loti eats | the garden cafe

The Garden Cafe at The Garden Museum in Lambeth opened back in summer 2017 and even though it’s not a brand new opening, this just might be our favourite place of 2018 so far. We went by for a late lunch on a Sunday after visiting the Andreas Gursky exhibition at the Hayward Gallery (a great Sunday line-up by the way) and fell in love with the place.

To start with, it’s a lovely place; a modern bright glass box adjoining St Mary’s-at-Lambeth church, next door to Lambeth Palace and just back from the Thames. Then there’s the menu, a short selection of starters, mains, and desserts that call out to you and make choosing hard work. Starters are simple but confidently executed and pack plenty of punch – we loved the fresh creamy burrata on a bed of purple sprouting broccoli and the thin slices of vibrant pink cured sea trout with dill and potato.

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For the mains, things are turned up a few levels but there’s still no posturing; it’s all about simple, effective flavours. The cod with pink fir potatoes, spinach and salty anchovy butter was a great dish but the venison wellington was a thing to behold and perfectly put together. Desserts kept to the same high standard. We can’t remember having a better treacle tart than this and the creamy buttermilk pudding with rhubarb and honey was pretty as a picture and tasted damn good too.

The only drawback to the Garden Cafe is that it’s currently only open for dinner on Friday nights. If enough people get wind of how good it is though (and they surely will) then they may well have to change that in the future! Definitely one to check out.

For our favourite London restaurant, see our Top 20 guide here.

 

[easy-image-collage id=113199] Garden Museum, Lambeth Palace Rd, London SE1 7LB
gardenmuseum.org.uk

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