Better than the original: Scott’s Richmond reviewed

Scott’s, Richmond, is a fish, champagne and oyster bar, and a new branch of Scott’s, Mayfair. The original Scott’s was part of what became the Trocadero Centre. (Ian Fleming was a regular. He would take captured U-boat officers there to get them drunk and chatty. James Bond visited too.) It moved to Mount Street and was bombed by the IRA in 1975. This Scott’s is on the Thames at Richmond and is part of a development by the King’s favourite architect Quinlan Terry, who managed, in the mid 1980s, to throw up a Domestic Revival village on the water. It looks very weird, but I’ve always liked it because the alternative is worse.

I went to school in Richmond; I remember the holes in the brick wall of the poppy factory. People would make them with pennies as they waited for buses. This was pre-iPhone. Richmond exists for the monied upper-middle classes, and it is open to a very predictable kind of magic. Mills and Boon operates from a red-brick house on Paradise Road, and if you walk north from Richmond Green the ruins of a great Tudor palace appear. Richmond likes itself, and why not? Its views were painted by Turner and its Royal Star & Garter Home dominates the landscape like a medieval fortress built by Barratt. (Now, inevitably, it is luxury housing, presumably for the benefit of the war heroes who were moved. You can have too much view.) Richmond is ready for Scott’s, which seeks to summon Monte Carlo, nay, Asgard, by power of will.

There cannot be a suburban restaurant so gilded anywhere, and, with it, Richmond, which was always slightly chintzy and frayed, has crossed over into something else. I wonder if it is a function of the pandemic: you do not need to visit the fleshpots of the West End – when she lived at Royal Lodge in Richmond Park the late Queen Mother moaned about having to drive to Mayfair for nightclubs – for they are here. Richmond has shrunk, and Mayfair has grown. When people talk about the 2020s being a new age of excess – addled because they’ve seen Cabaret at the Playhouse (‘In here, life is beautiful!’) – they mean this.

It a white, square building with a cupola and windows on to contemptuous swans. Terry’s villages look like board games, and we have landed on Italianate. Inside it is vast and brightly coloured, made of velvet. There are red and green and blue chairs and banquettes; columns, chandeliers, awnings and gilt, jumbled together; paintings of flowers, and women, and a clown; a glowing bar, though alcohol of this quality needs no salesman. It is probably too sumptuous for Richmond, which should smell of wet dog and river mud, but the local wives think otherwise. It is filled with them. We eat a glorious mozzarella and tomato salad, with tomatoes of every colour on the tomato spectrum, and with pesto; and mashed potato; and monkfish cheeks and snails in bacon broth with toasted bread; and butternut squash agnolotti; and a perfect honeycomb ice cream.

It would be churlish to say it’s not a great restaurant: the staff are pleasant, the interior is by Cecil B. DeMille, and the food is superb. Perhaps I am only afraid I will meet my stepmother here. It’s better than Scott’s, Mayfair, which has no views of contemptuous swans. I am still pondering Harry Sussex’s book, in which he named a grumpy swan ‘Steve’. Is Steve here? Then I wonder what Henry I, the first king to live at Richmond, would think of it. He loved fish: he died after eating lampreys, and there’s the answer.