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