It is the first Saturday morning service at the new River Cafe Cafe, which last week opened across the courtyard from the River Cafe proper. My attention, however, isn’t focused on what’s on the paper-clothed table in front of me — crescent moons of orange-scented cornetti; French cherries the size of gobstoppers — but the huge Damien Hirst painting of cherry blossom hanging opposite. I am trying to gauge what difference four inches might make to something that already takes up half the wall.
“When Damien’s people hung it, I said it was too high,” Ruth Rogers tells me a week earlier, three days before opening the River Cafe Cafe — a name she insists was always the intention and not something silly that stuck around from an early brainstorm. “And they told me, well, Damien gave us instructions. So I asked if they could take a photograph and send it to Damien to see what he thought. Eventually he came back and agreed that it was too high. And he lowered it by four inches.” Rogers was right.
