The great thing about the British TV show Doctor Who has always been its gleeful disrespect for the space-time continuum. Actor David Tennant in particular would tug the concept's pigtails and grin at the camera with his pointy little teeth.

Space is just a big girl's blouse and time is nothing but a bit of string, he'd say. It exists only in our minds.

All I can tell you is that I time-travelled last night and it wasn't the tiniest bit fun, nothing like when the doctor and his companion romp around Shakespeare's apartment or the Middle Ages.

I was sitting in an awful Toronto restaurant, the kind that tries to head back in time via its decor in order to intimidate the customers and just comes off as inept. Open a year now, it's highly praised and ludicrously overpriced. It has a French name. You just knew it would.

Time to forget the past

Retro is part of a trend that encompasses far more than restaurants and we shouldn't revel in it. A new economic world is knocking hard on our door and we're being distracted from answering it.

Mad Men's Birdie Draper (actor January Jones) in the historically accurate TV drama. (AMC/CTV)

There's nothing good about travelling back in time when, more than ever, it's not possible. It would be like voting for McCain.

My girlfriend kept apologizing for choosing the place. "It looks better at night," she said.

Yes, and so did the Middle Ages. Everything was chocolate brown, that colour favoured by hoteliers and the ubiquitous interior designer Brian Gluckstein for its concealing properties. Handprints and spilled drinks and worse.

There was a lot of that damask swirly cutout nonsense going on — curlicues and sashes and feathers — and cheap chandeliers over every table. The staff were horn-rimmed, studying the customers for signs of cachet.

Mad about nostalgia

In that restaurant, it was 1960 all over again and I was scared. I have no nostalgia in me. Fifty years ago was a harsh era that wasn't good for much: Morality, lungs, design, cuisine, women and children, especially in Southeast Asia.

You see, insomnia made me spend two nights watching the entire first season of Mad Men, the American TV drama about Madison Avenue in the 1960s that the cable channel AMC is producing to waves of approval.

I was immersed in Mad Men. It will be one of those TV-without-pity hit shows that serve as a secret password. You watch it, you're in.

Mad Men initially offers itself to the viewer as a style manual. Advertising visionary Don Draper's suits are stiff as paper — this is not a body that needs pleated pants — and his good looks are all about thin lips and a "short back and sides" haircut.

There is nothing affable or George Clooney about him. His beautiful naive wife Betsey is a dream of beauty strictly under corset control.

A lot of brown

We are at the tail end of the 1950s, just moving into the Kennedy era when youth worship began.

Working women are treated like dirt and openly referred to as morons; married women are treated like married dirt and governed like children. There's an abundance of Danish modern furniture about.

The colours are greys and pale blues, a lot of brown. Food is deadly; people drink mai tais and eat shrimp cocktails. No wine, only hard liquor, drunk through the working day. Smoking is constant.

Gynecologists smoke Lucky Strikes as they prod vaginas and say things like, "Don't think you have to go out and become the town pump just to get your money's worth."

Tech time

Canadian author Douglas Coupland writes that we now measure ourselves by technology. When he saw friends at a tech conference recently, "The encounter went along the lines of, 'John, I haven't seen you since … eBay! I haven't seen you since … Google! I haven't seen you since … BlackBerrys!'"

The use of decades and calendar years to mark eras is over, Coupland says. "Time is measured in tech waves."

Mad Men shows the first photocopier arriving in the office. It's a revolution.

Coupland has also said that in times of rampant technological change, people develop an intense nostalgia for the more lumpen eras that preceded it. Retro cluelessness is suddenly sweet.

But the early 1960s? Birth control was a beige diaphragm with sperm-killing jelly. Blacks were n---ers. Divorcées were used goods. Gays were hiding in closets. The closest thing to revolution was a beatnik.

But now many unseen forces — the money-hungry churn of fashion, our yearning for distraction, our political stupidity, our fear of recession and peak oil, and our (boomer) terror of aging — are making the early 1960s look attractive to us.

So simple! So clean! This was the seed of Mad Men and certainly the inspiration for a thousand restaurants across North America. We're going to take you back to 1960 and make it MODERN and NEW!

Food crimes

In this awful restaurant, where my girlfriend and I dined, the pork belly tasted like the eight ounces of flavourless slippery white fat it was.

The Arctic char sat in a plate-filling circle of mint gel — a failed Martha Stewart colour wash — a puzzlingly wet aspic that anchored other things, an egg yolk surrounded by albumen, a potato that turned out to be another white foam creation, its bubbles vanishing into the fish, five tiny orange egglets forming a glutinous curve the size of a cocktail ring.

Nothing on the plate was just there; it all gave the impression of having been secreted.

And so pastel, all of it. It is possible to produce slimy food in clear strong colours: You should taste my peaches microwaved with brown sugar. I call it my Pêche à l'Erreur; small children clamour for it.

But you really have to work to produce mucilaginous food the colour of Eastern Airlines upholstery circa 1962. And the restaurant did. But why?

I have never sent back a meal in my life; it's still food even if it's bad. But the single green glass noodle clinging to the char was the end. So we didn't eat and waited to be asked why.

Why, the waitress asked.

She got adjectives. "There's an emulsion theme here throughout the entree," my girlfriend said. She is very sophisticated. Earlier, she had been more brusque. "Heather, we've ordered the pro-life platter," she said.

"It's … viscous," I offered.

"Jellied," my friend said.

"Lubricious."

"Shiny."

And then I broke down. "Mucus. It was like mucus. I'm sorry."

In the meantime, two men in suits had sat down at a table beside us. One of them was a younger version of white-haired Roger Sterling from Mad Men. The waiter was all over them with an amuse bouche from the chef that looked pretty slithery to me.

Oblivious to us, they talked patronizingly about a co-worker. "She's a new girl. She's well put together." Snicker. "She can handle a meeting," one of them said grudgingly.

That's how they talk about women in Mad Men. That's how they talked in 1960 and how they still talk in 2008.

The service was brisk and hostile from then on. The entrees were taken off the bill and the meal still cost $150.

Retro is so popular now that soon we'll be running out of it. "That's so last year" will become a compliment. We got in a cab and went back to 2008, where much happiness resides.