There are garden restaurants, and then there’s the cafe at Petersham Nurseries. It’s essentially a cafe in the greenhouse of a private garden in Richmond, with Italian food that’s pricey, but always extremely pretty and the kind of thing even your pickiest friend would nod approvingly to. Get a plate of their saffron gnocchi with mussels and peas and sit in their absolute stunner of a conservatory, which opens onto an actual meadow during the summer. As far as escapes go, it feels like you’ve left town because you basically HAVE left town. Factoring in the walk from Richmond tube, it’s a proper mission, but compared to getting on the train to Oxfordshire to eat at a mediocre country pub, we’ll take this any day.