The River Cafe's Cheese Room

Are cheese rooms the new must-have restaurant accessory?

You'd think perhaps not in these hard times but if the iconic River Café installs one you can be pretty sure that others will follow. I was hoping to check it out last week but didn't manage to fit it in with moving house (hence the lapse in posts on the blog) but there was a glowing article about it in yesterday's Telegraph

I was interested to see from their menu that one of the cheeses they stock currently is Castelmagno, an ancient semi-hard cows' milk cheese that's made next to a chapel of the same name up the mountains above the Piedmontese city of Cuneo. As you can see from the picture below, taken when I visited this time last year, it can have extensive blue veining but it varies from cheese to cheese.

Other London restaurants with cheese rooms include the Star & Garter in Lower Richmond Road, Vivat Bacchus in Farringdon and, of course, La Fromagerie if you count cheese shops with a café. But we have yet to have a full-blown cheese-centred restaurant of the quality of Artisanal in New York. With a lower average spend in restaurants maybe it will be the upcoming trend.