The Sunday Times
Charlotte Ivers took her mother to lunch at “the world’s poshest Ikea café” – a restaurant at a stately home near Oxford that is now the UK base of American furniture company RH (fka Restoration Hardware).
Eerily, they seem to be the only customers in the building, itself a succession of “tasteful” brown-and-beige decorated rooms, like “an MC Escher painting”. The grand dining room “feels like a Greek temple: white, cold, empty. Someone, somewhere, is losing an awful lot of money. I look at the legions of staff loitering around, utterly lovely and polite. What are we all doing here?”
The food barely registers, apart from a “cauliflower steak” that is “quite a glorious dish. A bit of rosemary, a lot of chives and lemon. Artfully blackened on the ‘live fire’ grill, it tastes new and exciting. Quite the achievement for a cauliflower.”
Charlotte Ivers - 2024-07-28
