By men of a certain age, the beautiful waitresses of Brown’s restaurant in Woodstock Road are still remembered for having been as important a draw as the food when it opened back in 1975. Perhaps more important. As The Oxford Times reported at the time: “Brown’s nubile waitresses are restaurant’s main attraction.”

The quotation came to my attention recently in Leslie Scott’s book About Jenga (Greenleaf, £16.99). Leslie, an old friend of mine, wrote: “I still meet people who are more impressed by the fact that I was a Browns waitress back then than anything I have done since.”

What she has done since includes, most famously, the invention of the game Jenga, more than 50 million sets of which have been sold around the world. Beauty can matter more than brains, then.

Leslie, who still lives in the area, was for me the most obvious absentee from a big reunion bash held on Saturday night at the new bar and restaurant Camera, in St Ebbe’s, by former staff from Browns and the Duke of Cambridge, the smart bar round the corner in Little Clarendon Street which was set up by the same catering entrepreneur, Jeremy Mogford. Both have long since passed into other ownership.

The party organisers Ross Buchanan and Mary Furlong were able to track down some 300 former employees, including one (Peter Donovan) who came specially from America and another (Jude Caton) from Spain. But, as ever with these sort of events, some evaded detection.

As a customer almost from the first day of Browns’ opening, I was delighted to be included in the party. There was something very special about seeing in one place so many once-familiar faces — some much altered by time, others (as Lord Tennyson put it) “all in all the same”. The line-up of ladies from Brown’s first years, as shown in the picture below, was particularly evocative of times past. Three of the group I still see on a fairly regular basis; the others have been out of my life for a quarter of a century or more. For most, the catering trade is long in the past, but Linda Thorne – perhaps the most famously pulchritudinous of the seventies’ set – remains in the business as the general manager of Orso, a popular Italian restaurant in Covent Garden. I promised to visit.

Among the men present, I was pleased to encounter two old pals in the shape of Martin Agius and John Mitchinson.

The former I had known in his days as a Browns barman, before he opened his own first restaurant – Brotherton’s, in Woodstock. He now has the well-regarded Fisher’s in St Clement’s and The Plough, in Clanfield. John was an early barman, too (there was a strict division between the sexes over jobs in those days), but I got to know him well only in later years when he was playing – as he still plays – a key role in the QI organisation. He’s Director of Research for QI and co-author of QI books.