The Petersham Nurseries Café takes your breath away. While London’s prevailing mood is one of belt tightening here everything is uncompromisingly, flashily expensive. It’s a fabulous setting – you eat in a Greenhouse with plants and flowers all around – the bunch of pale blue cornflowers in a jam pot on the table is so beautiful that the artifice of florists becomes instantly irrelevant. This is the spiritual home of A-list designer handbags and ladies who lunch very well indeed.  At 12.50pm one day last week the ladies outnumbered the gentlemen 47 to 1, I found it strangely intimidating and am told that this was exceptional – a more common ratio being 80:20 ladies to gents. The food is created by Skye Gyngell and it’s true to say that she has a unique culinary voice. This may not sound like an unusual asset but all too many of today’s chefs look over each other’s shoulders and collaborate as much as they innovate.

The menu is blissfully short and comes with the welcome caveat “we source best quality seasonal ingredients. Due to supply and demand this may mean that we run out of certain dishes”. The sourcing of ingredients is both carefully considered and meticulous, when you get a wedge of lemon to squeeze over your food you can be sure that it is a decent sized, perfectly ripe, chunk hewn from a very fine lemon. Starters - Parma ham and melon (£13); bresaola with sheeps’ milk ricotta, crushed peas and mint dressing  (£11.50); a carpaccio of smoked haddock with raw shaved courgettes, crème fraiche and purple basil (£11.50) – a grand dish the salty fish seasoning the latent crunch of the courgettes. Or there was grilled asparagus with tonnato dressing (£12), and bringing up the rear hand dived scallops with Datterini tomatoes, lentils and salsa verde (£14). All the starters look elegant and combinations of taste and texture were well balanced.

Onwards to the main courses and even fiercer prices – roast wild sea bass with peperonata and salmariglio (£27); grilled aubergine, roast tomatoes, arroncina beans and goats’ curd (£17); barbecued quail with sweet potato, spinach and pounded spices (£24). There’s a welcome tendency here for care to be lavished on the accompaniments – the quail was perfectly cooked, but the orange mash was astonishing: sweet spud, spinach and spices a savoury, exotic concoction. Truly delicious. There was also a fillet of beef with chickpeas, chard and chilli oil (£25); and a grilled veal chop with courgettes and rosemary aioli (£26). Once again a accurately cooked chop but the piled creamy courgette it sits upom steals the show.

When judging prices a good rule of thumb is to remove VAT and then divide by 3 to give an approximate 65% food cost margin. The figure you end up with should equate to the ingredient cost – this means that in the case of he £26 chop the kitchen should be spending about £7.40 on a courgette, some cream and a chop. Which calculation makes the £26 price tag look a little strong. Don’t get me wrong, this is accomplished cooking with an original take on spicing and flavours and real style in the presentation. The chocolate mousse (£7) was exemplary. The wine list also takes few prisoners – there’s a bottle of perry for £23.

Currently this “café” is fighting a battle with bureaucracy over access and parking and there is a chance that – despite the support of hundreds of fans – they may be forced to close in six months time, which would be a great pity as this is definitely a centre of excellence. I suppose my attitude to the Petersham Nurseries Café stems in part from the fact that I couldn’t afford to eat there more often than once a year.

Charles Campion

Petersham Nurseries Café, Church Lane, off Petersham Road, Richmond, Surrey (020 8605 3627) www.pertershamnurseries.com

In it’s own quiet way Mayfair is a contender for “Most changed London village”. Read pre-war crime novels and all too often the hero, an amateur detective, has a suite of rooms in a Mayfair block. By the 1960’s the area around Shepherds Market was a hotbed of vice with red lights sparkling at every window. The new Millennium has brought yet another change of pace as more and more hedge fund folk have moved their offices from the Square Mile to Mayfair town houses.

The Greenhouse was set up in the 1970’s and an impressive roll call of head chefs includes such luminaries as Gary Rhodes, Paul Merrett and Bjorn van de Horst. The current incumbent is Antonin Bonnet - a Frenchman who served time with Michel Bras -  and if anything the Greenhouse has become an even more sophisticated and ambitious restaurant.

It is hard to walk down the decking leading to the Greenhouse through what is almost a garden, without wondering what such a piece of Mayfair real estate is worth. Enter the restaurant and all is restrained modernity, this place is stylish but still comfortable. The Greenhouse is a very suave operation, the front of house team is French and there is an agreeable formality to the tone of the place.

The food is most impressive, yes, there are classical French influences at work but this is no hidebound, ultra-trad, menu.  Antonin Bonnet has an admirably open mind and a penchant for Asian spices and flavourings. It is also very welcome to see that one of the starters and one of the mains changes on a daily basis. Currently a seasonal starter of English asparagus is prepared differently every day,  on my visit resulting in a dish that teamed perfectly cooked asparagus with a runny-yolked gull’s egg. Good by any measure. Other starters include a Limousin veal sweetbread with wild garlic caramel, glazed leeks and veal jus; or scallops with a liquorice and pumpkin purée and a yuzu dressing. These are precise combinations of flavour and look good on the plate. The mains range from brill cooked on the bone with baby Swiss chard, maple syrup and grated nutmeg; to an Anjou pigeon with braised salsify and toasted sesame “gomasio” – more Oriental influences.

One of the most agreeable elements of Antonin Bonnet’s menu is the “modern classic”, usually for two people to share this dish comes with a limited availability warning (which translates as when-it-runs-out-it-runs-out!).  You may be lucky enough to try the poulard de Bresse in two services – a magnificent black leg chicken, roasted to perfection with a layer of truffle under the skin, then brought to table for carving. The breast meat is served with morels and broad noodles made with fresh herbs. Meanwhile the legs go back into the oven for a little more cooking time before re-emerging as a separate course with a small salad. This lengthy and complex procedure achieves its objective – both the white and the dark meat end up perfectly cooked. The French chickens also deserve some of the credit, their meat is denser and much better eating than younger, more intensively reared birds. 

Puddings are both elegant and delicious, there is one titled “Snix” that combines chocolate with salted caramel and peanuts – light and indulgent at the same time. A strawberry tart is simplicity itself, a tart case, chopped strawberries, crème patissier and a basil and strawberry ice. The Greenhouse combines slick service with delicious and sometimes innovative food – meanwhile the wine list takes a brief wander through the foothills where there are bottles at steady prices before setting out in earnest to climb the peaks – oenophiles can test their wallets here.

The Greenhouse is a very good, and very Mayfair, kind of restaurant, which makes the bargain set lunch (2 courses for £25 & 3 for £29) all the more remarkable.

Charles Campion

The Greenhouse, 27a Hay’s Mews, W1 (020 7499 3331)

There’s something very comforting about the name “Chop House” and that's a plus point that didn’t escape Sir Terence Conran when he set up the Butlers Wharf Chop House, or indeed Mark Hix when he recently opened the Hix Oyster & Chop House. Chop Houses are honest; they are not the kind of places where you get small portions; they are the kind of places where you get top quality meats carefully but simply cooked. Add in the emphasis on regional British cooking, plus the use of unfamiliar but traditional ingredients and you’ll get a feel for both Butlers Wharf and Hix’s new place.

The Butlers Wharf Chop house is a machine, lots of tables inside, lots of tables outside, a bar with yet more tables to eat at. This isn’t an intimate place to eat but it is an efficient one which is probably much more important to the busy people who have crossed Tower Bridge in search of a meal. During May there is a “squirrel and rook” season. When I visited only the squirrel element had kicked in - and the  menu listed “Grey squirrel and rabbit terrine with piccalilli” – the terrine had a good texture, the sweet close-textured squirrel meat ends up pretty much indistinguishable from the rabbit – this would be a great dish for nervous squirrel sensation seekers. On the main course list there is “braised Grey squirrel and Guinness stew with carrots and horseradish dumplings” – very rich and discernibly squirrel, the meat falling from the bones of those long back legs – the dumplings need work, they are a little solid (which need not be a bad quality in a dumpling but can be taken too far) and they also need a bit more of the promised horseradish bite. The kitchen at Butlers Wharf is to be commended, not because every diner yearns for squirrel, but because the chefs are trying to do something new and interesting. The other dishes – steak and kidney pudding with oysters; pan fried red mullet; roast wild boar with spring greens are also done well. This is a very reliable place to eat, and one that understands the importance of grace notes like a decent British cheese board and a post dessert savoury. Expect to pay about £40 a head ex-drinks.

Meanwhile, over in Smithfield, on a site that was previously a restaurant called Rudland & Stubbs,(a fish restaurant that stumbled into oblivion), Mark Hix has opened his first solo venture. He didn’t get to put his name over the door at Le Caprice, the Ivy or Scotts but he does here. The Hix Oyster and Chop House is a small, comfortable, friendly restaurant that already looks weather-beaten and broken in. This place has been set up with a strong and coherent philosophy - British seasonal food - and the menu reads accordingly. Despite the restaurant having only been open for a couple of weeks getting a table is already difficult, they have been bowled over by hordes of enthusiastic customers and as a result the service can be fractured. The food, however, is exemplary. In an earlier blog (4th December 2007 – Le Café Anglais) I commented that Rowley Leigh’s great skill was his ability to write the kind of menu where every single dish appeals. Mark Hix also has this gift. The menu here is perfectly in tune with the times and draws heavily on his rather good book “British Regional Food”. Starters range from simple dishes such a asparagus from St Enodoc in Cornwall served with hollandaise sauce; to fried skate knobs with caper mayonnaise; rabbit brawn with a pea shoot salad; or a pennywort salad with Little Wallop goats’ cheese. These options all have something in common – they are all simple and unfussy, they are all delicious. The mains are equally unadorned, this is the kind of cooking that Hix does very well indeed. St George’s mushrooms come with a Welsh onion cake; there’s a Wiltshire bacon chop with laverbread and cockles; there’s a mutton chop curry; the steaks are good (perversely decent steaks seem to be one of the measures of a good chop house). The beef flank and oyster pie is exceptional – great pastry and stellar gravy. Worth a detour. But the hanger steak with bone marrow is pretty good as well, and when you get to dessert spare a thought for the Bakewell pudding. This one will run and run – expect to pay around £32 a head ex-drinks.

Charles Campion

Butlers Wharf Chop House, 36e Shad Thames, SE1 (020 7403 3403)

Hix Oyster & Chop House, 35-37 Greenhill Rents , EC1 (020 7017 1930) 

Following our adventures on Avery Island I went down to New Orleans to do a couple of gigs at the American Food Writers’ Conference. It was strangely liberating to eat out in a variety of places without the need to write anything specific. However, old habits die hard, and here are some of my notes regarding the various restaurants visited. In keeping with the spirit of the times I shall list them in reverse order and save the best for last.

Prejean’s in Lafayette, “Cajun Dining” a.k.a. vast tourist trap. Soggy fried everything. Gloopy gumbo. A deep fried cheesecake (a slice wrapped in a pancake and then crisped up in old oil). A jolly place with dire food and hen parties.

Poking fun at Brennan’s (one of the oldest and best thought of restaurants in New Orleans) is rather like saying something horrid about the late Queen Mother. It’s full of happy, smiley customers all dressed up and out for a treat. The chef is a charming, gentle fellow who has worked there for 46 years. The food is nudging its way out of 1960s into the early 1970s. There is a dish on the menu called “fillet Stanley” which teams fillet steak with a white sauce made from horseradish with plenty of cream, and then they garnish with fried bananas! In all but the finest Louisiana restaurants the predominant flavour note is sweetness. This dish was very unpleasant.

Ruth's Chris Steak House in Lafayette is rather like an upmarket Angus steak house. The steaks are good, but strangely lacking in taste. The beef is US Prime and maybe the feed lot system (they grow the steers in large pens feeding them barley) accounts for the end product – very tender almost flabby meat that is low on flavour. Nothing on the menu could touch grass grown, properly aged British beef.

Upperline is an idiosyncratic and notably popular restaurant run by an enthusiastic middle-aged lady called JoAnn Clevenger. The cooking is steady, but once again there is sugar and more sugar. Perhaps that’s what the New Orleanians want? “Tom Cowman’s roast duck” came to table as half a roast duck that had been mercilessly over-cooked and then plonked onto a mound of unadvertised sweet potato mash. Few gastropubs would have sent this plateful out.

One of my regrets is that I never got to eat at Susan Spicer’s restaurant Bayona, I did give the canapés an exhaustive trial at a reception held in the pretty garden, and suspect that had I managed to eat there properly it would probably have merited a high ranking.

GW Fins is a large, slick and buzzy fish restaurant. The chef used to be a development chef for the Ruth’s Chris organisation but the food here is a great leap forward. Stand outs were the Louisiana baby conch (that’s what you have to call whelks in the US to have any hope of selling them!)they came roast, sizzling with snail butter; the seafood gumbo; and the tuna sashimi. From the mains the Chilean sea bass (aka Patagonian Toothfish) was magnificent – a large lump first grilled and then served in a seafood nage. The stone crab claws were good. The wood grilled lemonfish (ling) was good and came with jumbo lump crab, asparagus, mashed potatoes and roast corn butter. Every restaurant in Louisiana seems to serve bread pudding – I tried half a dozen variants (avoid b-pud at Prejean’s; Ruth’s Chris; Upperline but order it at GW Fins and Mother’s).

Mother’s is an astonishing place. Yes, they have the American “over-facing” syndrome in spades – a single “po’ boy” sandwich would feed a family of four, but the food is honest and authentic. Try some “debris” – the leftover bits of beef, shreds really – implausibly delicious. Try the seafood gumbo it’s great. The ham (modestly billed as the “world’s best baked ham” since 1938) is pink and amazingly tender, rather on the sweet side. The fried chicken was a revelation – very crisp and dry outside, very tender within. A good, cheap place to eat as attested by the lengthy queue.

Both Cochon and Herbsaint are the brainchild of a very capable chef called Donald Link. At Cochon his partner is another chef called Stephen Stryjewski. The food here may be based on local dishes and hail from the Bayou but there is a sophisticated hand at work. You know that you’ll be happy when you see a menu with Jalapeno spoonbread with stewed okra; fried rabbit livers with pepper jelly toast; fried boudin with pickled peppers; fried pigs’ ears with spicy honey mustard; hen and andouille gumbo soup. Mains are good too, rabbit and dumplings; smoked beef brisket with horseradish potato salad. Good cooking and all in a light bright airy room with friendly waiting staff. This is the kind of genuine, unpretentious food you long for when in foreign parts.

Jaques-imo’s is a loud, brawling, cheap, jolly, busy, frantic place. The food is amazingly good for the price and the sixty other people in the dining room know it. Smothered chicken with biscuits; crab cakes; duck and andouille sausage gumbo; crawfish etouffee; bronzed veal chop with red flannel hash; pan fried drum (a fresh fish from the bay) with a pecan meunière sauce. Decent local beer, but the highest praise of all must be reserved for the simplest thing… as you sit down they pop a basket of hot, slightly sweet cornbread muffins onto the table – mind-bogglingly, greed-provokingly good, very crisp outside (doubtless baked on a tray crusted with lard) tender middle. Afterwards you can step down the street to the Maple Leaf, a particularly seedy bar where there are strong drinks and a live rock band. Charles Campion

Gazetteer – in the right order!

Jaques-imo’s. 8324 Oak Street, New Orleans (504) 861 0886) www.jaquesimoscafe.com Maple Leaf bar, 8316 Oak Street New Orleans (504) 866 9359) www.mapleleafbar.com

Cochon, 930 Tchoupitoulas Street, New Orleans, (504 588 2123) www.cochonrestaurant.com & Herbsaint, 701 Saint Charles Avenue, New Orleans, (504) 524 4114) www.herbsaint.com

Mother’s 401 Poydras, New Orleans (504) 523 9656) www.mothersrestaurant.net

GW Fins, 808 Bienville Street, New Orleans (504) 581 3467) www.gwfins.com

Bayona, 430 Dauphine Street, New Orleans, (504) 525 4455) www.bayona.com

Upperline, 1413 Upperline Street, New Orleans (504) 891 9822) www.upperline.com

Ruth's Chris Steak House, 620 West Pinhook Road, Lafayette (337) 237 6123) www.ruthschris.com

Brennan's Restaurant, 417 Royal St, New Orleans (504) 525 9711) www.brennansneworleans.com

Prejean’s, 3480 I-49 North, Lafayette, (337) 896 3247) www.prejeans.com