The Financial Times have been running a promotion for the last two weeks which allowed you to dine at a fine dining restaurant for a maximum of £20.08. One of options was for a 2-course lunch at The River Cafe which is a one-star Michelin restaurant on the banks of the Thames and a restaurant we’ve had our eye on for a while. I’m not a Financial Times reader ordinarily but Jenny saw the deal on a website and of course we couldn’t overlook such an offer so for today we were Financial Times readers. Considering that dishes at The River Cafe average about £11-£12 for antipasti and primi meals and £27-£30 for secondi meals and even factoring in that we were likely to get a reduced fixed set meal the offer was a very good bargain.

We actually only found out about the deal a couple of days ago and were lucky to get a booking (even if it was for a late 2.15pm lunch which kind of worked out anyway …) Finding The River Cafe proved harder than we thought without an address and only an arrow on a streetmap.co.uk print out to guide the way (which pointed us in the wrong direction by the way!)

We did indeed receive a reduced menu for the FT Lunch though the Antipasti and Primi selections were mainly intact, it was only the Secondi options which was completely different from today’s A La Carte menu. The disadvantage to our late lunch was that the options that we really wanted such as the Vitello Tonnato (a poached veal covered with mayonnaise, tuna, anchovies, capers & parsley), Ravioli di Baccala (pasta stuffed with creamed stockfish with chilli, parsley & lemon) and Maiale ai Tegame (pork leg fillet, wrapped in coppa di Parma slow roast in Valpolicella with roast celeriac, potatoes and fennel) were sold out.

The menu, as you can see from the above descriptions, is pretty good at describing the dishes on offer almost to the point where it seems that they are trying to oversell the dishes or over-emphasise the particular ingredients they’ve used. For my selections I ended up going with Prosciutto di Parma con Polenta e Fegatini (grilled polenta with chicken livers cooked in Vecchia Romana with Prosciutto di Parma) as my starter and Coda di Rospo con Vongole (wood baked monkfish with claims, marjoram, trevise, potatoes & Vermentino.) Both complicated sounding dishes with some, to me anyway, unrecognisable ingredients. As expected the dishes came out presented impeccably. If only the taste lived up to the promise. I’m not saying the food was awful nor the ingredients of high quality – I just expected the package (flavour, texture etc.) to be a bit more challenging. Though the manner of the menu implied complexity the actual flavours were more simple than expected. For this reason only I was a little disappointed in my experience as mouth-watering it was not.

As for the other factors – I couldn’t complain at all about the service we received at The River Cafe – it was impeccable from start to finish. They have more than enough staff to cover staff who are otherwise occupied – from what seemed like more than ten chefs and assorted helpers in the kitchen, to the multitude of waiters in the restaurant to the multiple staff at the front desks so no diner was ever left out on a limb. The attention we received at lunch was perfect. The restaurant ambience was very buzzy – the high roof top meant that it was very noisy from the chatter in the restaurant and therefore surrounded us with a pulsing atmosphere. The restaurant is long with the kitchen/bar running down one side which allows the diners to have some sort of involvement in their meal.

In all honesty this is exactly the type of restaurant that food critics live for – simple food with complicated descriptions and sky-high prices. Almost the opposite of what I prefer.