Nicole Farhi, 202, 202 Westbourne Grove, London W11

At the new premises, you can shop for a wardrobe - and the clothes to put in it. But, says Terry Durack, the best buy is the brunch

Getting a table at Westbourne Grove's most fashionable new café can cost you anything up to £4,000. But at least you can take it home with you.

There are clothes racks and vases and little Parisian tables and bentwood chairs and wine bottles and glasses and antiqued mirrors and suede jackets and candles and linen shorts and lacy tops and white-bean and prosciutto soup and bare wooden floors and muffins and leather armchairs and fake-fur throws.

202 is a new concept store from Nicole Farhi, ranging over two light-filled floors in what used to be a pub. It's very hard to tell what is for sale and what can be eaten. The store is full of things that don't look expensive but are, and the café, taking up half the ground floor and threatening to spill out into a rear terrace at the slightest hint of sun, is full of food that looks expensive, but isn't.

As the area gets "nicer" and the rents get higher, the idiosyncratic art and antique dealers are moving out, and the big designer names are moving in. Now the French and Americans are surging up the hill from Holland Park; tourists stream in at weekends; and everyone, but everyone, is having babies.

Open for breakfast and brunch only (so New York), it's not the sort of place you take a trencherman for a three-course meal, so I just wander in and out over a few days, and treat it as the locals do.

Midweek lunch: a queue forms in the middle of the store by 1.30pm, made up of men in Tibetan scarves and shepherd's cloaks and leather slippers talking on their mobies, and women who look like Mariella Frostrup and Nicola Formby but aren't. There are tables of men eating steak sandwiches, and women eating chicken Caesars, and very few tables with both men and women on them. Is it only at night that we cohabit?

I love my daily special of white-bean soup (£3.95) because it's just the sort of thing I'd cook for myself on a cold day; thick without being creamy, and topped with a crisp of prosciutto.

There's a wall of wine and a simple list of food-friendly Sauv Blancs and Corbières. Bread is a good chewy baguette with unsalted butter (£1.75) on a plank of wood, and cut-lery is over-sized, so everything feels a bit like that snack you used to have when you got home after school.

202's smoked-haddock fish cake (£9.50) is a beauty; a large pod of herby, potatoey cake topped with gently wilted mossy-green spinach and a sensitively poached egg. A moat of lemony butter sauce flecked with chives riches it up but the egg would be enough, its amazingly orange yolk spilling out in an unstoppable lava flow.

This joint has some of the best salads in town – real café salads of the sort few Brits can do – made of fresh, crisp, green leaves and bouncy pink tiger prawns or grilled chicken in bright, zippy vinaigrettes. Prosciutto and goat's cheese (£8.75) is a good example, the cheese warmed on crisps of toast, the prosciutto freshly sliced, and the leaves dressed in a sweet, tangy vinaigrette, with little grilled figs and toasty pistachios nestled among the greenery.

Weekend brunch: the queues are longer, no bookings are taken, and the post-pregnant are getting tetchy about there being no high-chairs, but the floor staff are saints, maintaining tea-room civility throughout.

I'm here for another of those café salads; this time with sizzled chorizo, roasted potato and softly boiled egg with baby spinach leaves in various stages of wiltdom. Once again, it shows a great understanding of salad theory and practice, with its interconnecting texture, colour and flavour.

A Roquefort omelette (£6.95) is the only boring thing, being a bit oily and rich. Dessert is a gooey, overly rich vanilla cheesecake (£4.50), with a dollop of zesty apricot compote on the side.

The cooking, under the direction of Annie Wayte, is loaded with fresh herbs and natural flavours, with only a slight tendency to over-richness to mar the simplicity.

Coffee and cake: strollers circle the tables like pioneering wagon trains, and the Italian boys behind the bar are having fun with the girls on the floor. The coffee could be better. A caffe latte is mellow and smooth, so its not the bean or the roast at fault, but a cappuccino is coarse and thin-tasting, so it's either the barista or the machine. There are lemon and poppyseed muffins and American-style over-sized cookies, but I need them as much as I need a collection of antique walking sticks (£1,500).

It's too fashionable for words but I still love this place, probably because it reminds me a little of the best café in the universe, Bill Granger's fresh and simple bill's café in Sydney. 202 is already London's most Zeitgeisty café, because it's filled with light, serves up fabulous salads and fun things like lobster rolls with shoestring fries, and it knows how to be a café and not a restaurant.

In four or five visits, I still haven't seen anyone buy anything in the store. Is this a problem? No, they can turn the whole thing into a café as far as I'm concerned. The only real problem is getting a table – unless you're prepared to pay £4,000 for it.

Tel: 020 7727 2722. Open 9.30am-7pm, Sun 11am-5pm, Mon 10am-6pm. Brunch, about £25 with wine and service