“Restaurants gain appetite for the credit crunch lunch”, screams a headline in today’s Evening Standard. Good news, it seems, brought to you courtesy of Which?, the publishers of the Good Food Guide. They proclaim that – thanks to current market conditions – there are “more and more good lunch offers available” in the capital.

But hold on a minute. Have set menus not been about for years? Of course, but apparently, “in the past no one has put any thought into them”. But now, it is suggested, they are.

The sad thing is that the whole story is nonsense on stilts – tosh from beginning to end, and quite offensive tosh too, to the many restaurateurs who have long offered excellent-value lunch menus.

There might have been the beginning of a story if examples had been given of long-established restaurants which had only recently brought in a cheap lunch. But not a single such example is given.

In fact, if you look at the examples of set lunches the Standard uses to illustrate the article – which were supplied by Which?– what’s most striking is that the restaurants concerned were already offering lunch menus at or below the current prices almost 12 months ago. (Source of this extraordinary revelation? Yes, you guessed it: the Good Food Guide 2008, which was researched in the middle of 2007.)

Regular readers will know that Which? and the GFG have form when it comes to the careless use of statistics to promote their own cause. Just think how critical they would be of other organisations which talked arrant nonsense in a bid to promote their products!