The River Café

The River Café opened on the Hammersmith riverside in 1987 as Ruth Rogers and Rose Gray's lunch room for the architects in the wharf above, and has since become the most influential Italian kitchen in Britain — Jamie Oliver, Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall and April Bloomfield all trained here. The Michelin star has held since 1998; the kitchen still changes the menu every service; the wood oven is still the centrepiece.

Book the lunch on a sunny day six weeks ahead, take the wood-roasted langoustines and the chocolate nemesis. The riverside terrace is the point in summer.

The lunch that defined British-Italian.