rise of Deliveroo has shown that restaurant-quality home eating, for example, has never been more accessible. But what a skilled home chef or a student on a mountain bike can’t provide is service, the bit that turns a meal into an experience and, when done really well, can leave you walking on air for days. This is infinitely more beneficial to your business than the “wham, bam, thank you ma’am” approach.

Independents may actively try to distance themselves from the ways of the big chains, but customers are attracted to return because of the experience they’ve had and, while surprises may be exciting, they aren’t something you can rely on. Whatever type of business you’re in, brand loyalty is built on loving something – and knowing it will be exactly the same or better every time you try it.

Owners need to surround themselves with expertise and apply operational efficiencies – as long as they aren’t detrimental to the experience – wherever they can. Nothing remains the “cool new thing” for long, and it’s essential that the business is financially viable enough to sustain the regular reinvention so vital in today’s market.

In February 2012, Alcohol Concern published a report entitled White Cider and Street Drinkers, which highlighted the impact these drinks have on homeless drinkers. Earlier this month, the Alcohol Health Alliance (AHA), an umbrella organisation that represents about 40 bodies from “public health” and consistently demonises alcohol and seeks to de-normalise its use, published a piece of faux research that generated headlines such as: “Alcohol continues to be sold at pocket money prices – AHA report finds.” And what alcohol are they referring to? You guessed it – white cider.

The AHA partner organisations involved in preparing this report were the Institute of Alcohol Studies; Alcohol Focus Scotland; Balance, the north east Alcohol Office; and Healthier Futures. So what did this bunch of neo-temperance nannies actually do? Apparently they visited a range of off-sales premises “looking for the nation’s cheapest booze” – nothing like starting with a conclusion and then selecting evidence to “prove” it – all in the name of science, of course! More than 500 products were examined but, despite this, they highlighted only one – white cider – which they described as “dominating the market for cheap, high-strength drinks”. The AHA went on to state: “High-strength white cider products, which are predominantly drunk by dependent and under-age drinkers, are sold for as little as 16 pence per unit of alcohol.” The report goes on to dramatise the problem further by stating: “For the cost of a standard off-peak cinema ticket, you can buy seven and a half litres of 7.5% ABV white cider containing as much alcohol as 53 shots of vodka.”

So what is the purpose of this report and what does the AHA hope to achieve? The demands made by the AHA on the back of this report are for government to:

• Increase the duty on high-strength cider

• Reinstate the alcohol duty escalator

• Tax all alcoholic drinks categories in proportion to their strength on leaving the EU

• Implement a minimum unit price on all alcoholic drinks

The AHA’s strategy is exactly the same as Alcohol Concern’s strategy in 2012 – to selectively demonise drinks categories that have only marginal market penetration, link them to groups of “vulnerable drinkers”, and then leverage the demand for alcohol restrictions on a much wider scale. Remember “alcopops” and “vulnerable young drinkers”? Even at its peak this category accounted for less than 3.5% of the total volume of alcohol consumed in the UK. Remember “toffee vodka” aimed apparently at “vulnerable young girl drinkers”?

And if white cider is “dominating the market for cheap, high-strength drinks”, the AHA forgets to mention that this category accounts for about a tenth of 1% of the total volume of alcohol sold in the UK. Yet these categories are held up as typical examples of a drinks industry out of control and unconcerned about the social impact of its products and, therefore, “something must be done”.

Typically, the AHA links the demand for higher taxes for white cider to higher taxes for all ciders, which would involve levelling-up cider duties to match beer duty rates. We surely need to separate the lower taxes that are designed to protect our indigenous cider industry from the purchase of the cheap, foreign apple concentrate that is used in the production of super-strength white cider. Demonising drinks categories by reference to “vulnerable groups” is a way of emotionalising the issues and softening up political and public opinion for further restrictions on all drinks and all drinkers.

While I am neither a drinker nor a defender of these particular ciders, I think we should be wary of those who proffer simple solutions to complex problems. Dependent drinking isn’t caused by the availability of a particular “problem drink”, it is highly linked to depressive illnesses and other mental health problems as well as a complex set of other social and psychological issues. The desire of dependent drinkers to numb this pain doesn’t go away if you ban or tax a particular drinks product. There will always be a substitute, whether it’s an alcoholic one or some other substance. And as for white cider being a favourite tipple of under-age drinkers, curiously that was never mentioned in Alcohol Concern’s report in 2012 – but maybe they missed a trick. Before anguished, hand-wringing meddlers cry “what about the children?” they should perhaps remember that under-age drinking is in sharp decline and the vast majority of under-age drinkers get their booze from their parents or steal it from home.

For someone born in the 1980s, and consequently now in their late 20s, you would think I’d have an app for everything and be posting my every waking move on social media. I am, however, rather behind the curve and tend to end up joining the trend several months after the hype and popularity has died down. It is perhaps not surprising to learn I don’t own an iPhone, or anything Apple-branded for that matter, nor do I play Pokémon Go! Not that I’m knocking it, restaurants are literally tapping into this and using it to their advantage, generating a short-term boost in turnover as a result of becoming a PokeStop (Google it – probably the most bizarre phenomenon I’ve come across).

So when I first heard of Uber, I was slow to embrace and a tad sceptical. Having now joined the Uber revolution, I am the ultimate convert. What could be better than being able to tell a car where you are, it comes to you and not the other way around, and costs a fraction of the traditional black cab fare? Even better, I no longer have to bother about having cash.

With Uber proving popular with customers, albeit not so popular with black cab drivers, they have now sought to expand their offering beyond just transporting people to places – transporting food to people. As if Uber couldn’t make life any simpler for us. Short of downloading the app and telling them what you want to eat and where to deliver it to, there is nothing else to do. It automatically links to your standard Uber account and off you go.

But Uber was not the first here, nor does it match its main competitor for coverage, although it is now expanding outside Zone 1 as well as into regional cities. Fear not, Deliveroo has it covered.

So 2016 must mark a turning point in the eating out sector; the age of eating in has arrived but in a far different form to its predecessors and it is Deliveroo, set up by Will Shu and Greg Orlowski in February 2013, that has pioneered this.

Three-and-a-half years since inception and it has only recently been really hitting the headlines. Investors have bought into the concept, funding has been fast flowing, and more and more companies are seeking to get in on the action. Even Amazon is looking at it.

As explained by Shu in an interview with Wired.co.uk, Deliveroo’s concept is about improving the range and quality of home delivered takeaway food, taking it above and beyond what has typically been a fairly low-quality, fast food offering, often fairly unhealthy and confined predominantly to Indian, Chinese, Thai and similar cuisines. This time it is about engaging with existing restaurants which don’t provide a takeaway service and providing the facilities and technology to do so. In turn, this enables the restaurant to focus on enhancing the business and maintaining food quality, but without affecting their physical restaurants and without adding costs to the business. In return, Deliveroo charges a delivery fee, payable by the customer, and a commission payable by the restaurant, based on a percentage of the order value.

As of August, Deliveroo was established in 12 countries and 54 cities, almost 40 in the UK and Ireland. In London alone, more than 2,500 restaurants have now signed up to the concept. According to the Telegraph website, revenues are set to hit £130m this year, reflecting annual growth of 1,000%! Little surprise that venture capitalists such as Bridgepoint are ploughing money into the concept, providing the leverage for it to expand even further.

So how does it work for the restaurant operators and is it a worthwhile venture? I put this question to Food & Fuel, operators of 11 gastro-pubs and cafe bars in London, which recently embarked on this new relationship.

When an operator signs up to work in partnership with Deliveroo, they are supplied with a tablet which interfaces with the Deliveroo app and also syncs with the couriers, who have the app on their smartphones. Deliveroo foots the cost of the tablet, not the restaurant, so start-up costs are minimal.

The restaurant operator retains control over the use of the service and there are no minimum requirements imposed on them, so when the restaurant is busy and they can’t or don’t want to provide the service, the tablet is turned off and the restaurant disappears from the list on the app. The customer can no longer choose this restaurant.

Food & Fuel only has positive things to say about the relationship so far and it would appear its staff at the restaurants, those having to physically facilitate it, are on board as well. Peter Myers, financial director, said there had been no negative impact on the company’s restaurants. It had boosted trade, particularly on quieter trading days, for example Sunday nights, which are the most popular nights for orders. When asked how he thought it translated in terms of brand image, again he believes it is a positive.

So it would appear it’s all positive news from the financial side of the operation but it can’t all come without any bumps along the way, can it? Timing, product quality and packaging is a key consideration to ensure a reputation is upheld. One Sunday night I trialled Deliveroo (UberEats doesn’t currently cover where I live) and put Wagamama to the test – all in the name of market research. Order placed, estimated delivery time of 18.16 – it arrived early, piping hot, in a Wagamama bag and with chopsticks, napkin and cutlery, and presented exactly as if I had ordered it from a table in the restaurant.

So what on the face of it appears to be merely a takeaway service is revolutionising the sector. Never before has it been possible to have such a range of food available and delivered to your door, at the touch of a button, and indeed the range of operators now signed up to the likes of Deliveroo and UberEats is surprising. You can get anything from a Gaucho steak or a Dirty Burger to Yo Sushi or Pho and from Amorino ice cream to Crosstown Doughnuts. There is something for everyone, to satisfy any craving. And it’s not just food, you can order drinks as well – BrewDog, for one, has signed up. One must start to wonder, though, are we all about to become terribly antisocial? You could eat, drink, work, shop and socialise all from the comfort of your sofa. Could this have a serious negative impact on our mental health and could we see the demand for physical restaurant space dry up and rents start to fall?

Personally, I doubt it. For most people, eating out is enjoyable and a social activity, a forum for meeting friends, family, colleagues, hosting dates. Eating a takeaway at home is a convenience, a lazy treat, but not necessarily sustainable. What we may see, however, is a rise in the number of central production kitchens if the concept proves so successful the individual restaurants can’t support its new customer base.

I do think this is a concept that is here to stay and may evolve again. It is convenience at its peak and has revolutionised the takeaway market, bringing it to a level I never expected – “picnic in the park” looks set to take on a whole new meaning. Thanks to Deliveroo, it could soon be bringing the restaurant not only to your home but to wherever you are, be that a field, a park or even on the beach.