A creche for nepo babies: the River Cafe Cafe reviewed

The River Cafe has grown a thrifty annexe, and this passes for democratisation. All restaurants are tribal: if dukes have Wiltons, ancient Blairites have the River Cafe. It is a Richard Rogers remake of Duckhams oil storage, a warehouse of sinister London brick, and a Ruth Rogers restaurant. Opening in 1987, it heralded the gentrification of Hammersmith, which has stalled now that Hammersmith Bridge is closed to traffic and sits dully on the Thames, a bridge of decline. The River Cafe appears, thinly disguised, in a J.K. Rowling Cormoran Strike novel where a literary agent murders her client because he writes Swiftian pastiche, and it is a good place to watch the Boat Race.

It is intensely disorientating until sunset. Windows – the cafe has a wall of them – are underrated

Now there is an annexe, which is called the River Cafe Cafe. As names go, this is just lazy. I thought it would be impossible to get into – so many restaurants run on fumes of spin – but when I arrive it is almost empty. If the River Cafe has an interior made for Star Wars – like any glossy restaurant in an industrial space it feels remote, untethered, mad – the River Cafe Cafe is more so. It feels like a nursery designed by people who have never met real children. The carpets are blinding blue; the walls are bright white and soaring; there is a long, shocking pink curtain; what I think are acrylic flowers climb up the walls; the staff are so courteous they seem just born. It is intensely disorientating until dusk falls on the Tideway and a London sunset comes. Windows – the cafe has a wall of them – are underrated.

The menu is simple and short. The clientele – two adults moaning about the problems afflicting private landlords, a succession of glossy babies with carers, and us – eat adequate pasta and good sundaes. The rigatoni with Italian sausage, chianti, cream and chilli is oversalted but OK; the bruschetta with winter tomato and Felsina olive oil is, by turns, soggy (bread) and hard (tomatoes). The sundae is good.

The purpose of this flimsy annexe is a mystery until I remember an interview Ruth Rogers gave to the Guardian in 2017. I think Rogers was tired – she gave a ludicrous quote about asparagus (‘I don’t get angry with people who don’t know what asparagus is’) – and said, in response to the insinuation that a £100-a-head restaurant (the River Cafe) in an inner London borough (Hammersmith and Fulham) cannot be a meaningful agent of social change, that she would love to open a cheaper restaurant. And this is it.

Now I wish I had eaten the £10 pizza Romana with potato and rosemary, or tomato and oregano, in fairness to Rogers’s dreams; Domino’s, where real working-class people eat, charges more than £20 for a large pizza, and I hate them because they are gross. Even so, the rigatoni is £23 here; at the real River Cafe, tagliolini al pomodoro is £36. I see all points of view, and that is my curse.

This is Rogers’s great act of penance in dough, then, her Persuasion: an attempt to prove that a £100-a-head restaurant in an inner London borough can be an agent of social change. It can’t be any such thing, of course, and only vanity made her think it could: and who opens a restaurant to please hacks? Its clientele is not the inhabitants of the housing estates, and it never could be, but the babies of people who eat in the real River Cafe. Essentially, it’s a creche for hungry nepo babies, and the hope it would be something more is so touching I don’t know whether to laugh or weep.