Kathryn Flett reviews Petersham Nurseries Covent Garden: ladies, babies and male accessories

Despite being able to navigate my way around the city with a skill approaching The Knowledge, I find there are now swathes of London that it’s simply easier to avoid. Take, for example, Covent Garden, now effectively a giant retail “Westworld” – and thus a natural fit for the new and expensively realised Petersham Nurseries.

All the charms of the original Petersham branch have here been jettisoned in favour of some heroic brand-marketeering. Perhaps no surprise given that the boggling wealth of Petersham’s owners – the Boglione family – comes from sportswear brands such as Superga and Kappa (and whose self-regard is quite something; check out the individual family profiles on the Petersham website).

Anyway, the gulf between other people’s shiny “lifestyles” and my matt “life” is now so much larger than can be defined by a single missing syllable as to make me feel, at best, fraudulent – at worst, in a place like this, a stalker.

There’s a deli, cellar and a giant shop selling a few immaculate plants (this is not the place to experience the feel of soil under your manicure) and other related posh ephema-knackery™, while in the adjacent “Floral Court” there’s the informal (or “vibrant, accessible” according to the website blurb) restaurant La Goccia.

Next door to that lies the new Petersham, this week’s in-spot for see-and-be-seen Ladies, plus (on the day I visit) a selection of their dogs, babies and male accessories, and my designated lunch venue.  I assume this new incarnation is aimed at people who, while identifying stylistically with the posh bohemianism of the original early-2000s Skye Gyngell-era Petersham, never actually bothered to go.

Yet while a lifestyle fantasia of plants plus food somehow worked in the upscale ’burbs of south-west London, in King Street WC2 it feels very much less, well… organic.  It’s a pretty room, granted. There’s some proper big art and lovely lighting, so it manages to be playfully airy and lunchy as well as rather grand and dinnery.

Yet the overall atmos was just one dropped tray short of the full Pizza Express-at-Saturday-lunchtime. Even at 1.45pm all areas were still heaving, while waiting staff scurried from pass to table and back again, furrowed of brow. In a different context I might have enjoyed our waitress’s extremely easy-going approach to service.

“There is fish of the day, salmon” – a shrug – “Chef make us say it,” before a short coughing fit, a “Sorry!” and an eye-roll. However, it felt a tiny bit wrong when I was preparing to pay a bill that was shaping up to be less like the cost of a meal than a percentage of the rateable value of a prime London site.

No set menu offers here, though if you hanker after veal steak, no problem: yours for £34.50. Plus another £7 for a bowl of new potatoes, and six quid for a green salad. To start, I had a very good crunchy parmesan-soused asparagus risotto, although my guest was rather less whelmed by their own asparagus and crumbled hard-boiled egg with bottarga (cured grey mullet roe; nom-nom): “It would have been nice to know in advance that it was going to be cold. I wouldn’t have ordered it because if I’d made this myself I would’ve been disappointed.” 

For that £34.50, my chargrilled steak with sage and capers was admittedly huge – gloriously unladylike, it would have made a nice snack for Desperate Dan; I couldn’t finish it. And nobody blanched when I asked for the T-bone to be doggy-bagged for my actual (lucky) dog. My guest liked their generously chunky fish stew with native lobster, gurnard, squid, dill, sea aster and aioli, too. “And for thirty-two quid, I should hope so…”

We shared a dessert – the “original bean chocolate with Zisola olive oil ice cream and honeycomb” was rather stupendous, especially if, like me, you think the majority of puddings are way too sweet. We also had two glasses of rosé (£18 the pair): oddly, the wine and dessert seemed like better value than all of the other dishes.

So, you’ll have picked up on my theme here, and I make no apologies for its repetition. At £47.50 for a plateful of steak and veg I wanted to be impressed far more than I needed to be fed – that’s a lot of cash to be coughed-upon. Luckily, the cooking at Petersham is mostly good, verging on the very.

However, obviously only a fraction of what you’re paying for in Covent Garden is food. And after an adult life largely defined by its professional detection and definition, for me the Petersham experience amounts to a “Peak Lifestyle” moment… “over” which I find I very much am.

Entirely coincidentally, just three days later my partner and I went to a pop-up: a set tasting menu at Camber Sands’ Gallivant Hotel, cooked by Petersham’s chef director Damian Clisby and the hotel’s Chris Baguley. From the crab bruschetta to the strawberry, wild fennel sorbet and lemon balm panna cotta (particularly fine), via the butter roasted monkfish and the salt marsh lamb with caramelised cauliflower and the Burwash rose cheese on walnut bread with apple salsa, every one of our seven courses was a little plate of joy – and all for 60 quid a head, plus a view of the sun setting over the dunes. On days such as these you’re very welcome to your lunch in London WC2.