TOM JACKSON, ANDREW BURTON60 The Times Magazine
to the gang at the next table, who worked
for a champagne label with offices nearby,
so after lunch we went back to their place,
with its balcony over the river, and embarked
upon a vertical champagne-tasting that
morphed, obviously, into a horizontal one,
which ended, for me at least, in an Uber (at
last) at 4am, heading home from a house in
west London where I’d spent the hours since
midnight bollocking on about nothing to
nobody whose face I would recognise if
they walked into my office now and danced
a cancan.
Because that is what lunch is for.
Sometimes. Especially when it is your first
for nearly a year. And I thought of it when
I found myself heading out that way for lunch
again, a year later, to the very week, for lunch
with my old friend Tom to celebrate the first
full year of back-to-normal, post-pandemic
restaurant life (because one always has to
have an excuse).
Not to the River Cafe this time, because
I can’t afford to do that every year, obviously
(and not on foot, because I’ve still got the
blisters from 12 months ago), but to a place
called Sam’s Riverside, which opened in late
2019, barely three streets from the RC, and
then got interrupted by You Know What,
so I never got along there in the first wave.
But I guessed that it would have river
and sky and fresh fish and good wine and
be just as good a spot for a long drunkenEating out
Giles Coren
hen lockdown restrictions on
non-essential businesses in
England ended on April 12, 2021,
the first thing I did was to walk
the seven or eight miles from
my home to the River Cafe
(because I was too excited
to wait at home for an Uber)
for my first proper lunch in what felt like
a lifetime. The sun blazed hard on the
unaccustomed pavements as I marched
through my gradually reawakening home
town, dreaming of insalata con granchio,
slivers of raw baby artichoke with shaved
bottarga, pizzetta with taleggio, the first
spring asparagus with a frothy parmesan
fonduta, grilled calamari with fresh red chilli,
pennette with wild rabbit...
I broke into a run at times, thinking
of the veal chop with sage and Amalfi lemon,
the turbot, the first ice-cold glass of rosé
of the year, and then bottles of rich, inky
tignanello, and when I finally arrived, my
review ended, because I like to mess around
with you. But I can reveal now, a year later,
that my lunch was everything I had dreamt
of and more, so much more.
Because my friends and I got talkingW
‘The parmesan churros
were like fresh, hot
Wotsits. But better,
obviously. Actually, that’s
not true. Nothing is
better than a Wotsit’
Sam’s Riverside