Restaurant review: AA Gill at The Lawn

Fulham Palace, Bishop’s Avenue, SW6; 020 7610 7160

Mon-Sun: breakfast, 9am-10.30am; lunch, noon-3pm; dinner, 6pm-10.30

5 stars: Go alfresco, 4 stars: Rural idyll, 3 stars: Green belt, 2 stars: Urban myth, 1 star: Concrete jungle

In life, there are moments that are so marinated in the collective cultural experience, so barded and trussed with literary, cinematic, theatrical, operatic and poetic cliché and anecdote, they’re impossible to come across without a sense of predestination, as if you’ve been handed a script. You open a door and know that you’re walking onto a stage, and that you have become a character, merely a plot device, in some eternally revived drama. And, just as invariably, these moments will all be meals. We lay tables for the set pieces of existence. Not all of them are profound, wakes or weddings; some are risible, flippant and sentimental.

One of the purple-passage pap pop-cultural cliché auditions is the summer alfresco lunch in Tuscany. Anybody raised with the western canon cannot approach a table in this landscape with these people without a frisson of indulgent embarrassment. This is one of the most popular and evocative stops on the grand tour of a western life. So, there I was yesterday, high on a hill, standing in the elegantly dishevelled garden of a genteelly dilapidated vineyard farmhouse, with all its rusticity carefully and knowingly preserved, but folded in with the sophistication of an urban life, like egg whites in custard — the world-music CDs, the paperback classics in a number of languages, the discreet Mac — all aesthetically framed through the bottles of preserved tomatoes, strings of scabby peppers and shelves of memorable wine bottles. In front and below was a view of sublime comfort, as familiar as your own duvet, a rolling, cross-hatched panorama of hill-town campanili, half-hidden ruined terracotta roofs and lines of black cypress trees, marking the graph of time, distance and beauty. White dust roads, die-straight, climb through sanguine fields of umber and sienna and desiccated ranks of bowed sunflowers, all of it so, so memorable, sown and harvested for the bread and stones of civilisations. This is the view against which we measure the aesthetics and intellect of all other cultivated vistas.

We sat at the de rigueur trestle table admiring the delicious local wine, heavy with notes of tobacco and tar, fig, donkey dung, and old, boxed letters of unrequited love, tied with faded rose-madder ribbon. Then a steaming bowl of artlessly peerless rigatoni, with a sauce of ingénue simplicity: tomatoes gently stewed to reveal an intense, silky, sensual summer brilliance, a touch of peperoncino, lurking like crumbled beetle backs, and the throat-tightening, ticklish Tuscan olive oil. And then a chicken that had lived a long, productive and hardy life, which had apparently been killed with a hammer and pliers, and more tomatoes, fresh in a salad, stout with acid and sugar.

Along the table, we players were all from central casting, a smattering of English trying to look local in their unfamiliar flapping rope soles and cornflower-blue Boden, the fading Italians looking, as ever, like English bowls judges, and some honey-eyed, fidgety-groined adolescents aching to suck the juice out of their light summer. You could look from face to face and judge exactly which cultural script each was reading; who thought they were in a Bertolucci film, a Forster novel or an olive-oil-spread commercial. Then there were a couple of middle-aged Germans, tucked in and pursed. The conversation was of dreamy and contented half-sentences, catches of anecdotes and the recital of book plots that get mixed up with films. We all know our words are mood music and a soundtrack will be edited on later. One of the Germans questioned me Germanically about who I was. I wanted to say, haven’t you read the script? Instead, I said, who are you, when you’re at home? “I’m a lawyer,” he replied, in a way that made it sound like the quality controller in a brothel, and added, “I was minister of the interior in the Schröder administration, and my friend,” he paused, “is the finance minister for the German republic.”

God, you really didn’t read the script, did you? There’s not supposed to be a matched pair of Reichstag über-pols here. Dumping the German finance minister at this table is like laying a curly cable on the torta della nonna. Instead of continuing the desultory, humid chat about earthy notes and where did you get that wicker basket, we had to do mortgage rates, manufacturing deficit and exchange control.

And then, as the thick coffee was being passed round, a new cast of guests arrived. Ah, good. Back on plot. One of them was a tall, slender woman, wearing a see-through silk mini-shift over a bikini. She had well-cut platinum blonde hair, and could just about carry off the look, though she wouldn’t see 50 again. She was a triumph of confidence and Carla Bruni.

The German finance minister leapt to his feet, eyes wide behind rimless spectacles, his polo shirt straining over his surplus bellies. “Mein Gott, what the good hell are you doing here?” he shouted. “Mon Dieu,” she squealed, and they fell upon each other. He pressed his bald head into her relaxed embonpoint. “We could talk about section six, subsection b,” she said coquettishly. “Or we could talk about wine and cheese,” he riposted, in what the rest of us realised was the ceiling of his wit and repartee. This was a weird plot twist: you couldn’t begin to imagine their back story. “Ho,” chortled the interior German, slapping his thigh as if it were still encased in leather. “You know who that is? That’s the French finance minister.” You what? Now, I’m sorry, cut. What are the odds of getting two European finance ministers up a hill in Tuscany for a random lunch? Sometimes you just hate the new Europe. They stood, nose to breast, happily talking telephone numbers. The rest of us left them to it. They laughed in that exaggerated and overpleased way that overpleased people do.

I heard him raise his glass of love letters and manure and say, “. . . and then we can tax them,” as the punch line to some fiscal jape. We thought we were sitting in for Fellini and Lampedusa, but really, it was David Hare and Ray Cooney.

I’ve left very little space for this week’s restaurant, because it’s Oliver Peyton, and I like Oliver, and it isn’t very good. Peyton’s restaurants are an almanac of life in London over the past couple of decades. They reflect his and my growing up, starting with the Atlantic Bar & Grill that is still the template for door-Nazi-chic clubs; then the beautifully designed and sophisticated sure-thing date-destination Coast; Mash, with its microbrewery; the brave but doomed Isola; and then the middle-aged restaurants in museums and galleries. The Lawn, the latest, is the cafe inside (and outside) Bishop’s Palace in Bishop’s Park, Fulham. If you can walk there pushing a pram, then you might think it’s a local amenity, though if you are pushing a pram, you might think it pricey for a public building in a park.

I started with what they’re now calling Cornish sardines, which are in fact pilchards. Whatever the friends of fish try to tell you, these are not a delicious forgotten delicacy. Passing off pilchards is just green PR: they’re still oily in a nasty way, aggressively bony and taste of not enough. The best thing to do to a pilchard is tin it, put it in a cupboard and forget about it. Then a Barnsley chop, which is a double-neck, good fatty cut. The kitchen decided to send it out bleu on their own insistence. Few things are as nasty as undercooked fatty lamb. Flora, my daughter, had some prawns that she liked, and a rib-eye steak, which she also liked. She liked them because she liked Oliver, who came and had a cup of unpleasant coffee with us, and because she thinks I’m too mean. She might be right. “Why don’t you just say something positive?” Like what? “Well, you had a nice time.” I was having dinner with you. We always have a nice time. You have to be quite mean with other people’s money. “How much did it cost?” £100.13, with one extra pudding and no drink. I tell you what, if you pay for it, out of your holiday money, we’ll give them a nicer review. “No way, old man. Diss the bitches!”