The River Café

Rose Gray and Ruth Rogers opened The River Café in 1987 at Thames Wharf, in a converted warehouse on a site Richard Rogers had already made his own. Nearly four decades on it holds a Michelin star and a reputation that has outlasted most of the rooms that copied it. The restaurant is long, low and bright: an open kitchen with a pink wood-fired oven running its length, a blue floor, and a garden terrace that gives straight onto the river walk.

Two rooms are let privately. Sylvia's sits directly across the garden, facing south through floor-to-ceiling windows onto the Thames, with its own access to the river path and an upright piano the house will find a pianist for. It takes 48. The Private Dining Room is off the kitchen, with doors to the garden and a glass-fronted cheese room built to a classic Italian design in the 2008 rebuild. It seats 18 and takes full audio-visual equipment on request.

Music here is a piano rather than a rig, and the evening ends at half past eleven. That makes it a room for a long dinner, a lunch that runs into the afternoon, or a launch that wants the river and the cooking to carry it, rather than a room to dance in.