Thames Wharf, Rainville Road, W6; 020 7386 4200. Lunch, Mon-Fri, 12.30pm-2.15pm, Sat, 12.30pm-2.30pm, Sun, noon-3pm. Dinner, Mon-Thu, 7pm-9pm, Fri-Sat, 7pm-9.15pm

5 stars: Rivers of Babylon, 4 stars: River Cottage, 3 stars: River Island, 2 stars: River rat, 1 star: River Styx

I can’t actually recommend Bratislava as a destination all on its own. It’s a bit like York or Wales, or Denise Van Outen. If you’re in the area, it’s worth dropping by and looking around. Slovakia is a beguilingly misbegotten nation that doesn’t seem to know quite what it’s for. No, it does know what it’s for: it is for putting together other people’s motorcars. They’ve put together more cars per head than any other nation on earth, and when they’ve saved up to buy one themselves, they drive to Vienna. Bratislava is a capital that looks like a long-distant cousin many times removed who, out of the blue, has been told he has inherited the title, a castle, but sadly no cash.

What struck me was a little caff off the main square that was done up in Formica and glass and brightly lit to let the local kids know that, hey, get you, this was modern and international and not remotely like the inside of a cuckoo clock. It was called Wow Kono Pizza. Personally, I think Wow Kono Pizza is a fine name for a fast-food, get down daddio, young person’s chillin’ hangout, particularly in a second language. It’s like we might call somewhere Wotcha Box Pasty. Or Hey Origami Pie.

What was particularly memorable about Wow Kono Pizza was that it did exactly what it said on the box. Unlike Kentucky Fried Chicken, which, I hate to disappoint you, isn’t really sealed in fat in the bluegrass state, or Domino’s Pizza, which isn’t an edible game of simple arithmetic loved by elderly West Indians, Kono Pizza really was a pizza folded into a cone and sealed along one edge, the inside full of pizza topping and open at the top. And I just know how that happened: one day, some bright, go-ahead entrepreneurial Slovak laid aside his adze and said to the goats: “We are joining the new Europe, where people have shoes not made from wood, and there is running gas all day, and the policemen don’t carry swords. We must enter this new place. I will open a tavern of international renown and succulence, but with a brilliant twist. And the thing I will brilliantly twist is pizza.”

Wow Kono Pizza is one of the world’s great bollocks ideas: a collapsible bread cup full of melted slop. On every level, it’s not an improvement on a pizza. But what I liked about Wow Kono was the sense of experimentation, the inquiry, the adventure, the pushing of the envelope and dropping the contents all down your front. Food is the first and the final frontier: we never get to the end of our search for unexpected combinations and freshly half- baked ways of eating. Nobody has ever been able to satisfactorily explain why we yearn for such variety and would go to such lengths to go and get weird stuff to put in our mouths on the chance that it may be brilliant. Why did anyone ever think of Rice Krispies or chewing gum, food that you can’t swallow? How counter-intuitive is that? Why is apple and cheese such a great combination, and cheese and onion so accommodating, but apple and onion so horrid?

Last night, someone gave me a bowl of tagliatelle that was miraculously delicious. It was made with cabbage and spinach. Who would have thought cabbage and spinach would make a sauce of bosky, unctuous, uber-vegetative, intensely green depth? Put them together in your imagination and it is iron-bitter cud, like being spat at by a sheep. You would never order cabbage and spinach pasta in a restaurant, and you’d never make it, so you’re just going to have to take my word for it. (Then again, the combination that disgusts me more than anything is egg yolk and tomato ketchup. Properly wrong: the taste, the texture, the temperature, all of it retching, but it is the truck driver’s tiffin.)

Italians, on the one hand, are the most cavalier and fearlessly inventive people in the edible world, and on the other, the most fussily conservative and unadventurous. Proportionately, there must be fewer foreign restaurants in Italy than anywhere else in Europe, but this is a nation that can make hot-water soup, spleen and lung sandwiches, and one of its most popular pasta sauces is named for the hot and sour flavour of prostitutes. The River Café — Tuscany in Fulham — was closed by a fire seven months ago. It has just reopened with a makeover, and, rather like Italian food, I wanted it to be inventively new and improved, but also exactly the same as it always was. Depending on the delicacy of your own social digestion, the River Caff either fills you with syrupy feelings of excitement, warmth and nameless intellectual superiority, or it makes you want to join a nihilist terror cell and buy a length of rope. It represents everything you hate: peasant food made absurdly chic and expensive, served to smug, parasitic liberals. Well, I know where I stand. I know where I belong. I’m on the inside, smirking out. On the way there, as we ignored the tramps and junkies sleeping rough, the Blonde said that it was just about the last restaurant that gives her a real sense of occasion: “I’ve been excited since lunch.” And, let me tell you, that is a considerable commendation.

The restaurant is much the same, if a little Botoxed around the edges. The entrance is still a swinging barrier, like the border to another country. It still has the feeling of being a canteen that’s got ideas above its station. The wood oven has been moved and made conspicuous with a steel chimney. It’s menacing and crematory. There is a new private room, which seems to rub against the canteen champagne socialism — but then, we’re all new Tories now. The menu is much as we left it: the chocolate nemesis, that cake that famously wouldn’t work for people who didn’t vote new Labour, is still here, along with the stinko and the simple bruschetta of olive oil and rubbed garlic, all the effortless sleight of hand, reminiscent of summer holidays in rented villas with BBC executives and their new literary-agent wives. The cooking and immaculate quality of the ingredients is also, as always, the River Café’s speciality. Its trick is to let the goods do all the heavy lifting. As often as not, the preparation is organising temperature control and getting out of the way.

The Blonde’s turbot was the best dish, a whacking tranche of fresh fish that swam with white beans; a close second was my raw minced veal with white truffle. The bill is also, as ever, horrendous: £300 for four, with a couple of glasses of wine. It really is harder and harder to justify this sort of price, but if anyone can, Ruth Rogers can. There is still no shortage of people who will pay without looking, or wincing. They are also as I left them: a collection of the plump and glossy manipulators of art, information, entertainment, gossip and money, who all dress 10 years younger than they should, but with an expensive, déclassé shabbiness. The men look like they lie for fun, the women like they fart blank verse, and I’m aware that they make me bristle.

I walk in with the stiff limbs of a put-out cat, mostly because I recognise how completely, neatly, I fit in here. This is my canteen, and at least the food’s good. And so is the service. The River Caff has the most pulchritudinous and elegantly friendly waiters in London. It’s not unusual for middle-aged customers of either sex to fancy the staff of either sex; but the River Café is the only place where every time I come here, I’m convinced that all the staff really fancy me. And that is a neat and lucrative little deception. This place is still one of a handful of consistently five-star restaurants in London; and if that thought brings out the angry provincial chippy son of Jarrow in you, do what I do: get over yourself and have the squid with chilli.

Other places to eat Italian

Casamia, Bristol; 0117 959 2884.

And who could refuse the dark chocolate tart with beetroot ice cream for pudding?

L’Anima, EC2; 020 7422 7000

London is packed with brilliant Italian restaurants, but none of them in the City, so there was a collective cheer when Francesco Mazzei recently opened L’Anima in the heart of the Square Mile. Slick, glossy and warm, it delivers some knockout dishes, including Mazzei’s signature beef tagliata. An added bonus is breakfast from 7am, so you can get in a few extra hours’ lamenting the collapse of business.

Rogano, Glasgow; 0141 248 4055

The ultimate Italian restaurant. Now more than 70 years old, it remains a favourite haunt of bigwigs and scenesters. The interior is an art deco imitation of the Queen Mary, the Cunard liner that was built nearby in 1934. Sit at the bar for a quick plate of oysters or go for a sole meunière lunch in the restaurant. For more informal pit stops, the cafe downstairs is perfect for a girls’ shopping trip or a late-night assignation. Make sure you try a Rogano cooler.

Jamie’s Italian, Oxford; 01865 838383

There were queues round the block when Jamie Oliver opened this wholesome little pasta joint in the centre of town. Keep your order simple — the breads and antipasti are well sourced and delicious. Go for the “meat plank” or some of the cheeses, all at reasonable prices. No signs of a big expansion yet, but with its bright decor, it might be the perfect antidote to the seemingly unstoppable Carluccio’s.

Mademoiselle Mangetout

E-mail your recommendations to monsieur.mangetout@sunday-times.co.uk

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