Canary Wharf’s best-kept restaurant secret no longer needs a theatre ticket to get in

Songbird, the restaurant and bar built into the same Wood Wharf building as the Troubadour Canary Wharf Theatre, has been open to non-theatregoers since May. We went for dinner earlier this week to see whether it holds up once you’re not just killing time before curtain up.

Nobody wanders into Canary Wharf expecting a cavernous, genuinely good British restaurant to be hiding inside a theatre building, which is exactly why Songbird works as well as it does. The space is enormous, a central circular bar anchoring a room of curved banquettes and green marble tables, built originally to serve Troubadour audiences and only opened up to everyone else this year. We went in expecting pre-show sandwiches. We left planning our next visit.

The food

Crumpets and caviar for £18 sounds like the kind of dish a menu writer dreamt up to be photographed rather than eaten, and then it turns up and it’s genuinely lovely, indulgent little bites of crumpet, a generous dollop of clotted cream, salty pops of caviar and a lick of lemon zest cutting through the richness. It’s a starter that knows exactly what it is and doesn’t apologise for it.

The heritage radishes and butterbean hummus (£6.50, and vegan) does something cleverer: it’s summer on a plate, properly seasonal, the hummus hitting a consistency and seasoning that a lot of kitchens still get wrong. The giant red prawns in confit garlic butter with charred lemon and toasted focaccia (£15) were the standout of the night, cooked exactly right, with bread that exists purely to mop up everything left in the bowl. Order it and fight someone for the last piece of focaccia.

Pork rillettes with gherkin jam, pickled shallots and sourdough (£11) is a rich dish rescued by sharp, acidic supporting characters, the jam and shallots doing exactly the job they’re there for. The roast chicken, with roasted leek, king oyster mushroom and a miso mushroom sauce (£24), is rich and creamy rather than light, but it stays the right side of overwhelming, a dish that knows when to stop adding things.

Then there’s the Wagyu burger. Eight ounces of it, truffle mayonnaise, mature cheddar, pickled shallots, a properly buttery bun, £28 and worth every penny of it, with the option to add fresh black truffle for another £10 if you’re feeling it. It’s a burger with a lot going on that somehow never tips into too much, and the fries alongside deserve their own mention, genuinely some of the better fries we’ve had with a burger this year.

The one dish that didn’t land was the St Clements cheesecake (£9, vegetarian), a citrus cheesecake with a biscuit base and caramelised oranges. The idea is right, the citrus should be cutting through all that cream cheese and butter, but it arrived a little too polite, not enough punch to do the job. Everything else on the menu earns its place. This one needs another pass in the kitchen.

The drinks

Special mention here for two things: the Earl Grey Martini, one of a small run of cocktails built around nostalgic British flavours, and The Songbird itself, the restaurant’s own namesake serve. Both are worth ordering before you’ve even opened the food menu, and the Earl Grey Martini in particular does something genuinely interesting with a drink that could easily have been a gimmick.

The London x London Take: Songbird spent its first life as a theatre restaurant, and it would have been very easy for it to coast on captive audiences and pre-show timing pressure. It hasn’t. This is a proper British menu taken seriously, with only one dish out of seven missing the mark, in a room too grand for how few people currently seem to know it’s open to anyone at all. Book it whether or not you’ve got tickets next door.

Rating: 4/5

Need to Know

• Where: Songbird Restaurant & Bar, 2 Cartier Circle, Canary Wharf, London E14 5HF
• Nearest transport: Canary Wharf (Elizabeth line, Jubilee line) or South Quay DLR
• Price: £££
• Booking: songbirdrestaurant.com
• Note: alternative entrance via Troubadour Canary Wharf Theatre