The fit-out must have been expensive. Rustic Italian, it has a relaxed, urban feel (if that’s not a contradiction in terms).

Starters were slow-cooked cannellini beans with Tuscan sausage (intense flavours) and prawn and crayfish cocktail (utterly refreshing).

Main courses were tagliolini with crabmeat, and calves liver, both perfect. We also had a bottle of white wine, Verdeca, Puglia 2008 (approx £16) which was modern, clean and intense, with a long finish.

The service was charming, professional but also relaxed.

All of this will be no surprise to those who’ve been to sister restaurants Osteria Pulcinella and Pincho, those very professional Church Street establishments.

But at Brocca, chef Pasquale Spaziano has raised standards to new levels. Despite the mid-market positioning Riversniffers has no hesitation in tagging Brocca under “fine dining”.

For a fine Italian meal, the lucky residents of St Margarets can now choose between Brocca at one end of the village, and the more formal A Cena at the other end, near Richmond Bridge.

Let’s hope we don’t get spoilt by too much choice. Who’d of thought it would ever happen to St Mags?

Oh, almost forgot – the bill? Including a couple of coffees  and a generous tip, £65 for two.

You owe it to yourself to go. But book early – the word is spreading.

Brocca Antika

139 St Margarets Road

Twickenham

TW1 1RG

Tel: 020 8891 2644

Riversniffers bumped into two seasoned restaurant goers who ate at Brocca on the first Saturday. Their verdict? The best meal they’d had anywhere in 2009 – at any price – absolutely fabulous.

She had bruschetta followed by a calzone. He had aubergine and mozarella bake, followed by crab tagliatelli. They had a good bottle of Italian white. The bill? £46 including a tip.

The next day the couple went to the Wolseley. They said that the meal, although really enjoyable, was “nowhere near as imaginative as Brocca on the Saturday”.

Riversniffers can’t wait to try it out and is booked in there in the next week. There will be a full write-up here shortly afterwards.

Looks like they’ll be beating the customers off with sticks.

Book early for Christmas!

Brocca Antica

139 St Margarets Road

Twickenham

TW1 1RG

Tel: 020 8891 2644

We never go out for dinner on Valentine’s Day.

After a run of bad experiences (overbooking, price ramping, shoddy food, couldn’t-care-less service etc) Mr and Mrs Riversniffer vowed some years ago never again to dine out on that day.

But when Mrs R said in January she’d booked A Cena, and what’s more it would be her treat, Mr R did not offer the slightest peep of objection. The fact is, if someone is offering to take you to A Cena, you don’t look the proverbial gift horse in the mouth. It’s usually very, very good.

At this point a slight diversion – why is Richmond unable to support a first class restaurant?

Richmond has always had plenty of choice in the mid-range (say £50-70 for two including a bottle of wine). But despite the town always being portrayed as “affluent” or “well-heeled”, restaurants which have aimed at the top of the market have not lasted long.

Over the last thirty years it is difficult to recall a single first division restaurant that survived and thrived. Twenty years ago one entrepreneur opened an up-market eatery in the then-new Richmond Riverside development. Shortly before he closed up six months later, he observed “nobody in Richmond has got any money.”

I leave out of this the Petersham Hotel. In recent years under chef Alex Bentley it has been consistently very good indeed. However, the Petersham is a hotel, and I’m talking about stand-alone restaurants.

Riversniffers would welcome comments. Can you remember a single first division restaurant in Richmond town in the last thirty years that maintained consistently high standards of food and service and survived for longer than say a year?

Anyway, back to A Cena. We arrived on time at 7:30pm and were shown straight to our table. A brace of martinis and two glasses of prosecco were followed by starters of scallops with anchovy, roast cherry tomatoes, green beans and parsley. Sounds delicious? It absolutely was.

Our main courses were: Pan-roast Scottish Beef rump with Chestnut mushrooms, red wine and white truffle oil mash and Sicilian Style Roast Guinea Fowl with lemon and braised broad beans with speck and olive oil mash. Both were faultless.

Puddings were: New York style vanilla cheesecake with blackcurrants and strawberries in Valpolicella syrup with meringue and cream – faultless again.

All this was accompanied by a bottle of Veneto chardonnay and topped of with a large espresso for him and a glass of iced coffee with vodka for her (highly recommended by the way).

Service was attentive, courteous and, well, faultless.

Did we escape the Valentine’s Day curse entirely? Not quite, because there was a special £50 a head prix fixe menu. We reckoned if you’d ordered what we had on a normal night it would have cost about £32 per head. There was a premium to be paid for venturing out on the dreaded night.

But we didn’t begrudge paying it. It had been a great evening, our third successful visit to A Cena in eight months. Each time it has been a rare treat.

So can we now say that at last Richmond has a well-established (four or five years established, I would guess) first division restaurant? Well, technically no, because A Cena is 100 yards on the left on the Twickenham side of the bridge, as you leave Richmond. So it’s in Twickenham, not Richmond!

Anyway, however you define where it is, it’s a great place and highly recommended. Including a bottle of wine, expect to pay around £60 for two for lunch, £100 to £120 for dinner.

Booking is essential.

A Cena, 418 Richmond Rd, Twickenham, TW1 2EB.

Tel: 020 82880108

http://www.acena.co.uk/

For years Ches’s Café in Crown Road has been reliably dishing up early morning bacon sandwiches and fry-ups.

But recently the focus has changed. It’s still a very good place for an English breakfast, but it has recently adopted a different guise at lunchtime and evenings – Ches’s Trattoria.

Wikipedia states “a trattoria is an Italian style of restaurant, less formal than a ristorante. There are generally no printed menus, the service is casual, the prices low, and the emphasis is on a steady clientele…the food is modest but plentiful and is served family-style (i.e. at common tables)”.

This description is pretty much spot on for the new Ches’s Trattoria.

Ches’s is on two floors. Upstairs is the café, downstairs is a more intimate, restaurant-like room. On a recent visit, six of us were booked for 8pm, and on arrival we were shown to the downstairs room.

The choice of starters is quite extensive. Seafood salad, Parma ham and melon, mixed salami, tuna and cannellini bean salad, mushrooms with white wine and garlic are just some of the dishes on offer, all at about £6 to £8. For main course there are about a dozen different pasta dishes, and 15 or so different types of pizza, all in the £7 to £10 price range.

In the end we went straight for main courses, without having a starter. Four of us ordered pizzas and two ordered linguine. The kitchen was busy, and we waited for a while over glasses of wine (BYO, because they are not at present licenced).

 When the food did arrive, the dishes arrived all at once and piping hot. The pizzas were large, fresh and tasty, and the linguine had a wonderfully intense and genuine Italian home-cooked flavour.

A quick poll round the table for marks out of five for the food returned votes of fours and fives from everyone. And the bill, for six people? £65.50.

The Verdict

Italian home cooking served with real warmth, friendliness and pride. It gets very busy at times, so don’t expect to be in and out in twenty minutes. But for a relaxed evening out with friends at a price that won’t break the bank Ches’s Trattoria is very hard to beat. Highly recommended.

Other notes

Booking is essential on weekend evenings. They also do take-aways.

As mentioned before, they are not currently licenced so you are welcome to bring your own wine etc. No credit cards, only cash or cheques.

Ches’s Trattoria          48, Crown Road, St Margarets, TW1 3EH

                                    020 8892 4615