Don't mess with my food, I'm an accountant

The general picture, as it turns out, is that accountants (or the subset of them with a particular interest in restaurants, anyway) seem to have likes and dislikes very much in accordance with the rest of the world.

The top 20 restaurants that accountants are most likely to talk about shows a remarkable similarity to a general top 20.

Even the top five are very similar, including the Ivy, Wandworth’s Chez Bruce and celeb-heaven Nobu.

So is the accountant ‘everyman’? Well, not quite. If there is a distinctive theme, it seems to be that accountants are a bit more conventional in their tastes.

The two restaurants with a notably larger following among accountants are the Bleeding Heart (one of London’s best classic French standbys) and the Cafe du Marche (one of London’s best classic …) – well, you get the picture.

A statistician, though, would doubtless try to ‘normalise’ for the fact that neither of these places are very far from PwC outpost Plumtree Court, so perhaps it has nothing to do with style at all.

Interestingly, J Sheekey, the discreet Ivy-sibling fish specialist in the heart of London’s theatreland, has stealthily established itself as one of London’s most talked about restaurants, but accountants seem oblivious to its rise.

Even Locanda Locatelli – a truly good and fashionable new restaurant – is only now making its way onto the accountancy radar. Get with the plot guys and girls.

Digging deeper, it may not be a huge surprise that nature’s auditors are hard to please. Overall ratings for food, ambience and – most of all – service are judged more harshly than by other folk.

Perhaps members of the profession really should have little badges made when they go out to eat that say: ‘Don’t mess with me; I’m an accountant.’

• Richard and Peter Harden, who both trained as lawyers, publish London restaurant guide Hardens