Michael Winner’s serene contempt for public opinion is one of his most appealing features. For his weekly column in The Sunday Times, which has been required reading for 16 years, he personally chooses the (largely abusive of him) Michael’s Missives found alongside his latest (often abusive of others) musings on the restaurant scene.

As he explains in his highly enjoyable new book Unbelievable! (JR Books, £16.99): “I pick the funny ones which are insulting me. I set myself up as an Aunt Sally.”

He adds: “The column has become a bit of a game. It’s there to entertain. . . One thing I know for sure: if I say it’s good the place is full for weeks to come. If I say it’s bad, unfortunately it doesn’t always close a restaurant.”

In fact, I think restaurants sometimes are finished by bad reviews. I remember, for instance, La Gousse d’Ail a truly excellent restaurant in Woodstock Road, which was undone very largely by a stinker from Michael’s Sunday Times colleague, A.A Gill. He criticised the decor as a “Penelope Keith memorial show home” and called one dish, with its wide variety of ingredients, “an appalling blind-man’s-deli shoplifting spree”.

Michael himself had a bit of a poke at the restaurant in his column after he and and group of students walked out from dinner in order not to be late for his engagement at the Oxford Union. As they departed they were confronted by an “apparently hysterical” chef, Jonathan Wright.

I suspect from the ‘apparently’ that the libel lawyers had a go at the copy, for Michael tells readers of Unbelievable! that Wright “ran out of the kitchen screaming and threatening to kill me with a kitchen knife”.

The mention came because the globetrotting Winner encountered the chef at the Setai in Miami (“amazing food, Jonathan was a delight”) and later learned he was moving (he’s now there) to his favourite mega-swanky Sandy Lane resort in Barbados.

Jonathan’s move there rather supports me (“try this temple of haute cuisine,” I told Oxford Times readers) over Gill in the matter of his Raymond Blanc-honed culinary skills.

My 30-plus years reviewing restaurants have never been attended by the sort of excitements that accompany Winner’s Dinners. An owner’s attempt to slip me a £20 bribe (it was the 1970s! — and I refused) was the nearest I have come to experiencing unseemly behaviour from the management and my guests, I need hardly say, always behave impeccably.

But they are not, of course, the film stars that Michael entertains. Here, for instance, is Burt Lancaster in a restaurant in Kensington going “totally berserk” with the staff. “He screamed and shouted and yelled at them,” writes Michael, leaving one to ponder what he considers to be the difference between a shout and a yell.

And what had the poor fellows done? “Burt was served the wrong main course. Something he hadn’t ordered.” A venial sin? Not to Michael who, having described his pal’s behaviour, adds: “He was quite right. If three people at a table can’t order and get what they ordered, then the restaurant is bloody useless.”

As might be expected, Unbelievable! contains lots about Winner’s other friends. Regular readers will know they include John Cleese, Michael Parkinson and Roger Moore.

I prefer his bitchery to less favoured folk — Gordon Ramsay, for instance, recanting over his condemnation of carving trolleys (“Nice to see as blabbermouth approaches old age and penury, he’s come round to my way of thinking”). Des O’Connor is said to be “the meanest sod in the world”, his reluctance to pick up bills, supplying the evidence for the prosecution.

Winner always picks up his own bills, as he once reminded an Oxford Times writer who hinted otherwise. Clearly he reads what is written about him. Hope he likes this.