It’s popular, this design trope of papering one wall with loud, geometric and rather 70’s patterns. Stick a Yes poster on the wall and it could be one quarter of my teenage bedroom. If anyone is going to do it in a restaurant though then Babylon Roof Gardens (prop. R. Branson) is the one.

Whilst sitting on the train, on my way over to Teddington to review this restaurant, I wondered how busy it would be. What with the credit crunch clamping us by the jugular and consistent job losses, I was intrigued by how the suburbs were coping. On arrival, at 1 o’clock, it was plain to see. We were the only people there, and for the two hours we were there, three others came in for lunch and two locals enjoyed a pint, on separate tables.

My understanding of Indian food is largely based on years of always-the-same-order telephone takeaways (`yes, that’s right, the usual … chicken dhansak please`) or crouching in the funereal silence of a high street curry house exchanging sidelong glances with the waiter, who regards you with that finely-honed mixture of caution and contempt perfected through years of doling out lager and baltis to rowdy, over refreshed men in outsize sportswear.

Richard Corrigan’s life has been defined by pathos. From tending roots, shoots and sorting cows from sows, to tussling chicken-crazed foxes, he rose from the bog where electricity was anathema, to cook for the Queen. In rehabilitating dowdy ‘Bentley’s’, the barrel-tummied Nimrod also roused interest in food ‘from our islands’. An almost evangelical ingredientism continues to eat into his latest venture.