Dining in and dining out are radically different social or solitary occasions. Dining in, unless your address is Downton Abbey, is informal; there is no menu and no waiter. Dining out is a public affair, prescribed by the restaurateur, and it amounts to something approaching interactive theatre. There is a poem by Peter Rose in which he describes the floor of a restaurant as ‘raked’. The restaurateur is a director who holds tight control over the diner’s experience. He (very rarely she) is the dictator of every variable.

Being in control (of the aesthetics, the staff, the relationship between the kitchen and the front of house, even, dare I say, the customers) is a recurring trait found in many of the restaurateurs interviewed by Nicholas Lander. These professionals are not chefs, and what a relief it is to read about people who own restaurants but do not cook. Michael Carter, a Sydney academic, wrote in the 1990s: ‘A rise in the esteem in which cooks and cooking are held is not in itself fatal. It is the aestheticisation of culinary activities which opens the gate to decadence since it is the aspiration to art which subordinates the nutritional role of food to the demands of spectacle, performance, and transgression.’

Michelle Garnaut, an Australian who has lived in China for decades and oversees restaurants in Shanghai and Beijing, told Lander that she has never forgotten advice given to her by Mietta O’Donnell, a brilliant Melbourne restaurateur. ‘Don’t make it all about the chef,’ O’Donnell told Garnaut, who took this advice to heart, not least because she was already self-persuaded by this rule. (I should declare that I know and admire Garnaut.)

But surely it is more complicated than this. If a restaurant has a chef who is a particularly imaginative cook, the diners who patronise this restaurant will do so mainly for the food. If this kind of chef is missing, then the restaurant needs to become more than a stage for kitchen braggadocio. And if this restaurant becomes the place to be, to be seen, and, better, to feel comfortable in, then a very good chef will only make it even more popular. The ornery problem will always be the chef’s ego, so a very good jobbing chef will fit the place best: someone who wants security and a part of the responsibility, but not all. The restaurateur herself must have a confident knowledge of food and give that chef a reason to remain loyal.

The part of the equation that this set of assumptions leaves out is the ability of a singular restaurateur to set up a public dining space that has something almost indefinable, a buzz, an interesting but also entirely practical dining room, an invincibly professional staff – above all, a sense of confidence that rubs off on its diners. The sum of its parts produces a restaurant that hums and those who dine in this restaurant feel a sense of complicity in its success. I sensed this rare quality in the original Caprice in London more than twenty years ago; also at the Union Square Café in New York in the same period (Danny Meyer, who created the latter, is in Lander’s book).

Lander interviewed, at some length, twenty restaurateurs. Four are women, and two of the subjects are Australian, although only one, Neil Perry, conducts his businesses in Australia. Only a few have any background in professional cookery. The twenty-first restaurateur, the ghost in the book, is Lander himself, inactive now but still proud of his years of membership in a tribe he so admires. We can only take his word for it that he deserves to be included in his pantheon. One interview, with a successful restaurant designer, is irrelevant.

You would have to be a particularly well-heeled and well-travelled Australian resident to have dined at all the restaurants in the book. For the most part, its readers will be voyeurs to a world of which they have little experience, and it is possible, despite Lander’s protestation that the sum of his interviews is not a primer for budding restaurateurs, that there are valuable lessons to be had, not least the need for a fat purse and a sociable nature.

Writing about his transformation from restaurateur to critic, Lander mentions the clever American food writer Jeffrey Steingarten’s advice to never allow a waiter to unfold a napkin on your lap. Steingarten wrote, in The Man Who Ate Everything (1997): ‘I keep a very short list of people who are allowed to touch my lap.’ Amen to that, but I have one quibble, which applies to many of the interviewees but is most obvious in the ‘Sequence of Service’ rules that the restaurateur Russell Norman gives to all his waiters. The seventeenth one includes: ‘Do not ask if everything is OK. This suggests that OK is good enough. Please say: “Is everything good?” Smile some more.’ Forget the diktat of the smile, try to forget the grammatical lapse, but forever condemn any question about the well-being or opinions of a diner. Norman’s list is so obvious, so mundane, so otiose that it condemns the book from within.

Successful restaurateurs, on the evidence of Lander’s interviews, like to please but want complete control, hold their purse strings tight while mastering an atmosphere of generosity, have a keen eye for design, and like to be praised. Presumably, they are far more human than the lifeless drawings, which damage an otherwise handsome publication.

In the 1980s and early 1990s, when I still ate out and was still a restaurateur, my favourite restaurant in New York City was The Odeon on West Broadway. It seemed never to close and at 3 a.m. you might rub shoulders with Philippe Petit or a sumo wrestler at the bar (New York is good at celebrity, taking it in its stride). The Odeon was comfortable, inviting, and the service terrific. Opened by Keith McNally, it was the first of his many restaurants, and he is now opening a branch of Balthazar in London. One wonders why he wasn’t interviewed by Lander for The Art of the Restaurateur until reading in the Financial Times (Lander’s column, ‘The Restaurant Insider’, appears there) that McNally thinks ‘restaurants are overrated’.

In 1994, when I put Berowra Water Inn on the market after eighteen years of responsibility, social interaction, and back-breaking work, I was interviewed at Tropicana Café in Kings Cross by the novelist Matthew Condon, at the time a journalist at the Sydney Morning Herald. Exasperated by the attention to what was for me simply a decision to retire and curl up endlessly with a book, I exclaimed, ‘It’s only a restaurant for god’s sake!’ Ironically, this became a bold headline on the front page of what is surely a parochial paper. McNally, I like to think, would have understood.