Chefs, almost invariably eat simply when not on duty. Indeed the chef, and now museum creator Ferran Adria, liked nothing more than a bowl of clams shuffled around the plancha. Mr Pierre White never seemed to eat at all, merely pushing food around a plate as if he was trying to stop it escaping.

As a young chef I subsisted on a half pint of custard topped up with evaporated milk and two bowls of Sugar Frosties at the end of the shift. The better to tackle the night club ahead…

Later at the Braid Hills Hotel, then still mired in the culinary practices of the 1950s, a curious ritual was enacted every day at 5.30pm precisely . A table was dragged into the middle of the kitchen, where it was laid as if for the finest, and then the head chef would cook anything for his minions from the al la carte menu - before the hustle and bustle of that evening’s service.

There was Veal Holstein, truites amandine and duck bigarade on offer. Ever the contrarian, I ordered double egg & chips with two slices of bread cut on the angle with slathers of butter. Every single night!

Then came service: That was when us young ‘uns were allotted the job of tying Bob the sauce chef to his stove, where he swayed throughout service for all the world like he was cooking herring on a trawler, in a force 10 gale. He never ate either, a bottle of rum his only (lonely) sustenance throughout service. Yet he never failed to deliver an order on time and en-pointe.

There were tales of Louie the pastry chef baking Choux Swans for F. Scott Fitzgerald at a Swiss mountain hotel, (later to surface in Tender is the Night). Or head chef Francis’s grim tales of what passed for haute cuisine at The Adlon Hotel in the aftermath of the horror that was post-war Berlin. He somehow managed to get out... and never vouchsafed his secrets.

This communal table ritual was revived in L’ Alliance and Le Marche’ Noir in the mid 1990s but my mentors were long gone. There were new stories to tell.

The Core of the Big Apple

New York is a law unto itself. Go into a bar and have a beer and a wine, okay 3 beers and 3 wines, pay up and leave. Later, checking the bill, you’ll find you apparently had 2 large Cobb salads but no alcohol. Alcohol is untaxed you see, so they magic your drinks into food conjuring up $6 dollar surcharge.

Similarly, if you have a beer and a meal, then another 6 beers, the food tax bill will be recalculated every round even though you are no longer eating. Tip: check out after eating and start a new tab. What about the mysterious $6 tax for The Jacob Kravitz Center ‘extension’ that pops up on some bills. Is that kosher?

Or, in Pod 39 hotel: The hipster barman ignored me for 10 minutes, finally... “that’ll be $7 dollars.” I hand over $20 and wait another twenty minutes, when he reappears he doesn’t seem to remember the transaction. Then backtracks and divvies up. All of this rather theatrical finagling is perhaps understandable. You see those buildings tumbling into the sky, they are there for one express purpose only, making money.

New York was a city of hucksters from the get go. In 1626 Peter Minuit bought Manhattan from the Canarsie Indians for the equivalent in today’s money of $72 – an investment that has realised an increase, as of 1992, of 17 billion percent. The Canarsies were no slouches either, they came from Brooklyn, so it turns out Manhattan wasn’t theirs to sell. (For their part the Raritan Indians sold Staten Island to six different buyers, but at least it was theirs to sell.)

In a mercifully quiet cul de sac off Times Square, a man cuts across us diagonally and crashes into both of us. He wheels round, sober suited, fiftyish, and brandishing his briefcase, screams at us: “Don’t stop in New York!” And much quieter, “...don’t ever stop in New York.”

A city then whose sole purpose is movement. A city on the lam. A city that is barely even cohesive until night falls. Someone once called it a European city, but of no particular country.

For all of the above I adore it.