Friday night at Boccacio, formerly known as Villa Villebita. Remember the old days? You would show up, desperate for the best pizza in town, a bottle of wine, perhaps, or a Greek salad for the health-conscious.

You would present yourself at the front door, only to have the handsome Croatian maitre d’hotel fix you with a steely stare.

“You did not make a reservation?” he would ask accusingly. Shamefaced, you would hang your head, and with a last look at the tables of lucky diners, go off to some second-rate location.

Welcome to the new Kabul. Now you can just show up and have your pick of any seat in the house. The few other diners in the establishment will shoot you self-congratulatory grins, as befits those hardy few who venture out in the post-Serena world.

L’Atmosphere was closed for a week, assuredly the better part of valour, but disappointing nonetheless. For those of us trying to mount a display of impotent defiance, the loss of the town’s main watering hole was a serious blow. La Cantina seems to have slid off the face of the earth.

Last week’s attack on the Serena Hotel knocked the whole world off kilter. Or at least what passes for the whole world in the claustrophobic terrarium that is Kabul’s international circuit.

Some of us lost friends and loved ones when the Taleban stormed the five-star establishment with Kalashnikovs and explosive vests. Others just lost their refuge, the gym and spa where we used to unwind. The management says it will be closed for a month.

But all of us lost whatever illusion of security we had in Kabul. The Taleban’s much-vaunted announcement that they would henceforth target restaurants and other gathering places of the “khareji” (foreigners) has everyone on edge. Most organisations are in lockdown, and an eerie silence reigns in formerly boisterous locales.

Our friends and families are haranguing us from outside, begging us to Be Careful, a code for staying home, barricaded in compounds with our pillows over our ears.

One of our party at Boccacio received a tender but slightly hysterical phone call from her husband while we were at table.

“So you decided to go out?” he asked, from Oakland, California, which, at least at night, surely ranks higher on the danger scale than poor old Kabul. “I just want you to know that I have had a wonderful life with you.”

The old guard, the veterans who have been involved in Afghanistan since the Eighties, pooh-pooh our concerns and assure us that the Serena attack was “nothing to worry about”.

They accuse us of self-centred navel-gazing for taking the incident so much to heart, and ridicule our angst at the dimming of the Kabul social scene.

Listening to them, I brace myself for yet another war story from the “Journalists of the Jihad”, who trekked into the Panjshir in the Eighties on foot and donkey-back, lugging tons of camera equipment and dodging Soviet helicopters, to meet with the Great Ahmad Shah Massoud.

Ah, those were the days.

I’m sure they also walked uphill both ways to school.

We arrivistes apparently understand little of Afghanistan, and lack a certain measure of robustness.

Never mind that we travel to places like Helmand, where we live outside the fortified walls of the Provincial Reconstruction Team and mix with the local population.

Some of us move more or less freely around the region, fair heads hidden under burqas, pens and recorders at the ready, with one wary eye on the landscape and another on our fixer, a former Taleb who just might pick this trip to sell us to his old cronies.

We fly on tiny airplanes that are often pelted with rocks by baby mujaheddin, whose fathers are most likely on the hunt for Stingers.

So I certainly do not feel that I am one of the coddled newbies who are afraid to set foot outside their massively reinforced doors.

Still, even in the heart of Taleban country I have rarely been as nervous as I was last weekend at Boccacio and Taverna, where we kept glancing anxiously around as if a mob of black turbans were about to start spraying bullets and ball bearings all over the baba ganoush.

Alright, I admit that dining out with friends might not qualify anyone for the medal of honour. But for those of us at the three or four tables that were in fact occupied, it was a small rebellion, a reclaiming of our lives.

Did the international media devote too much time and column inches to the Serena attack? Perhaps. In this they were in stark contract to President Hamed Karzai, who ignored the episode entirely.

Are we more at risk in New York City or London? Arguably.

Do foreign correspondents underplay suicide attacks or bombing raids in remote places that kill only Afghans? Undoubtedly.

As head of a media organisation that has tried repeatedly to interest the wider world in the tragedy of Afghans caught in a senseless war, I understand the impatience of those who dismiss last Monday’s violence as just a minor blip in the ongoing tragedy of Afghanistan.

But all journalism, like all politics, is local. We covered it because we were there, because it affects us. Because it hits us where we live.

And because we now know that the war has come home to us.

Attacks will no longer be random, or targeted at the military, who at least have a fighting chance of survival with their Kevlar and their armoured personnel carriers. The civilians who work and live in Kabul, who eat in restaurants and ride in taxis, are now fair game.

How long before we begin to fear kidnappings and shootings every time we are out? How long before an expedition to Chicken Street becomes an impossibly perilous act? How long before we are all confined to a Green Zone, and are forced to experience Afghanistan from afar?

I don’t know. But in the meantime, I’ll be out there, eating, drinking, and making merry. For tomorrow… well, better not to think about that.

See you at L’Atmo.