Telephone: 020-8605 3627
Address: Behind Petersham House, 143 Petersham Road, Richmond, Surrey
Open: Thurs-Sun, lunch only, 12.30pm-3pm
Price: About £120 for two, including water, wine and coffee
Wheelchair access and disabled WC
We have tiptoed through the tulips - the lupins, pelargoniums and sweet peas, too, as it happens - to the conservatories at the far end of Petersham Nurseries, where a sort of fête champêtre is in full swing. Ladies (loads of them) are lunching, not exactly sur l'herbe, but at an assortment of wood, enamel and wrought-iron-topped tables - along with the odd blazered man, a giant poodle, two Yorkies and a fat, pink baby. Though the weather is fine today, the cafe is awash with what must be the world's entire reserve stocks of Pinot Grigio. Chink chink, glug glug: nowhere do classes chatter, nor glasses matter, more than in Surrey on a sunny summer's day.
Skye Gyngell, Vogue food writer and quondam London/Paris and Sydney chef, is now cooking four days a week here, elevating a simple cafe in a plant nursery to Richmond's must-have lunch reservation. The fact that they open only Thursday through Sunday, and then only for lunch, undoubtedly contributes to the cafe's cachet. "We keep tables for 20 minutes before giving them away," warns the polite-but-firm lady who phones two days before to confirm our reservation, "so please make sure you leave enough time for your journey."
Point well made, though not entirely taken. We arrive at Petersham 45 minutes late, but we needn't worry. Everyone, it seems, has come late today, and they're rather relieved we're later than everyone else. "Come zis way," says a jolly Frenchman, and ushers us to a rustic table, rickety on the nursery earth floor, but laid with good silver and two stiff linen napkins. Two ladies, meanwhile, have arrived simultaneously for their respective reservations, and I'm afraid it looks like only one of them is going to get seated. So it's secateurs at dawn for them, and a jug of elderflower cordial for us, please, garçon. Ah, this is the life.
The short menu, 10 starters and mains with no obvious differentiation between the two, is handwritten and dated, but only in the sense that it bears today's date. Because this menu is so bang up-to-date, so achingly now, it should be inserted into a capsule and buried deep beneath Petersham's clay soil, to be unearthed a thousand years hence, to show third millennium foodies how sophisticated we were back in the Glasshouse Age.
At £7.50, ajo blanco with figs and rosewater is the least expensive item on the menu and, frankly, I don't fancy it. It might sound more exotic than white garlic, but you can be sure it's going to be just as much of a killer on the old breath. Maybe that's what they mean by greenhouse gas. Then there's a big leap in price to the next dish, which weighs in at £14. Hold on to your hollyhocks, girls, it's going to be a pricey ride - but pepper, chorizo and black olive frittata does, I think, sound more like it. And guess what? It is - dense and eggy and wet, with beautiful, paprika-spiked chorizo, and soft, sweet peppers, sitting on a magic carpet of dandelion, rocket, bulls blood beet, basil and mint. Tara's borlotti beans come with ricotta and spinach on grilled sourdough, the ricotta so fresh it cannot have left Italy long before - an absolute fanfare of smoothness, creaminess and crunch, though again, at £14.50, not exactly given away.
The wine list, by contrast, strikes me as quite reasonable, the Andrea di Pec Pinot Grigio coming in at £14.50, and a nice plummy sangiovese at £22. Am I a bit price-obsessed today? I don't mean to be, but I'm sitting beneath a Kentia palm, with a frond stoking the nape of my neck and a £130 price ticket tickling my nostrils.
In the main courses, a swellegant tranche of tea-smoked wild salmon (£19.50) arrives with salsa verde and asparagus. It's a dish of pure summer, perfectly conceived - the pink, ever-so-lightly smoked fish yielding to the merest touch and lent piquancy by a peppery, parsley sauce. My halibut (£22), skin side obligatorily up, pan-fried to a sizzling crispness with the gorgeous, big-flaked and fleshy fish beneath, quite rightly takes centre stage to a ladleful of Umbrian lentils, slow-roasted sweet tomatoes and a tangy, homemade lemon mayo. This is really fabulous cooking - bold, self-assured, yet essentially uncomplicated. The menu, according to Gyngell, changes every day depending on what's growing in the garden and available at the market, and you believe it.
A lemon semi-freddo for pud, crowned with two indecently big blackberries, is really the only weak link in a lunch that is as near to bucolic perfection as you're likely to get inside the M25. It's melting, but then again I would be, too, were I a semi-freddo trying to look attractive while sweltering in 84 degree heat in a conservatory.
I love this place. Atmosphere-wise it's the River Cafe and an English country garden rolled into one, and I for one will be back. With easy but efficient service, too, it sure puts a new spin on nursery food.
