There’s only one huge communal table, so bring your dinner party chat A-game

One of life’s simple pleasures is coming across unexpected names for new restaurants, so I was enthralled when the Troublesome Lodger opened recently in Marlow, Buckinghamshire. This single room with a minuscule kitchen attached is upstairs at the Oarsman pub in the centre of Tom Kerridge’s fiefdom, so there’s bound to be some decent hungry passing trade, and most chefs who take over a space in a pub, hotel or fancy department store become troublesome lodgers within about three weeks. More fool you if you let a cook into your property to create their “culinary vision”: within hours, your lifts will be full of lobsters and a consommé spillage will have blown your electrics.

It is rather raffish of chef Simon Bonwick, then, to be quite so upfront, yet the Oarsman has given him this austere, very snug and dimly lit private dining room with one vast, leather-topped, antique conference table of the kind you’d imagine the bankers in It’s A Wonderful Life crouching over. Apparently, the room had been unused and full of dusty boxes and bags of sand until the new lodger took it on and turned it into what is essentially a reflection of his inner mind. Bonwick loves to paint, you see – his penchant being semi-surreal, multi-coloured dreamscapes – and every wall is now covered floor-to-ceiling with exhibits of his work, along with a pencil drawing of Tupac Shakur by one of his nine children; one of the space’s deep windowsills is filled with Bonwick family photos.