River Walk Grill, London

Wild décor, great views and more-than-competent cooking. Tracey MacLeod recovers her faith in a Sunday tradition at the River Walk Grill on the South Bank

Thanks to Ken Livingstone's fatwa against motorists, Londoners have been able to rediscover the pleasures of walking; a particular favourite is the evening passeggiata around cars that have been gridlocked in the Shoreditch one-way system since September.

The South Bank of the Thames is another good place for a see-and-be-seen stroll. At weekends the riverside walkway between the London Eye and the Millennium Bridge turns into a passable imitation of the Rive Gauche (only with lots more rain and concrete), thronged with strolling families and spooning couples, booksellers, musicians and street entertainers. I know, it sounds absolutely ghastly, but it's actually very pleasant to watch a city that has kept its back firmly to the Thames, starting to stretch, turn and face the water.

The crowds may be there, but the area is short of decent places to eat. How else to explain the queues at the reclaimed-meat burger stands, or in the bleak municipal cafeterias of the South Bank Centre? The Oxo Tower Restaurant is one established option, but it's not really for everyday use. Nor, certainly, was Richard Neat's short-lived restaurant on the second floor of the same building; even in inflationary times, diners balked at paying up to £95 a head, however brilliant the food.

Neat's premises have just been re-opened as River Walk Restaurant, Bar and Grill. Like Neat, River Walk offers both a brasserie and a fine-dining restaurant; sensibly, the new owners have retained the futuristic design while ditching the futuristic prices.

If Prince was ever looking for a venue for an after-show party, River Walk Grill would be the perfect place, with its bilious purple and lilac colour-scheme and Corvette-style bench-seating. It's all a bit clamorous, given that one wall consists of a panorama of the Thames and its bridges; when the view's that good, the décor doesn't need to compete. Add a soundtrack of disco-tastic hits, and the effect is of being set adrift in a Manchester hairdressing salon.

When I visited River Walk a couple of weeks ago, the posh restaurant bit still hadn't opened (it should be open now). But for a casual Sunday lunch, the Grill looked a perfectly acceptable option. The menu is a lot more ambitious than the name implies, assimilating global ingredients and styles – seared foie gras with thyme risotto, spiced yellowfin tuna, nashi pear and buckwheat crumble – with the kind of casual confidence more usually associated with American chefs than European.

Sadly, most of these dishes were unavailable; on Sundays, only a limited brunch menu is on offer, something I wasn't told when I booked. Now I've never felt the same about brunch since reading Anthony Bourdain's Kitchen Confidential, in which the New York chef describes the typical Sunday brunch menu as "old nasty odds and ends" cooked by a B-team of newly graduated dishwashers. He's particularly alarming about the likely history of the brunch seafood special, a warning which returned to me when I spotted River Walk's "warm shrimp bellini with garlic tiger prawns".

A few dishes from the regular menu – presumably the ones the B-team can't cock up – do appear alongside brunchy specials such as Bloody Mary soup with whipped avocado, so while Harry sampled the brunch menu, I sat down to lunch.

Soup of the day wasn't oxtail – surely a missed trick, in the Oxo Tower – but a comfort blanket of roast Jerusalem artichoke velouté, swaddled in lashings of cream. With it came what a Sixties edition of Good Housekeeping might have called a cheese and bacon pinwheel, but here swanks under the name of pecorino pancetta shortbread.

A better test of the brunch brigade was my main course, a more-than-competently cooked confit of duck, owing as much to Peking as Paris thanks to gentle Chinese spicing, and served with a rich butterbean and chorizo cassoulet.

Harry's Caesar salad sat at the outer edge of what can be served up under that name – the leaves weren't Romaine, the dressing contained chopped chives, and it came with a heap of fresh sardines, crisply tempura-fried.

Carefully sourced and well-prepared, the River Walk fry-up was the perfect rebuttal to any Bourdain-inspired misgivings. The menu tells us that the Cumberland sausages are from Allens and the black-skin bacon from Suffolk. We weren't introduced to the chicken who'd provided the free-range eggs, but she was obviously a happy enough soul, judging by their deep yellow yolks.

The truncated pudding list offered seasonal exotic fruits (aren't fruits either seasonal or exotic?) and several varieties of liqueur coffee. We braved the fatal Berni-Inn naffness of the latter, and ordered River Walk coffees, made with Baileys, Grand Marnier and cream, which sent us back out on to the blustery South Bank wrapped in a Ready Brek glow.

While not reaching Neat-esque heights, the bill did climb surprisingly, to around £20 a head. But you could order a plate of eggs Benedict for £5.50, or share Oriental nibbles at the bar, and that wonderful view would be the same. We'll definitely go back; if that was the work of River Walk's B-team, I look forward to seeing what the A-team can do.

River Walk Grill, 2nd Floor, Oxo Tower Wharf, Barge House Street, London SE1 (020-7928 2884)