There are “local” restaurants in London, with calm service and food that one might regularly want to eat—the offerings of Chris Corbin and Jeremy King at the Wolseley, the Delaunay, Café Colbert and most recently the Beaumont and Fischer’s are consistently pretty perfect, but so much so that you have to be famous to get into them, which rather misses the point. In its heyday the Ivy was another such place, until it became too full of gawking secretaries prepared to book six months in advance for a chance of glimpsing Joan Collins, and the regulars decamped to the Ivy Club next door, a grim fake gentlemens’ club for fake gentlemen. The Ivy is currently undergoing a centennial makeover, so perhaps it may rise again. Meanwhile, where to have dinner?
We took a cab over the river to Barnes. By central standards, Riva is, in many ways, a non-restaurant. It is situated in the middle of an unprepossessing row of shops in an affluent suburb, its décor, while pleasant, is entirely unmemorable, there is no music, no garden and no officious black-clad characters with clipboards at the door. A call from the taxi confirmed that there was indeed space; moreover, the encouragement to “pop by any time” actually made us feel welcome, an odd sensation in the metropolis, where customers are so often treated as an irritating inconvenience.
The food at Riva appears to be conventional Italian, but the owner, Como-native Andrea Riva, has created a beautifully balanced menu, incorporating standards from across the country, but where every ingredient simply sings. The simplicity of Italian cuisine is one of its much-vaunted qualities, but unless those ingredients are perfect, brimming with their own flavour, it can easily fall flat. We began with puntarelle, the twisty bright-green chicory tips seen everywhere in Italian markets from November until February, coated in a zingy anchovy and caper sauce, and gnarled braised artichokes, dense and earthy, alive with lemon and herbs. Then langoustines, just halved and grilled, sweet, soft and ozone-fragrant. Tagliata, sliced rare steak, lay in salty juice next to fresh spaghetti with a little chilli and garlic, while I chose the Lombardy classic cotoletta a la Milanese, a breaded veal chop, often a doughy and dreary dish, but here, again simply served with lemon, truly surprising, the meat flavourful and chewy, the crust crisp and light, so good that I wanted to chew the bone. We passed on pudding, since this was a ladies’ excursion, but we did manage a very jolly bottle of Barolo, and a teeny grappa, for health.
“London needs more Rivas,” pronounced my friend, and I couldn’t agree more. The correlation between food and status is perhaps inevitable, but the result is poisonous. Patrick Bateman doesn’t want to go to Dorsia for the menu, he needs to be seen there. No one goes to Barnes to be seen, which is probably why the food at Riva remains so delicious, and equally why the restaurant is a secret caff for chefs, critics and celebrities alike. Go for the food, but if you’re feeling a bit Bateman-like, Jeremy Clarkson is a regular.
