Well, no one could accuse them of rushing it – the River Café opened back in 1986 – but an offshoot of the famous Hammersmith restaurant is now seriously under consideration. No site, however, has yet been identified, co-patronne Ruth Rogers told the Evening Standard today.
Like her partner Rose Gray, Lady Rogers (wife, of course, of the lordly architect) can seem wonderfully oblivious of the world beyond her moat, er, front door, and today’s article conforms to type. “I’ve never heard anyone say they were ripped off in here”, she sweetly tells the paper.
How sensible of her to close her ears to the hundreds – or perhaps it’s now thousands – of Harden’s reporters over the years who’ve found the term ‘rip-off’, or some close synonym, a very useful summary of the Café’s pricing policy. And which London’s longest-established survey-driven guide has duly reported more years than not for most of the past two decades.
When Lady Rogers does summon the courage to peek over the battlements though, she seems to have a rather hazy view of the world. “I know it’s really tough out there and that lots of exceptional restaurants have closed”, she gushes. Anyone who’s read a newspaper (or the catering trade press) in the last couple of months will know that we recently reported that the past 12 months had seen the lowest rate of restaurant closures in London this millennium.
The remarkably thing about the current recession is how few ‘scalps’ there have been – not how many – and almost none of those cannot be explained by factors essentially unrelated to the recession. Indeed. most people would have difficulty thinking of even a handful of prominent scalps.
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