It was started by two architects, Alexander Neel and Michael Tickner, who had met while doing a year out of their course in San Francisco – they were impressed with a restaurant there called The Old Spaghetti Factory and Coffee House[1] and decided that it was exactly what London needed in 1970.

Parsons was one of the leaders in this trend for casual dining, becoming instantly fashionable, with queues forming in the street outside and strangers sharing tables inside.

The waiting staff were as young and trendy – some of them also from America, dodging the Vietnam draft – as the clientele, and the atmosphere in the evenings was glamorous and electric, a constant party to the background of loud funky music and the "in" crowd hosted by Tickner at one of the large tables in the shopfront.

[6] As the business matured the food improved, and it was an early adopter of the idea of traceability, buying all its meat from the mid 1980s from the Lower Hurst Farm herd of Herefords and Texels in Derbyshire, well before BSE became a problem.

The origin of this name is a classic urban myth; first used as a humorous reference to the fashionable flaneurs of the area by Pat Connolly, who supplied meat to the restaurant prior to Lower Hurst Farm, it was relayed as established fact during an interview with Jonathan Meades, who then included the "fact" in a review,[8] and the term became common currency.