Is this the place that I remembered as The Dartmouth Restaurant? With most of the tables in a basement space? Or did Coulters come later?

As 1970s teenagers, I'd go there with my first girlfriend sometimes. Even back then it was charmingly retro, with dark wooden booths and chequered tablecloths, and waitresses wearing the kind of black dresses and white pinnies that you'd be more likely to associate with a Lyons Corner House in the 1940s. It felt like dining in a Graham Greene novel. Brown British food in dark gravy - with stodgy puds and custard for afters. Lovely mumsy unsophisticated* comfort grub. It was probably the last place in Forest Hill that you could get spotted dick!

I rather miss it.

*For sophistication, of course, you had to go round the corner to the Alpine Coffee House, with it's Swiss chalet decor, where long-haired and moustachioed men in black polo necks played chess to the music of Tangerine Dream. My second girlfriend was lost in wonder when she discovered a raw mushroom in her salad. We'd never seen the like.