A simple lunch

Cafeteria food never sounds very appealing. Usually, its USP is the convenience of being able to eat without leaving the building. A tide of increasingly high standards for food in London, however, seems to have lifted even this waterlogged boat. One restaurant previously enthusiastically reviewed in this column, Delfina, started life as a canteen serving a set of artists’ studios, and another SE1 business, architects Allies & Morrison, built a canteen space to showcase its design skills and provide its employees with lunch, but having opened it to the public, find themselves with an award-winning restaurant on their hands.
The Table is not a place for formal dining, with its refectory style tables and benches, but by prioritising the quality of the food, they have got the balance between healthy and delicious almost exactly right. An array of salads uses innovative ingredients and combinations to tempt the eye and the stomach; as a committed supporter of the maxim “You make no friends with salad”, I feel disconcerted by the fact that I can rarely make it past the salad bar to try the sandwiches or the hot food.
A pumpkin, rocket and goat’s cheese salad will be given extra crunch by sunflower seeds, while mushroom, jerusalem artichoke and ratte potatoes add ballast to the salad plate. It was here that I first came across Israeli couscous, chewy farinaceous pearls that are likely to be the ingredient of the year when the fashionable restaurants catch on.
Passing on to the sandwich display, it is time to choose between sliced roast beef with gorgonzola butter in rye bread, or a portobello mushroom and cheese in a ciabatta bun. If you are still not tempted, chefs behind the main counter will offer you something from the grill - on a typical day, this might include steak, plaice and monkfish. You can then add a garnish such as rainbow chard or caponata, that Italian sweet and sour vegetable delight.
While it is always busy for lunch, mornings and afternoons are never totally quiet, as many customers come in to pick up a delicious chocolate brownie or a serving of bread pudding, while others use it as a convenient meeting place with excellent coffee.
There are plans to extend its opening hours to include evening dining and drinking when the enormous 1-2-3 Bankside development across the road is finally open - the question will be how soon the architects’ services are called on again to provide an extension.