Bogged down at the nursery

It's hard not to laugh at Petersham Café. This year's winner of Tatler's Most Original Restaurant Award is so achingly trendy it's in danger of disappearing up its own fundament.

For instance, it employs a woman who calls herself a forager and whose job, apparently, is to forage for locally manufactured, seasonal produce. She can't be doing a very good job because both the salt and the pepper are imported from Bali. Surely you can buy such condiments closer to home? I may be very much mistaken, but I think there's a branch of Sainsbury's in Richmond.

Of course, for those who subscribe to the local/seasonal dogma, supermarkets are the fount of all evil. Petersham Café is a produce-led restaurant, which means that it only buys ingredients from small, specialist suppliers. The walnuts, for instance, are provided by a woman who brings them in on the Eurostar from France, while the blood oranges are from a farmer in Sicily.

Needless to say, such produce doesn't come cheap. One of the ironies of local/seasonal restaurants like this is that their 'small is beautiful' philosophy doesn't apply to their own prices.

My starter of cod's roe was £14. The forager explained that it came from a smokery in Orford and, while I'm glad that this small business is being kept alive by the patronage of Petersham Café, it would be nice if such compassion was extended to the restaurant's customers.

Then again, perhaps they can afford to take the hit. Petersham Café is part of Petersham Nurseries garden centre and if the price of the secondhand furniture is anything to go by, the local customers are pretty well-heeled.

A rotting park bench, for instance, was on sale for £1,000, while a set of rusty garden chairs were retailing for £450 each. After those figures, who's going to complain about a plate of mezze for £17? It's a steal, particularly when you consider that the dandelion leaves adorning it were grown by no less a personage than Lucy Gray, daughter of the River Café's Rose Gray.

The reputation of Petersham Café owes at least as much to this sort of connection as it does to the food. The head chef is Skye Gyngell, who, in addition to being the daughter of the late Bruce Gyngell, once the MD of TV-am, is the food editor of Vogue.

That's not to say she isn't a talent in her own right. My cod's roe was excellent and my main course of meatballs accompanied by wild cherries was pretty good, too. I'm just not convinced any other restaurant this far off the
beaten track - you have to wade through an acre of mud to get there - could charge £109.12 for a meal for two that didn't include pudding or a bottle of wine.

On the afternoon I went there, my fellow customers were, almost exclusively, yummy mummies. They looked like the pampered wives of investment bankers who were stopping off for a plate of puy lentils in between a trip to Planet Organic and a visit to the local spa. 'Another long, exhausting day, another thousand dollars,' as Stephen Sondheim put it in 'The Ladies Who Lunch'.