Forget that elusive table at the Ivy, move over Gordon - farms are the new epicentres of fine dining

I used to be happiest in restaurants; happiest when I'd taken a ringside seat at the most fashionable, art-stuffed, paparazzo-stalked joint in town, glowing with the reflected warmth of all the city's finest lined up shoulder-to-shoulder and toe-to-toe in pretty little rows, clientele as carefully hand-picked and fabulous as the truffles and the oysters on the menus.

Glamour is still by far the best sauce for spaghetti, but nowadays I feel more of a sense of having died and gone to heaven at the other end of the food chain: on farms. Farms delight me more than anything else and I'll tell you why.

Restaurants were a phenomenon of the end of the 20th century. They spent the late Nineties and early Noughties becoming more and more extraordinary, more fantastic places. Eating out was the hottest ticket in town. The finest restaurants evolved into places of fantasy, the setting for high society to rub shoulders and gawp at itself. Proprietors became more and more ambitious as they competed with each other, employing madder and madder architects to encrust toilets with diamonds, importing chefs from all corners to gild desserts with gold leaf and dress fillets of beer-fed, hand-massaged rare breeds with white truffles.

But now, nearly a decade into this millennium, might farms be the new restaurants? They are certainly exciting places at the moment. The next big gastro-revolution will take place in the fields.

There have been sea changes in the way we cook food and the way we enjoy it, but there is nowhere with more room for change and development than in farming. It's not a disaster, no one's going hungry, but no one has yet come close to the agricultural equivalent of a diamond-studded bathroom. There are encouraging rumbles, though. The serene world of agriculture couldn't be further from the clamour and clatter of mega-star, mogul- and magnate-filled dining rooms, but it seems there is nowhere better for the magnificent to muck around happily ever after - or divorce each other to their hearts' content - than on farms. There is hardly a rock star worth mentioning who doesn't live on a farm. Daltrey, McCartney, Sting, Madonna: all doing it. Farms are the playgrounds of rock stars, billionaires and royalty - like really, really good restaurants used to be.

The key to the current popularity of allotments is probably that, while it does take a cast of thousands and a budget of millions to create the fine dining-out experience, and while it takes a certain amount of trial and error to produce a half-decent roast chicken, with very little skill or training it's possible to grow much nicer vegetables than anything you can buy in the shops.

Shops will soon work this out and things will gradually get better. The main cost in food production is distribution and marketing after all. It doesn't actually cost much more to sell a perfect purple biodynamic luxury carrot than it does to sell a tinned one.

Growing vegetables has, until now, been reserved for people with learning difficulties and recovering drug addicts, but I reckon Andy Warhol's often-misquoted suggestion that in the future everyone will be farmers for 15 minutes really is looking more and more likely.