Paris yesterday, cold and bright. Cream stone, pursed mouths, a brown ribbon of river. I’ve been here every year since my late teens, I grew up in a Swiss village a mile from the border, my dad still lives in France – but I’ve only recently begun to realise something about the locals. You know what a Frenchman thinks of you not by his acts or words but by the look he gives you. And I like that: the clean, steady vivisection of personality.

Waiters, for instance. Supercilious garçons are a sweat-sour tranche of froggy folklore, as much a European travel cliché as the Orient Express, grand tours and Dutch girls’ bacilli. The penguin-suited human smirk, peering disgustedly above a Bergerac nose and a ludicrous pout, doing very little, but doing nothing more successfully than relentlessly, vigilantly ignoring.

French waiters are grandmasters of the passive aggressive. No eyes are more blind, no ears more deaf than theirs. Say it’s time for the bill. You give them your practised eyebrow-raise. Doesn’t work. You motion a brief wave of consummate discretion. Nothing happens. A polite “excusez-moi” thuds to nothingness. These boys shower the tables with all the otiose devotion their wives give their armpits.

Not so long ago, I was in a cumbersomely-starred Paris restaurant. We sat in a room of ornate joylessness and ate mushy overpriced fish. And though we never wanted for anything, and 18-year-olds in ill-fitting suits appeared every three minutes to sweep away non-existent crumbs, and when my friend spilled a drop of red wine on the tablecloth someone scurried over to lay more linen on top of it, lest our view be sullied by the besmirching dot – despite all these, it was a sad, dreary meal. Good service is about more than serving. The waiters presented food without fanfare, topped up our glasses, left us alone. But they offered no engagement: just studied detachment and a base, baseless suspicion.

Even coming from England, where waiters tend not to be good at much beyond farting, dropping stuff and piercings, you wonder at the breathtaking performance of some serveurs in France. American restaurant staff, by contrast, are bubbles of ecstatic, grating perkiness, laughing like puppets on magic mushrooms. It can get annoying, but at least there’s a hint of punter-provider respect behind the assault and flattery.

French waiters, you’ll have noticed, almost never smile. And, dissociated from the experience, we can almost appreciate that – at least they’re emotionally honest. But restaurants aren’t places for emotional honesty: they’re about hospitality. If we wanted to be patronised and mocked, however honestly intended, we’d go to Tate Modern. Despite its bouts of social unrest, France remains a curiously retiring, coldly aloof place. Manners are a costume there, permitting distance and satire. They’re sword and shield at once.

When the French visit London restaurants, do they throw their hands to their faces and cry ‘Quel horreur!’ when waiters here (as indeed they can be) are polite, affable, courteous, and pretend to be pleased to see them? I doubt it.

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So 2009 wheezes out the decade. As I write this, snow is falling outside, unsettlingly. This is a fearful time for restaurants: they’re hyping their Christmas menus with all the urgent gloom of a closing down sale. Those glorious, spending tables will stand desolate in January, the glasses unfilled, the rooms idle and voiceless.

I’ve eaten out quite a bit this year. And I’ve noticed one trend, one trope, one pattern above all others. “Sharing” plates. Kiddie portions of miniaturised food, sometimes ethnic, sometimes not, the shtick being that everyone orders a few dishes and you pass them round the table. “Tapas-style”, the reviews always say, honey-I’ve-shrunk-the-squid.

What happened, I wonder, to heartiness, generosity and old fashioned unabashed Robbie Coltrane portions? This year, everywhere from Soho Italians to Fulham gastropubs to modern European basements in the West End have promulgated the absurd idea that mean, piddling little plates somehow promote conviviality, pleasure and fun.

Well, they don’t. For one thing, they’re dimly based on tapas, and we – like the Yanks – get tapas spectacularly wrong. In Madrid, the locals might stand at the bar nibbling a bit of bread and tomato. When dinner’s at three in the morning, as it is for the average Spaniard, then you need something to plug the gap and plug the belly after your lunch and snooze. They don’t – and this is the point – treat it as a meal.

They realise that dinner isn’t about dissecting a lamb chop into eight teency morsels, it’s not about shunting plates round the table in some artless supply chain, or about soup as swine flu vector, or about dropping things, or about interrupting conversations with have-you-tried-the-duck, or splitting crostini like peasants in a famine. Iberian pubs flog tapas because they’re salty and make the punters stay more and pay more.

But here, it’s become a lifestyle choice. People insist that it’s sociable and cheap. They rave with evangelical passion that it unites tables and everyone mucks in, and they hand round bits of dead animal with the naughty glee of an old man in a dirty mac holding out a packet of sweets.

Small plates aren’t sociable in any meaningful sense: friendships don’t spring from shared germs and spilled salad. Just because you and I once split a sausage doesn’t mean we’ve bonded on a deeper level: in fact, I probably fancied that luganega for myself.

Most of all, it isn’t cheaper. Some of us, in a few limited respects, might occasionally enjoy the company of the people we have dinner with. But we’re also aware of the Amazonian feeding frenzy that will ensue when food of this sort arrives: the jabbing elbows, the frantic gobbling, the forks stabbing thighs. So people typically over-order these shrunken plates as a kind of bitter insurance, spending more than they would if they’d done the sensible thing and had three simple courses to themselves.

It all suits restaurants, not customers. Tables turn faster; kitchens can get away with the odd missed ingredient or overcooked bit of fish because the vibe seems more informal; there’s no pressure about when to serve stuff or in what order; and the owner can overcharge on more things.

Of all the restaurant trends we’ve seen this year, the most antithetical to our own pleasure has been the insidious and pervasive dwindling of our portions. In 2010, I want them to expand again, in tandem with the economy and my waistline.

Something’s got my goat recently. Kid, curd and little beard. It began as a niggling irritant but has steadily descended into vein-bulging rage. It’s a word, a single word, sneering back at me on every menu I scan, on every restaurant website I shrink from, in every conversation I have about food.

Authentic. Three syllables of grimmest shame. You know the kind of thing: ‘Welcome to Land of Smiles Authentic Vietnamese Restaurant. We make the most authentic Thai green curry this side of a Khao San Road piss-up.’

It’s that woeful attempt to evoke race and nation, and heritage and history, the ribbon of time. ‘Authentic’ is a catch-nothing word, lazily bunged on press puff because it sort of sounds good and, worse, because it exploits the ignorance of customers. In this context, it has no agreed definition; there’s no supervising body hauling restaurateurs before judges and citing the Trade Descriptions Act. You can misuse it with impunity.

The ‘Authentic Food Company‘, a sprawling Manchester outfit supplying ‘Pubs, Restaurants, Hotels, Travel and Leisure, Business and Industry, Healthcare and Education’ with inedible-looking ready meals is, naturally, nothing of the sort. Under its laser-specific ‘Authentic Oriental’ range, it sells ‘chicken battered balls’ with ‘a separate pouch of sweet and sour sauce’. The ‘Authentic British’ series contains ‘hunter’s chicken in BBQ sauce’, while ‘Authentic European’ has a not dissimilar ‘chicken chasseur’. It’s all as authentic as Ray-Bans flogged by a bloke on the beach.

Authenticity is a vacuously daft, divisively partisan, destructively conflicted idea. Palates are ineluctably tied to genes and tradition. Anyone who’s ever been to Thailand and eaten the whopping quantities of chilli they use there will know there’s amost nothing like it in British restaurants, whatever their bogus boasts of authenticity. True ‘authentic’ food is austerely frugal, constrained by logistics of transport, weather and soil, and bridled by memory. It’s only in the spoiled, fattened crucibles of global cities, like London and New York, that these eugenic ideas can surface.

All the great developments in food in recent decades occurred in spite – and not because – of some retrophilic love of authenticity. Nouvelle cuisine was just that: a movement that broke from tradition, from ‘authentic’ high-end French dining, that liberated and electrified eating out, and changed it forever. Fusion, too, unfairly maligned these days, pulses with invention and the inauthentic: and Nobu, which enhanced the cuisines of Japan and Peru by twinning and tweaking them, was the most exciting restaurant phenomenon of the last 20 years.

Knowledge of the history of food is certainly a fine thing, and it’s helpful to appreciate background and context if you change and develop a menu. But it’s insidious nonsense to argue that long-dead people somehow found nirvanic perfection in specific dishes – it’s the province of bores and snobs. To any recipe that runs beyond ‘peel and eat’, improvements can be made – which is, after all, part of the joy and power of food.

Last night, I was taken to Layalina, a new Lebanese place in Knightsbridge. The quality of the produce was so high, the service so friendly and efficient, the skill of the kitchen so unflappably obvious, that to have hummed and hawed over the ‘authenticity’ of the meal would have been pointless and ridiculous. Good food is good food, and we know it when we see it – regardless of heritage tomatoes’ heritage.

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Christmas looms, and that means we’re veering into office party season, that sloshed embittered wasteland of social interaction. Nigel, gazing into his Rioja, dolefully telling his bored neighbour how he wished he’d taken that job in Dubai in ’98. Anne from Accounts gigglingly fumbling with Terry the IT guy’s fly. Secretaries in Santa hats shrieking Noddy Holder. And dropped trousers and camera flashes and panicked hangovers and global emails and cold unsmiling disciplinary hearings. It’s as British as beer, but more bitter.

Restaurants, of course, cash in. The canniest send out flyers as early as September, hoping to snare some very social secretaries and get the bookings going. When I worked in the City, I’d notice ads for Christmas menus more or less when people returned from summer holidays, in the trudging, familiar, eyes-on-the-prize way of office life.

True, you can’t blame the restaurants. Those cheerless company round-robins celebrating ‘a good year in challenging times’ often result in some miserly hand-out to the drones – and, as any MP will tell you, there’s nothing easier than spending your boss’s money. To survive in the business, you have to find any excuse for a mark-up: hence those vast libidinous forests of tables-for-two on 14 February. But I find something rather cynical in the wild inflation of menu prices during the season of goodwill, in the compulsory fixed-priced triple courses, in the coal-scrimping Scrooginess.

At D&D’s Butler’s Wharf Chop House, your typical set lunch is £26. At Christmas, it’s £85. Naturally, you’d expect a bit of inflation: for one thing, the luckless staff deserve some extra cash. But it seems bonkers to levy an increase of 227% over nothing but a date. If you want an all-out blow-out this year, a Crimbo dinner at the Dorchester is a smidgen under £400 per person – plus service.

It’s all so sad and disingenuous. We call it the ‘hospitality’ industry, but these places remain businesses, with margins and accountants and ‘brand experts’ advising them on ‘Twitter strategies’. They may provide a good time, they may nourish us, but they’re as far from the genial, jovial warmth of Yuletide, from relatives and friends supping and wassailing, as it’s possible to be.

What could be more antithetical to the spirit of Christmas than sitting in some hastily-redecorated room to eat food cooked by a sweatily hungover chef, served by hungover waiters with their eyes flicking constantly at their watches? More than this, everyone knows Christmas is really a time for children, and they hate restaurants. Moppets are far happier in McDonald’s or Pizza Express than in hallowed gastrotemples, and it’s a waste of time to expect any different. Christmas is about home, about turning away from starch and sommeliers and eat-all-you-can-eat buffets, and sitting somewhere you pour your own wine and nobody shoves a bill in front of you.

So the only people who use restaurants at Christmas – although, of course, the restaurants are really the ones using them – are: oppressed suit-wearing lightweights; the homeless; divorced dads and their weeping children; people having affairs; and lonely, forgotten Mr Bean types. For the rest of us, I recommend champagne at 10 o’clock, a fat goose, Ratatouille on the telly, and old-fashioned family fisticuffs.

The horror that is Sketch's website. Photo: Sketch

I spend an inordinate amount of time on restaurant websites. It’s the occupational hazard of food blogging. People come to you and say, ‘I’m off to a nose flute recital in Neasden tonight. What’s the best coeliac Mongolian round there?’ And because I’m petrified of looking thick I say ‘Let me have a quick think,’ and scurry to Google or my groaning shelf of restaurant guides and click and flick and say ‘Yes, I’ve got it – it’s Wheat Got the Wok’.

And, you know, the worst part of food blogging, the thing I’d change in a furry heartbeat, are these damn sites. On you log, hunting for a phone number or to see if they’re open on Sunday, and instead of calm HTML and simple info, they fling hideous graphics at you and pummel you with loathsome music. And when you eventually get past that, you find there’s nothing useful there, no hint of a menu or any indication they want your business.

I’ve just spent an hour trawling the web looking for bad restaurant websites. And now I feel a nameless dread, an ashen, wasted catharsis, like I’ve entered the seventh circle of hell: washed-out, strung-up, eye-frazzled and tinnital. I’ll focus on three.

First, though it saddens me to say it: Tayyabs. I’m fond of the restaurant, but its site is a mess. It begins with awful music – a frantic irregular pulsing, and a background sound like someone scraping a crocodile with a stick. There’s a piece of curiously-worded, unrequested advice: ‘The best way to get to Tayyabs is on the tube nearest station is whitechapel tube see map for directions’. (Repeated [sic]s…) The ‘map’ in question is buried elsewhere, while the menu languishes in a strange anti-browser of its own, refusing to list prices until you download the pdf. Useless.

Next, another place I like, Club Gascon. The site kicks off by inexplicably tracing an outline of Britain, then zooming into London (it says ‘London’, to help you along). Little spots pimple over the river, representing Gascon outposts, but you can’t click them, because everything immediately morphs into an ugly ‘CG’, like a mangled fingernail. When you finally choose a restaurant, there’s more infuriating Flash before, out of nowhere, an appalling noise starts up: the wail of a tortured animal, an over-fast jazzified atonal monstrosity that makes you want to rip your ears off, or pour cement into your head, or shove skewers through your eardrums. Needless to say, menus here are pdf only.

Finally, the grand-daddy. The monster. The Big Bertha of awful restaurant websites – Sketch. Visiting the Sketch site is like experiencing madness – the full-on, wild-eyed, gob-foaming, schizo, gibbering, screeching, clawing psycho stuff, not that doped-up Cuckoo’s Nest apathy. It begins by showing you a giant china testicle, with ‘Enter’ written underneath it. Always a worrying sign. If you click it – an odd decision, under the circumstances – there’s a pop-up window (hurrah!), and the thing starts clunkily rotating. You have to click it again, naturally, and it opens up and vomits out this hideous mechanical menagerie – elephants and flamingos bouncing around in cages, strange cogs and whirls, and spinning illegible text. The music – of course there’s music – is a monotonous thump of discordant bleeps, like a madman one-man-band. It’s all so shrivellingly ugly, so divorced from hospitality or welcome or even food, one can only wonder what on earth they were thinking.

Some other execrable websites:

Roberto Passon, New York. Screamingly awful blue and yellow colour scheme and a website largely comprising unreadable bubbles. Music straight from Guantanamo.

Casa Marcial, Spain. (Thanks to Marina O’Loughlin for this one.) It’s bonkers: it has to be seen to be believed. It’s impossible to navigate, and features plates rolling down hills, a giant disembodied hand and a chef apparently pleasuring himself.

Market Bar, San Francisco. Unappetising photos of sausages burning on a grill, and far too much Flash. But the real attraction here is the noise – a background hubbub meant to evoke contended diners but which sounds instead like the relentless babble of Babel.

And some successes:

St John: clean, clear, robust and English, like the great restaurant itself.

Franco Manca: the best pizzas in London, with all relevant details on a single page.

Gordon Ramsay: the svengali’s mothership is easy to navigate and looks elegant in his signature purple, showing that even an empire can be condensed into its essentials. No Flash, Gordon.

Please note that the opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of iStarvin.

Whenever I was in the States, and began to compare (as we all do) home and away, I used to think that what London needed wasn’t malls, multiplexes or Taco Bells, or the grating guff of I’m-Wanda-and-I’ll-be-your-waitress, or Creosote portions or super-hormoned beef. What London needed like tonic needs gin were joints flogging fat juicy burritos, roaring with chilli, sludging with guac, spattered with rice, crunching with veg, and with sweet melting shreddy strands of slow, slow-cooked pork. I’d meet a friend for lunch in midtown, and we’d head to Chipotle and queue and I’d say: ‘This would really work back home. Let’s set one up. We’d be millionaires’. And he’d nod distractedly and stare into the middle distance and ask something à propos of nothing.

Well, I was right. What London – and Britain – evidently did need were burritos, and now we’ve got more than we know what to do with. Barely a week goes by without news of another opening (often in Fitzrovia, for whatever reason). Mexican food is hot right now, thanks in part to that slender, pulchritudinous winner of Masterchef, Thomasina Miers, who started Wahaca. These new Mexicans have names like Daddy Donkey, Chilango, Luradoras and the oddly affecting Benito’s Hat.

There are two main reasons for this sudden burrito upswing. The first is obvious: we’re getting used to the food. The modern burrito is an entirely American (specifically San Franciscan) invention, albeit with Spartan nineteenth-century origins in the wild borderlands between south-western USA and north-western Mexico. Until surprisingly recently, going to the US was largely once-in-a-lifetime for most British families: invariably the historic odyssey to meet Mickey Mouse in Florida. Relatively cheap air fares have now percolated almost everywhere, and the British, on the whole, have always been good at testing local nosh.

But more importantly, the burrito’s spread is down to the burrito itself. It’s an inherently soft and pappy thing; you can eat them with your dentures out; and on the whole – let’s be honest – they’re gentle and bland, sparked and enlivened with a slosh of chilli. They’re thus strikingly well-suited to modern Britain, with our time-is-short, on-the-hoof, cutlery-spurning, three-minute-wolfing ways. Burritos work because they’re quick, sweet and stodgy – and depend for their flavour largely on a thwack of Scovilles. They lend themselves to the quick scarf, the dribbled gnash – as I discovered when I entered a charity speed-eating competition – and that, my friends, is how we eat today.

The proliferation of the burrito across London and the UK says something illustrative and poignant about our changing eating habits. Chilango, a ‘chain’ with just three outlets, is recruiting investors for an anticipated rapid expansion. One of its sites is outside Goldman Sachs on Fleet Street, and the Masters of the Universe evidently love the product enough to pour their money into the brand. Mexican food languished under a pissed-up, underused umbrella for far too long: kerosene tequila, unidentified brown slurry and a stale curled taco. The best Mexican food, from the shimmering vibrance of the carnita to the redolent purr of the mole, is still depressingly rare. It remains to be seen whether the burrito – fat, thunking, fresh and bloated – will change this: but until then, the one thing we can say with confidence is that it’s a bloody good hangover cure.