‘At night, it’s seductive and dreamy. During the day it’s chillier: as pale, precious and studied as Dita Von Teese’
There’s something dreamlike about Spring. The gauzy drapes and beautiful light fittings, like bunches of softly glowing white currants; the velvet sofas the colour of a baby’s fingernail. We’re shown to our table by a woman whose structural, trapezoid white frock makes her look like a beautiful Dalek. Wafting past a courtyard garden into the lofty, ceramic blossom-strewn room – a croon of sugared almond colours disguises its municipal past – delivers a touch of the Buñuels.
It also, with its nude leather chairs and marble bars, looks like it cost a gazillion quid. It oozes ascetic luxury. (Which, it turns out, is something of a theme: the food is also ascetically luxurious, in that ingredients are left very much to tell their own stories.) Somebody has invested a lot in chef Skye Gyngell– formerly a Michelin star winner at Petersham Nurseries– in an environment so far removed from her previous shack-and-garden-chairs outpost that it draws actual gasps from rubberneckers peering in.
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