Better than the original: Scott’s Richmond reviewed

Scott’s, Richmond, is a fish, champagne and oyster bar, and a new branch of Scott’s, Mayfair. The original Scott’s was part of what became the Trocadero Centre. (Ian Fleming was a regular. He would take captured U-boat officers there to get them drunk and chatty. James Bond visited too.) It moved to Mount Street and was bombed by the IRA in 1975. This Scott’s is on the Thames at Richmond and is part of a development by the King’s favourite architect Quinlan Terry, who managed, in the mid 1980s, to throw up a Domestic Revival village on the water. It looks very weird, but I’ve always liked it because the alternative is worse.

It is probably too sumptuous for Richmond, which should smell of wet dog and river mud, but local wives think otherwise

I went to school in Richmond; I remember the holes in the brick wall of the poppy factory. People would make them with pennies as they waited for buses. This was pre-iPhone. Richmond exists for the monied upper-middle classes, and it is open to a very predictable kind of magic. Mills and Boon operates from a red-brick house on Paradise Road, and if you walk north from Richmond Green the ruins of a great Tudor palace appear. Richmond likes itself, and why not? Its views were painted by Turner and its Royal Star & Garter Home dominates the landscape like a medieval fortress built by Barratt. (Now, inevitably, it is luxury housing, presumably for the benefit of the war heroes who were moved. You can have too much view.) Richmond is ready for Scott’s, which seeks to summon Monte Carlo, nay, Asgard, by power of will.

There cannot be a suburban restaurant so gilded anywhere, and, with it, Richmond, which was always slightly chintzy and frayed, has crossed over into something else.