5 November 2025

A tale of two River Cafés

Why British haute cuisine is obsessed with fake modesty

Photo by Andrew Butterton

There is a restaurant in west London called River Café, exactly one and a half miles from a restaurant in west London called The River Cafe. When a friend texts you on a Saturday morning “Lunch, River Café?” pay close attention to the presence of the definite article. This will tell you whether you’re about to have toast, tomatoes and builders’ tea; or whether it’s an afternoon of linguine con granchio – Devon crab, parsley, chilli and lemon – and a glass of Blanc des Millénaires.

The appeal of the London Borough of Hammersmith & Fulham pretty exclusively relies on The River Café, with a little help from the handsome Victorian bridge spanning the Thames – and even that is currently closed. Since 1987, The River Café has been ranked among Europe’s best Italian restaurants, central to the culinary revolution of the 1990s. Lured by its cobalt-blue interiors, perfectly set terrace and Tuscan peasant food made haute (with the prices even hautier), the city’s elites traipsed to a neighbourhood otherwise defined by plodding suburban streets and ugly overpasses. Flog crab pastas with bitter-leaf side salads, and Richard Branson will come.

Sharp readers will have noted that this time it was tomatoes, toast and builders’ tea on the menu for me. The Champagne would have to wait – there are very different people with very different ideas about food down at River Café, opposite Putney Bridge Station. Dirty green awning, art nouveau tiling, wooden chairs, plywood panels, and laminated tabletops – yep, that looks like a café all right. It’s been there longer than the New Labour haven up the road, run by the same Italian family for three generations. But the offering is as English trad-caff as one can expect – an array of fry-up components to be remixed into a lunch of your choice. Brown sauce, I think, is mandatory.

The frivolous nature of the comparison isn’t lost on me, were you minded to point it out. I too have a namesake – my friend’s Swiss shepherd. Finn is a large, white, pointy-eared dog that lives in Park Slope, Brooklyn. Think-pieces are welcome on all that unites or divides us, of course. But I fear that hound and human is as unedifying a line of enquiry as “builders’ tea or Blanc de Blanc?”

I am minded to ask, however, why The River Cafe ever got away with such a demure moniker in the first place. And they are not the only participants in this national exercise of competitive modesty. I think, too, of the high-ceilinged, minimalist restaurant abutting the Hackney canal – Café Cecilia. How many cafés do you know that serve pork with “whipped cocoa beans” and “cime di rapa”? In Shoreditch, at Rochelle Canteen, you can settle in to a guineafowl and trotter pie for £26 – meanwhile, my school canteen specialised in a line of “fried item” accompanied by “fried-from-frozen item”. Then there is Canteen on Portobello Road, the current destination for London’s professional classes and all that disposable income. Porcini risotto or persimmon and walnut salad, anyone? From a humble canteen, of course.

This is a case of the ironic downward signal – a thermostatic correction to the inherent embarrassment of being visibly posh. Think of the 30-room grace-and-favour mansion Prince Andrew has just been ordered to vacate, insouciantly known as the “Lodge”; or the Grade II-listed, 5,089-square-foot Frogmore “Cottage” on the Windsor estate. Is all this dressing up the High in Low’s clothing dishonest? Sure. But I suspect the alternative is far more frightening to the British psyche – something gauche, chauvinistic, pompous… American.

And so, here I am, eating hot buttered toast and roasted tomatoes in SW15. There’s a man with wispy white hair beside me, but I can’t see the Richard Branson anywhere. I’m a long way from that slice of Chianti-in-London, just a short walk upstream. Where would I rather be? Well, that’s for me to know. But in the meantime, I have a suggestion for River Café: rename yourself Brasserie-sur-Thames. Two can play at this game.

[Further reading: The Zohran Mamdani interview]