Five Damien Hirst angels hang off the ceiling of a former Porsche showroom on Mount Street. A Clerkenwell courtroom serves lunch under jade paint and pink plaster that nobody has touched since 1782. And the prettiest dining room in Mayfair sits inside Edwin Lutyens’ old banking hall, where the safe deposit boxes are still in the basement.
London does beautiful restaurants better than almost anywhere, partly because so much of its stock was built for something else first: a magistrates’ court, a bank, an embassy, a painter’s studio. The good operators have worked out that the cheapest way to a remarkable room is to inherit one.
These are the thirty-one we would actually send you to, grouped by what makes the room rather than by postcode, with the designers named and the prices current. Where the food does not live up to the ceiling, we have said so.
Quick answers
What is the most beautiful restaurant in London? Sessions Arts Club, in the old judges’ dining room at the Middlesex Sessions House. It is the only one on this list where the design decision was to stop restoring and leave the walls as they were found.
Which is the best value? Chuku’s in Tottenham, where the whole weekend brunch costs less than a main course at most of the others.
Which needs booking furthest ahead? The Big Mamma rooms. Ave Mario, Jacuzzi and Gloria all release tables exactly thirty days ahead at 9am, website only.
Where do I go for the view? SUSHISAMBA on the 38th floor, or Madera on the 15th if you want to see the BT Tower rather than be miles above it.
Is any of it worth it for the food alone? KOL, Sketch’s Lecture Room and Berenjak, yes. Several of the others you are paying for the ceiling, and we have flagged which.
Rooms with a view
The oldest trick, and still the one people book for. Worth knowing which floor you are actually on, because several of these sell a view they do not quite have.
SUSHISAMBA
110 Bishopsgate, EC2N 4AY. Mains £21 to £88, tasting menus £80 to £135. Daily to 1.30am
Thirty-eight floors up, about 175 metres above the City, reached by a glass lift bolted to the outside of the building that is half the experience before you have sat down. The room is built under a suspended bamboo lattice hung with clear glass globes, and there is an orange tree growing on the west terrace.
The tower is officially 110 Bishopsgate, though everyone including SUSHISAMBA’s own website still calls it Heron Tower. Kohn Pedersen Fox designed it; the Samba Room sky bar on the 39th floor was added in April 2024 by Fabled Studio, in a mid-century Brazilian palette of orange and copper.
Prices are what you would expect at this altitude: black cod £46, ribeye £45, T-bone £88, or the Taste of Samba tasting menus from £80. Book a window table or do not bother, and go at lunch rather than dinner: same view, roughly half the bill, and you can see the city rather than a field of lights. It is also one of the best views in London, one of the most photographed rooms in the city, and one of the few up here still serving at half past one in the morning.
Madera
Treehouse Hotel, 14-15 Langham Place, W1B 2QS. Mains £24 to £40, set menu £24 for two courses. Daily
Fifteen floors up with floor-to-ceiling glass, reclaimed timber floors, cedar booths, wicker swings and enough hanging greenery that the hotel’s grown-up-treehouse conceit actually lands. The views are some of our favourite in London, largely because you are close enough to pick out individual buildings rather than looking down on a carpet of them.
The cooking is Californian-Mexican and better than a hotel restaurant needs to be. The set menu at £24 for two courses, served daily until 5.30pm, is the best-value way into a room like this anywhere in central London. Taco Tuesday is £38 a head, unlimited.
Take the £24 set at lunch and sit on the window side, because the a la carte does not do anything the set menu does not. It is one of the more quirky restaurants in London and a short walk from the rest of Fitzrovia.
14 Stories
14th floor, 120 Fenchurch Street, EC3M 5BA. Mains £29 to £48. Monday to Sunday
This is the restaurant you may know as 14 Hills. It was renamed 14 Stories during 2025, after D&D London was bought out and rebranded as The Evolv Collection, bringing it into line with 20 Stories in Manchester and 24 Stories in Birmingham.
The room is by Robert Angell: 170 covers, floor-to-ceiling glass, and actual trees growing out of the dining room floor rather than the potted gesture most rooms settle for. Mains run £29 for gnocchi to £48 for fillet, with a porterhouse to share at £120 and brunch at £48.
Go up to the Garden at 120 on the fifteenth floor of the same building first. Free, no ticket, and you will have seen the skyline before deciding whether to pay for it.
Skylon
Royal Festival Hall, Belvedere Road, SE1 8XX. Mains £20 to £34, set lunch £30. Daily
Conran and Partners built this into the Grade I listed Royal Festival Hall around a six-metre ceiling and thirty-six metres of floor-to-ceiling glazing facing the river. The dramatic central bar is the thing everyone photographs, and the mid-century detailing in bronze, walnut and slate is a straight nod to the building around it.
It reopened on 27 January 2025 after a refurbishment that brought in a new centrepiece bar, furniture, lighting and flooring. Mains are £20 to £34 and the set lunch is £30. Take the £35 pre-theatre even if you are not seeing anything: same kitchen, two thirds of the price, and it runs from half five.
Plenty more nearby in our Waterloo guide, our Waterloo bars roundup and the wider South Bank guide.
One Twenty One Two
Royal Horseguards Hotel, 2 Whitehall Court, SW1A 2EJ. Mains £24 to £42. Daily
The building is the draw and it is a serious one: Whitehall Court, Grade II* listed, built in 1884 by Thomas Archer and A. Green in a French Renaissance manner that looks like a chateau got lost on the Embankment. The dining room looks out over the Thames.
The name is the old Scotland Yard telephone number, Whitehall 1212, and the building housed the Chief of the Secret Service, which is the sort of detail the hotel is right to keep mentioning. Mains run £24 for the chicken, ham hock and leek pie to £42 for the salt marsh lamb, with a tomahawk for two at £120.
Ask for a river-facing table when you book, because the ones facing inward are effectively a different restaurant. One of the better riverside restaurants in London, and considerably calmer than anything on the South Bank opposite.
Megan’s
27 Circus West Village, SW11 8NN. Open 8.30am daily
The cheapest room on this list and the one doing the most with the least. Megan’s Battersea sits in the arches at Circus West Village, all macrame hangings, fairy-lit booths and a riverside terrace, and it opens at half eight for breakfast, which almost nothing else here does.
Two courses are £18 on the Megan’s by 7 menu, Monday to Friday between five and seven. Walk-ins are taken until 4pm on Fridays, weekends and bank holidays; online tables cap at six people.
Come for breakfast rather than dinner. It opens at half eight, the terrace is empty then, and it is the only thing on this list you can do before work. Worth knowing it is in Circus West Village rather than inside the Power Station itself. It makes our best bottomless brunches, and there is more of the area in our Battersea guide.
Buildings that were something else first
A magistrates’ court, a bank, an embassy, a painter’s studio. The best rooms in London are almost all inherited, and this is where the borrowing has been done most intelligently.
Sessions Arts Club
24 Clerkenwell Green, EC1R 0NA. Mains around £28 to £33. Lunch Tuesday to Sunday, dinner Monday to Saturday
The best-looking room in London, and the argument is not close. It is on the fourth and top floor of the Old Sessions House, the Middlesex Sessions House, built in 1782 by Thomas Rogers and Grade II* listed, in what was the judges’ dining room.
The decision that makes it is what they did not do. The worn jade paint and crumbling pink plaster were left exactly as found, under a twenty-metre dome, with green leather banquettes on the mezzanine, Palladian arched windows, salvaged furniture and a brass-detailed lift. Russell Potter of SODA Studio did the conversion, Ted and Oliver Grebelius of Satila Studios the restoration, and artist Jonny Gent the room itself.
Florence Knight left in January 2024 and Fenella Brereton now runs the kitchen, cooking in a seasonal register that suits the room. The Sunday Sessions launched on 1 February 2026, doing proper non-sharing roasts with guest chef residencies. Book, and ask for the mezzanine. There is more of the area in our Farringdon guide.
Kaia
The Ned, 27 Poultry, EC2R 8AJ. About £41 a head. Daily
The Ned is Edwin Lutyens’ former Midland Bank headquarters, finished in 1924 and Grade I listed, and Kaia sits on the ground floor of it among the verde antico columns that once held up the banking hall. The safe deposit vault is still downstairs, with a twenty-five-tonne door.
Kaia itself is counter seating around an open kitchen with communal tables and vintage desk lamps, doing Asia-Pacific cooking off a robata grill. Around £41 a head, with Saturday brunch £45 to £65 and flowing cocktails another £30.
Sit at the counter over the open kitchen rather than at a table, because the room is the old banking hall and the counter is where you can actually see it. Ring ahead on hours, which differ between listings sites, and expect a ninety-minute table. The City of London guide covers the rest of the neighbourhood.
Aki
1 Cavendish Square, W1G 0LA. Opened October 2025
A Grade II listed former banking hall given a fifteen million pound conversion by Francis Sultana, who kept the soaring ceilings and filled them with plaster trees and cloud motifs borrowed from a Japanese screens exhibition at the Met. Kimono fabrics are used as upholstery.
The bar underneath, Kiyori, is in the old bank vault, done in gilded and burnished bronze. The most ambitious new dining room to open in London since Carbone, and two minutes from Oxford Circus.
Go down to Kiyori in the old vault for a drink before you eat. It is the better half of the building and almost nobody knows it is there. New enough that we would book rather than chance it.
Carbone
The Chancery Rosewood, 30 Grosvenor Square, W1K 2LG. Opened September 2025
The New York Italian, in Eero Saarinen’s Grade II listed former United States Embassy, which is a sentence worth reading twice. Ken Fulk did the interiors: ebonised mahogany marquetry, burgundy billiard-cloth ceilings, Campari-red velvet banquettes, red and white marble floors and Watts 1874 archive damask.
There are works by Ai Weiwei, Julian Schnabel and Francesco Clemente on the walls and the staff are in burgundy Zac Posen tuxedos. Nobody has committed harder to a look in London this decade.
Worth saying plainly: you are paying Mayfair money for New York Italian, and the room is the reason to go, not the veal parmesan. It is the hardest table in Mayfair. Book the moment the diary opens, and see the rest of the area in our Mayfair guide.
Twenty8 NoMad
The NoMad London, 28 Bow Street, WC2E 7AW. Mains £22 to £48, pre-theatre £52. Daily
You may know this as the NoMad Restaurant, or as The Atrium. It relaunched as Twenty8 NoMad on 9 May 2025, named for both the original NoMad’s 28th Street address and this building’s own number.
The building is the former Bow Street Magistrates’ Court, opposite the Royal Opera House, and the room is a three-storey glass-ceilinged atrium. Martin Brudnizki reworked it in 2025 around a custom eight-foot wood-burning hearth carved with leaf motifs, with mirrored gallery walls hung with Napoleon Sarony portraits, including the famous one of Oscar Wilde.
Bryce Shuman came from NoMad New York as culinary director with Zak Gregoire as executive chef, and the cooking moved to a New York-inflected French brasserie register. Mains are £22 to £48 and the £52 pre-theatre is the sensible move given where you are. Ask to sit in the atrium near the hearth rather than up in the gallery. Our Covent Garden restaurants guide covers the rest of the area.
The Lavery
4 Cromwell Place, SW7 2JE. Opened March 2025
A Grade II listed Georgian townhouse that was the home and studio of the painter Sir John Lavery, opposite the Natural History Museum. Parquet floors, distressed mirrors and the vast north-facing studio windows he needed to work by.
The private dining room doubles as a rotating art installation. The current one, Dining Arrangements, is curated by Tbilisi’s Rooms Studio with pieces by Minjae Kim and Bitossi Ceramiche.
Go in daylight. The whole point is the north-facing studio windows Lavery worked by, and they do nothing at all after dark. The best new room in South Kensington, and it turns up in our Kensington guide for good reason.
Bacchanalia
1 Mount Street, W1K 3NA. Set menu £32 for two courses, £36 for three. Daily to half twelve
Bacchanalia divides opinion at the London x London office. It could fairly be called a money-over-substance sort of place, and there are plenty in this city who would argue the opposite. What nobody disputes is the room.
Martin Brudnizki Design Studio put it into a former Porsche showroom in December 2022. Five monumental Damien Hirst sculptures hang over the dining room: a winged lion, two unicorns, Medusa and Bacchus. Gary Myatt painted the ceilings and walls, reworking Thomas Couture’s 1847 Romans in their Decadence with the figures on laptops and phones. Over three hundred books of 24-carat gold leaf went on, the ladies’ cloakroom uses more than four hundred thousand tiles, and there are genuine Greek and Roman antiquities on the bar shelves.
The set menu at £32 is how to see it without committing to the a la carte, and honestly we would eat somewhere else and come here for the room and a drink. We have written it up in full, and the bar makes our best bars in London.
Full maximalism
No restraint, no apologies, and in most cases a design studio given a very long leash. If you want the opposite of a beige room with an open kitchen, start here.
Sketch
9 Conduit Street, W1S 2XG. Gallery mains £25 to £62, afternoon tea from £95
The Gallery is not pink any more, and has not been since April 2022, so ignore every photograph you have seen. India Mahdavi, who did the original pink room, came back and made it yellow: warm golden walls in metallic De Gournay copper paper, yellow fabric and leather banquettes, raffia woven in Senegal and Ghanaian wicker wall lights by Ines Bressand.
The art changes with it. Yinka Shonibare’s Modern Magic hung there from 2022; since January 2026 it has been Jonathan Baldock, with eighty-four clay masks from his Maske series, surreal flower sculptures around the bar and wool cocoons suspended from the ceiling. Mahdavi’s yellow stays. Before Shonibare it was David Shrigley, and before him Martin Creed.
And do not overlook the food: the Lecture Room and Library holds three Michelin stars, awarded in 2024 and retained in 2026, which makes it one of the very few rooms in London where the ceiling and the kitchen are equally serious. Gallery mains are £25 to £62, and our advice is to book the Gallery for tea rather than dinner, because tea is what that room is for. See the rest in our Michelin-starred restaurants guide.
Jacuzzi
94 Kensington High Street, W8 4SH. Lunch set from £18. Daily
A four-floor palazzo that has been described, accurately, as a pleasure palace, and there does appear to have been a rule against fitting any light that is not a chandelier. Big Mamma’s in-house Studio KIKI did it.
The list of things in here is faintly absurd: a spiralling radial marble floor, an alabaster-walled room with backlit shelves holding a thousand bottles, a marble bar under a retractable glass ceiling, a lemon tree canopy, a Murano chandelier, a Sicilian-courtyard mezzanine and a trellised boudoir on the third floor.
The pasta is genuinely good and the Pranzetto lunch set starts at £18 on weekdays. Tables release thirty days ahead at 9am on the website only. See our Kensington guide for the area and our Italian restaurants roundup for the cooking.
Ave Mario
15 Henrietta Street, WC2E 8QG. Pasta £15 to £21, lunch set from £17. Daily
The striped walls in the main hall are modelled on the Duomo di Siena and painted in Dulux Heritage Mallard Green and Piano White, with the brushstrokes deliberately left visible. Six-metre ceilings, a mirrored ceiling in the back room over terracotta floors, three and a half thousand bottles dressing the bar, rattan courtyard chairs from Maison Drucker in Paris and Murano glass globes.
Studio KIKI again, with Apolline Lugger. Pasta is £15 to £21, pizza £13.50 to £20, the fiorentina £35 a head, and the whole tiramisu for the table is £38.
Ask for the back room with the mirrored ceiling: the striped hall is the photograph, the back room is the better dinner. Same booking system as the rest of the group, thirty days ahead at 9am, website only, and thirty-seven days for groups of eight or more. It sits in our Italian restaurants guide and there is plenty else to do in Covent Garden.
Gloria
54-56 Great Eastern Street, EC2A 3QR. Lunch set £23 for two courses. Daily
The one that started the London run for Big Mamma, opened in February 2019 and styled on 1970s Capri. Studio KIKI built it around an elongated bar in grey Carrara and pink marble, a wall covered in a string of porcelain plates, a wine room holding thirteen hundred bottles in old crates, and a lower dining room with a mirrored ceiling and a wildflower carpet over the open kitchen.
The kitsch is the point and it is executed with total conviction. Order the whole tiramisu for the table once, at £38. It is absurd and it is the entire proposition. The lunch set is £23 for two courses and £29 with dessert, Monday to Friday; the group menu is £54 a head.
It makes our best pizza in London list, and the group has a City site called Edmondo on the way.
Amazonico
10 Berkeley Square, W1J 5AR. Weekend asado £65 a head
Lazaro Rosa-Violan designed this and did not hold back: a wave-form ceiling installation, a coral-clad sushi bar, domed glass terrariums and rattan lighting, with a Jungle Bar downstairs running resident DJs. Sandro Silva and Marta Seco brought it from Madrid, where the original opened in 2016.
The cooking is Latin American via Asia and the Mediterranean, which produces some genuinely odd fusion and a lot of wow. The weekend asado is £65 a head between noon and four.
This is the entry where the room outruns the kitchen by the widest margin on this list, so our steer is the Jungle Bar downstairs and a cocktail rather than a full dinner. Bookable ninety days ahead, last booking at 11pm, and no under-tens after seven. It is in our new restaurants archive from when it landed.
Fenix Mayfair
Stratton House, 80 Piccadilly, W1J 8HX. Opened spring 2026
Four and a half thousand square feet and 166 covers on a single floor behind a 1920s Portland stone facade, organised by Studio WYZE around a sequence of sculptural plaster arches and a wall of Greek decorative breeze blocks lit to shift colour through the day.
The bar front is bronze feather. The plaster runs in two Mykonos-inspired finishes. The most confident new room on Piccadilly in years, and Greek, which London has been short of at this level.
New, so book, and give it a season before you build a birthday around it. Ask for a table against the breeze-block wall rather than in the middle of the room.
Under glass and greenery
Two rooms where the planting is the architecture rather than the dressing.
Clos Maggiore
33 King Street, WC2E 8JD. Mains £33 to £55, set lunch £29.50. Monday to Sunday
The conservatory at the back is the most requested table in Covent Garden and the reason to come: a canopy of white blossom overhead, a retractable roof and a working fireplace under it. The rest of the restaurant is a perfectly good classic dining room and it is not the same experience, so specify the conservatory when you book and book early.
Mains are £33 for the pecorino gnudi to £55 for native lobster, with the weekday set lunch at £29.50 for two courses and a five-course tasting menu at £89. It holds three AA Rosettes and a Wine Spectator Grand Award.
It tops our romantic restaurants in London and there is more nearby in our Covent Garden restaurants guide.
Petersham Nurseries
Church Lane, off Petersham Road, Richmond TW10 7AB. Set menus £70 to £95. Closed Mondays
You eat in a working glasshouse under a living canopy of bougainvillea, vines and jasmine, on the nursery’s earth floor. Nobody has built anything that does what this does by design; it works because it was never designed as a restaurant at all.
Go for lunch in summer rather than dinner. The glasshouse is the whole experience and in winter it is dark by your second course. Set menus run £70 for two courses to £95 for four with an arrival cocktail. It holds a Michelin Green Star and has done for several consecutive years.
Richmond is the one to go to. The Covent Garden sites closed in February 2025, and this was always the better room. Our Richmond guide has what else to do around it.
Old London, properly kept
Rooms that have been getting it right for decades and have resisted the temptation to freshen up.
Scott’s
20 Mount Street, W1K 2HE. Booking essential
An institution since 1851 and still the most glamorous fish restaurant in London, done by Martin Brudnizki, with a Renoir Room seating eight and a private room for forty. The Richmond sibling, opened September 2022 under head chef Tom Fraser, has the same nineteenth-century register plus a terrace above the Thames and jazz from Tuesday to Saturday.
The Dover sole and the twice-baked Keen’s cheddar souffle with black truffle are the orders. Be aware of two 2026 changes: only assistance dogs from May, and the terrace now carries a seventy-five pound minimum spend per person, with bookings guaranteeing indoor seating only.
Richard Caring sold a majority stake in Caprice Holdings to Abu Dhabi’s DIAFA in April 2026, though nothing in the room has moved. Our seafood restaurants guide has the rest.
Bentley’s Oyster Bar and Grill
11-15 Swallow Street, W1B 4DG. Mains £27.50 to £49.50, set menu £35. Monday to Sunday
Two rooms and you want to know which you are booking. The ground-floor Oyster Bar is marble, walk-in, and gets through something like a thousand oysters a day; the Grill upstairs is William Morris-inspired papers, blue leather and warm wood across sixty-eight covers, with five private rooms behind it.
Richard Corrigan bought and restored it in 2005 and has run it since. It opened in 1916 under Bill Bentley. Mains are £27.50 for fish and chips to £49.50 for turbot, Dover sole for two is £65, and the set menu is £35 for two courses in the Grill.
Eat downstairs at the marble oyster bar rather than upstairs in the Grill: cheaper, livelier, and the room people actually remember. There is a heated terrace, which on Swallow Street is more useful than it sounds. See also our best restaurants in London.
Bob Bob Ricard
1 Upper James Street, W1F 9DF. Mains £22 to £39, set lunch £34. Daily to midnight
David Collins Studio finished this in 2008 and it won a Wallpaper Design Award for Best Booths the following year, which tells you where the effort went. Lobmeyr chandeliers, mirrored ceilings, oak panelling, marble tabletops, and the blue leather booths that every photograph of the place is taken from.
The Press for Champagne button is the gimmick and it is a good one. We have pushed it purely to check it works and can confirm that it does. We have also returned time and again and never had a disappointing meal, though at £43 for the steak that is measured praise.
The chicken kiev is £22, the beef Wellington £49 a head for two, and the entrecote set lunch is £34 daily until half five. Note it takes bookings for full meals only. Our full Bob Bob Ricard review has the rest, and there is more in our Soho restaurants guide.
Small rooms, big design
Not every beautiful restaurant needs a banking hall. These are the ones where the design budget went a long way in a small space.
KOL
9 Seymour Street, W1H 7BA. Tasting menu £185, five-course lunch £95. Tuesday to Saturday
A-nrd studio built this around three kitchen islands with hand-chiselled counters rising into reclaimed elmwood canopies, with the fire pit and comal oven clad in handmade British clay tiles against burnt-orange stucco. The tableware comes from eighteen British potters and there are pieces by the Mexican designer Fernando Laposse.
Santiago Lastra has held a Michelin star here since 2022 and the conceit still holds: Mexican cooking made entirely from British ingredients. The eleven-course tasting menu is £185, the five-course lunch £95, and there is no a la carte upstairs.
The Mezcaleria downstairs has a monolithic concrete bar with reclaimed oak beam inserts and takes walk-ins, which is the cheap way to see the building. Our Mexican restaurants guide has the rest.
Berenjak
27 Romilly Street, W1D 5AL. Closed Sundays
A narrow corridor of a room modelled on the kababi houses of Tehran: counter seating over the open kitchen, leather booths down one wall, distressed plaster, Persian rugs and black-and-white photographs of modern Iran, with a rear room heated by the tandoor and mangal grill.
It holds a Bib Gourmand and it is the JKS group’s cheapest good idea. Sit at the counter and watch the bread.
A second, larger Berenjak opened in Mayfair on 20 March 2026, on the corner of Duke Street and Brown Hart Gardens, designed by Atelier Wren across two floors with a terrace. The Soho original is the one with the atmosphere. See our cheap eats in London for more in this bracket.
Chuku’s
274 High Road, N15 4AJ. Weekend brunch around £40 to £45. Closed Mondays
Coral walls painted in a shade taken from adobe clay, hung with Nigerian art, in a small room two minutes from Seven Sisters. The least expensive thing on this list by a distance, and one of the most cheerful.
Emeka and Ifeyinwa Frederick founded it and still run it, doing Nigerian tapas designed for sharing. Over half the menu is vegan and gluten free and all the meat is halal. Order the cassava and ata dindin.
Worth flagging on access: there are steps at the entrance, the walkways are narrow and there is no accessible toilet. Their own site quotes weekend brunch at both £40 and £45 a head, so check when you book. It is one of the best Black-owned businesses in London.
The Soak
The Clermont London, Terminus Place, SW1W 0RP
The hotel is the former Grosvenor, opened in 1862 to designs by James Thomas Knowles and Grade II* listed, one of the first buildings in London to use a French pavilion roof. The Soak sits inside it with a grand oval central bar, asphalt-blue booths and double-height arched windows.
It is a hotel bar-restaurant doing modern Middle Eastern, and the room outperforms the brief considerably. Bottomless brunch is £43 a head and the roast sharing board is £65 for the table.
One caution: the venue says it may not be able to accommodate wheelchair users because of the building’s structure. Sit at the oval bar rather than in a booth, and treat it as the best pre-train drink in London rather than a destination dinner. Eighty-five metres from Victoria station. See our date ideas guide for more of the same.
YOPO Zaytoun
The Mandrake, 20-21 Newman Street, W1T 1PG. Rib-eye £49. Wednesday to Saturday
This was YOPO until 14 May 2026, when it relaunched as YOPO Zaytoun with a new chef, a new cuisine and a new interior. Zaytoun is Arabic for olive, and the cooking is now Eastern Mediterranean sharing plates built around Cypriot Manahi olive oil, under head chef Viktor Yordanov, previously of Mazi.
The room was redone by the fashion designer Leo Prothmann in a register he calls Stable Glam: equestrian leather and tack set against the Mandrake’s existing surrealist taxidermy, with a commissioned soundscape. The giant stuffed ostrich with a python for a neck, native American headgear and burlesque fans for wings has survived every refit and long may it.
Read the hours before you go, because they contracted hard: Wednesday to Saturday only for lunch and dinner, breakfast alone from Sunday to Tuesday. The room is worth more than the menu here, so our steer is a drink on the Jurema Terrace, a three-storey open-air canopy planted with jasmine, passionflower and tree ferns, and dinner somewhere else. Our YOPO review covers the old incarnation.
The Cocochine
27 Bruton Place, W1J 6NQ. Opened March 2024
Four floors of a former Mayfair mews house, restored by its owners: a twenty-eight seat room on the ground floor, a seven-seat chef’s counter on the first and a wine cellar in the basement.
The art is the reason it is here. Since autumn 2025 it has hung works by Francis Bacon and David Hockney from the investors’ own collections, having previously borrowed from Hamiltons Gallery. There is no interior designer credited, which is unusual for Mayfair and rather to its credit.
Book the seven-seat counter on the first floor rather than the ground-floor room. The Bacon and the Hockney are the reason to come and you may as well eat under them. Seven seats means booking well ahead.
Cafe Kowloon
London Fields, E8. Opened 2026
A Hong Kong cha chaan teng done by Daytrip without a scrap of pastiche: counter seating, banquettes, and Lazy Susans built directly into the tabletops, which is the sort of detail that only comes from someone who has actually eaten in one.
The newest room on this list and the least expensive of the new arrivals. Get a table with a Lazy Susan built in, order too much, and spin it.
Check the address before you travel, as it opened very recently and the listings have not all caught up.
Booking, and what it actually costs
The three Big Mamma rooms, Ave Mario, Jacuzzi and Gloria, all release tables exactly thirty days ahead at 9am through their own website, and thirty-seven days ahead for groups of eight or more. Walk-ins are taken but not promised. Set that alarm or accept the bar.
Several of these publish menus only as PDFs, and the aggregator sites guess at price bands badly. Where we have printed a figure it is from the restaurant’s own menu; where we have not, it is because we could not see one and would rather say so. Set lunches are consistently the way into the expensive rooms: £24 at Madera, £29.50 at Clos Maggiore, £32 at Bacchanalia, £34 at Bob Bob Ricard, £35 at Bentley’s.
The London x London Take: if you only do one, make it Sessions Arts Club, and go at lunch when the light comes through the Palladian windows onto the unrestored plaster. The lesson of this list is that the best rooms in London are almost never the ones with the biggest design budget, they are the ones where somebody inherited a remarkable building and had the confidence to leave most of it alone. Bacchanalia spent three hundred books of gold leaf making a Porsche showroom look like the fall of Rome, and it is a spectacular evening, but a Clerkenwell courtroom nobody repainted beats it before you have sat down.
