Aglowing residency amid the spartan gloom

A bleak mist shrouds the restaurant business.

- DAVID ELLIS

Not the ghost of Rachel Reeves still very much alive; you may have spotted her at a Sabrina Carpenter concert recently - but certainly her essence. The Chancellor's thuggish budget is playing hell with hospitality, forcing job cuts and closures. The future is neither bright nor orange: it is the brown of an envelope containing final demands.

Opening a new place, then? Received wisdom suggests the only types going for it at the minute are either in too deep to stop or money laundering. I rather like a cash-wash restaurant, as it happens. There's usually a cellar full of top wine at knock-down prices, caviar on the house, and lovely loos full of marble and flat surfaces. Say what you will but the morally bankrupt are never cheap.

Câv seems unlikely to be a money laundry, and not only because owners Chris Tanner and Edwin Frost are hardly the type. This is an operation that appears to be financed by gumption alone. Tables have been inherited from the previous occupant of their railway arch home, the lighting is moot, as though someone is fearful of the leccy bill, and the walls, now dark stained wood, have no art, not even a poster. It's as if someone opened The Dover in their garage, using pocket money.