Fourteen places to eat in Hampstead village, with what they cost and when they are actually open. The best of them has eight seats and you sit at the counter.
Hampstead is not a difficult place to eat well. It is a difficult place to eat well at five in the afternoon, which is a different problem and one nobody warns you about. The village runs two almost entirely separate trades: the cafes and bakeries that open at half seven and are shut by half five, and the kitchens that do not start until five or six. Come off the Heath at four hungry and you will find a lot of closed doors and one very busy pub.
So this is arranged by when you can actually use it. Everything below is in Hampstead village itself, NW3, within about ten minutes of the tube. Belsize Park and West Hampstead are separate places with their own high streets, and we have left them out rather than pad the list with things you would need a different tube line to reach.
One practical note before anything else. Hampstead is the deepest station on the Underground, with platforms 58.5 metres down and the network’s deepest lift shaft. The stairs run to over three hundred steps and are not a shortcut. On a sunny Sunday afternoon, when the Heath empties into the village, expect a proper queue for the lifts on the way home. More on the walking in our guide to Hampstead Heath walks.
The best table in the village
INÉ by Taku
16 Hampstead High Street, NW3 1PX · Wednesday to Sunday, 12pm to 2pm and 6pm to 9pm
An eight-seat omakase counter opened in Hampstead in December 2023 and quietly became the best restaurant in the village. It is the second site from the team behind Taku in Mayfair, with Takuya Watanabe as patron and Law Kwok Meng heading the kitchen, in the room that used to be Goldfish.
There are three tiers and the difference between them is not just money. Eight courses at a table is £55; thirteen courses at the counter is £85; the premium seventeen-course menu is £130. The counter is the entire point, so if you are going to do it, do it properly and ask for a counter seat when you book, because there are only eight of them and four services a week. Edomae sushi done with real precision, in a village where the previous best answer to a special occasion was a Georgian basement doing small plates. There is a separate bar upstairs for sake, and private dining for seven to twelve.
Dinner
All four of these open in the evening and three of them close for the afternoon, so check the clock before you walk up the hill.
Jin Kichi
73 Heath Street, NW3 6UG · closed Mondays · lunch 12.30pm to 2.30pm, dinner 6pm to 10.20pm
The Hampstead institution, two hundred metres up Heath Street from the tube, and still the hardest table in the village to get at short notice. It is a charcoal yakitori grill first and a sushi counter second, which is the right way round: the chicken and spring onion skewers, the ox tongue, the salted crisped chicken skin and the grilled salmon jaw are what the regulars are there for.
Book, and book early. The restaurant asks for advance reservations rather than treating them as optional, and it closes on Mondays, which catches out anybody who has just walked the Heath on a bank holiday. The kitchen shuts between half two and six, so there is no drifting in mid-afternoon. It is not cheap once the skewers mount up, and the room is small and hard-surfaced, so do not come here for a quiet conversation.
28 Church Row
28 Church Row, NW3 6UP · from 5pm daily, lunch noon to 3pm Saturday and Sunday only
A basement on what is probably the finest Georgian terrace in London, doing Spanish and Italian small plates off a menu that changes constantly. The vegetable dishes are the ones to order and the wine list is unusually good by the glass, which makes it the best place in Hampstead to eat and drink without committing to a bottle.
The thing to know, because it changes how you use the place: there are no evening reservations at all. Lunch is bookable, and lunch only happens at weekends. Every dinner service is walk-in, so the move is to arrive when it opens at five rather than at half eight, and to have a second plan. That is also the answer to the dead hour, since it is one of the few kitchens going before six.
L’Antica Pizzeria
66 Heath Street, NW3 1DN · 5pm to 10.30pm Monday to Thursday, noon to 10.30pm Friday to Sunday
Neapolitan pizza done to the letter: Caputo flour, a 36-hour ferment and a wood oven run at 400 degrees, which is the combination that produces a base with some chew to it rather than a cracker. The pizzas are named rather than numbered, so you order a Sophia Loren or a Caravaggio or a Giuseppe Verdi and take your chances on the translation.
It is small and it fills, particularly at weekends when the Heath crowd comes down. The catch is the clock again: no lunch Monday to Thursday, because it does not open until five. Friday to Sunday it runs from midday, which makes it one of the more reliable places to get fed in the village on a Saturday afternoon.
Delicatessen
46 Rosslyn Hill, NW3 1NH · noon to 11pm Sunday to Thursday, closed Friday and Saturday
Modern Middle Eastern cooking and one of the better kitchens in NW3, sitting in the middle of the Rosslyn Hill run. The hummus masabacha is £13 and the golden cauliflower £15; mains run from shawarma at £29.50 and chicken musakhan at £31 up to a lamb chop at £41 and short ribs at £45. The pulled chips with y-sauce at £8 are the thing to add without thinking about it.
It is kosher and KLBD-certified, which means it closes all day Friday and all day Saturday for Shabbat. Those are the two evenings most visitors would try, so this needs planning around rather than stumbling into. Sunday to Thursday it runs until eleven, making it the latest proper dinner in Hampstead.
Daytime
The village’s best eating is arguably all before four in the afternoon. Perrin’s Court, the narrow pedestrian alley off the High Street, holds two of these within a few doors of each other and is very easy to walk straight past.
Ginger & White
4A-5A Perrins Court, NW3 1QS · 7.30am to 5.30pm weekdays, to 6pm at weekends
A hundred metres from the tube, down the alley, and the village’s default breakfast for fifteen years. Dippy eggs with soldiers, shakshuka with tahini and feta, the scrambled eggs they have built a reputation on, borekas and cinnamon buns. The coffee is Square Mile’s Red Brick, which is a better bean than most neighbourhood cafes bother with.
Two things worth knowing. There is a separate street hatch called The Window doing pastries and sandwiches to take away, which is the move if the room is full and you are heading for the Heath anyway. And click-and-collect orders have a midday cut-off for the following day, so a picnic needs deciding on the night before. It opens at half seven, earlier than anything else on this page. More breakfast options across the city in our guide to the best breakfasts in London.
Sourdough Sophia
14 Perrin’s Court, NW3 1QS · 8am to 4.45pm Monday to Saturday, from 9am Sunday
Sophia Handschuh moved the bakery from Highgate into its biggest site yet in July 2025, a few doors from Ginger & White, which turned one alley into a genuine two-stop breakfast street. More seating than the old place, and the bread is the reason to come rather than the coffee.
It shuts at a quarter to five every day, which is earlier than you would expect of a bakery cafe and is part of why the village empties when it does. Go in the morning for the full counter, because by mid-afternoon the good things have gone, which is how it should be. The pair of them make Perrin’s Court the densest good-food address in Hampstead, and it is a narrow alley between two shopfronts on the High Street that thousands of people walk past every weekend without turning into.
Ottolenghi Hampstead
32 Rosslyn Hill, NW3 1NH · 8am to 9.30pm Monday to Saturday, 9am to 6pm Sunday
The Hampstead branch arrived in 2023 in the old Kojo site, and it does the full range: counter salads to take away, and a proper sit-down menu that runs all day. Shakshuka is £15.50, the fried turmeric eggs £13.80 and buttermilk pancakes £11.20, with breakfast served until 11.45. In the evening the char-grilled asparagus with basil mayo is £26, the spiced sea bream with dukkah £29.50 and the burrata with hibiscus-poached rhubarb £17.
The Sunday trap is worth circling: the shop stays open until six but the kitchen stops at half three, so Sunday dinner here does not exist. You can book through SevenRooms or simply walk in, which is rarer than it should be in Hampstead.
Harley’s Butchery & Rotisserie
Oriel Hall, Oriel Place, NW3 1QN · opened 2025
From the team behind Ibai in Smithfield, which is why a butcher’s shop has ended up being one of the more interesting things to open in Hampstead in years. The rotisserie is the point: half a chicken is £16.95 and a whole one £32.50, which makes it comfortably the best-value serious food in the village and the obvious Heath picnic stop.
The sandwiches and salads are all £12.95, including a chicken Caesar and a coronation chicken, with rotisserie potatoes at £3.95 and chicken gravy at £2.95. If you are feeling less sensible there is a plate of 5J Iberico at £24, Wagyu cecina with crisps at £28 and Cantabrian anchovies with burrata at £12.95. The Basque cheesecake is £12.50 a slice or £50 for the whole thing, which is the correct way to buy a cheesecake.
The Hampstead Butcher & Providore
56 Rosslyn Hill, NW3 1ND · open every day except Christmas Day, Boxing Day and New Year’s Day
A butcher, cheesemonger and charcuterie counter that belongs in a food guide even though you cannot sit down in it, because it is where a Hampstead picnic actually comes from. They will put a Heath provisioning box together for you, and the cheese counter is better than anything else within a mile.
The detail that matters: the sausage rolls are £6 and they are made at weekends only. Turn up on a Tuesday wanting one and you will be disappointed, which is a small tragedy worth planning around. Saturday or Sunday, on the way up to the Heath, is the whole point of the place.
On the Heath
The Brew House Café, Kenwood
Kenwood House, Hampstead Lane, NW3 7JR · Kenwood open daily 10am to 5pm, last entry 4.30pm
Still called the Brew House, still in the old service wing at Kenwood, and still the best place to eat on the Heath itself. Sandwiches, salads, soup and cakes, taken in the courtyard or the walled garden, with one of the great house collections in Britain a few metres away and free to walk into.
Two practical things. Kenwood is cashless, so card only, all the way through. And there is no station anywhere near it: either walk up across the Heath from Hampstead tube, which takes about forty-five minutes and is the nice way to do it, or take the 210 bus from Golders Green. There is a second, smaller outlet on site, the Stewards Room, for grab-and-go if the Brew House queue has gone out of the door.
The pubs
Hampstead has better pubs than most of London and they are genuinely useful for eating, particularly at the hours when nothing else is serving.
The Flask
14 Flask Walk, NW3 1HE · food noon to 9.30pm Monday to Saturday, to 9pm Sunday
The answer to the dead hour, and the single most useful address in this guide. Young’s have owned it since 1904, it is Grade II listed with the original wood and glass screens still dividing the rooms, and the kitchen runs straight through from midday to half nine with no afternoon break. Nothing else in the village does that.
The food is a proper notch above pub standard: smoked salmon on sourdough and a cyder-battered haddock sandwich are both £12.50, the Dorset lamb and Guinness pie is £22.50, a pan-roasted ChalkStream trout fillet £23.50 and an 8oz bavette £24. Sticky toffee pudding is £7.50. Their own advice is to book because it fills fast, and on a Sunday afternoon in summer that is not a suggestion. More of this sort of thing in our guide to London’s oldest pubs.
The Wells
30 Well Walk, NW3 1BX · kitchen noon to 3pm and 6pm to 10pm weekdays
More restaurant than pub, and honest about it: roughly four in five customers are there to eat. Beth Coventry has held the licence since 2003 with Greg Smith in the kitchen, and the roast beef is what it is known for. The menu changes seasonally and the upstairs dining rooms are considerably smarter than the bar.
The kitchen closes between three and six on weekdays, and between four and seven at weekends, which is the opposite of helpful if you have just come down off the Heath. Booking goes through SevenRooms, and groups of eight or more have to leave card details, with £20 a head charged for cancelling inside 48 hours. Worth knowing that the freehold was sold in 2022, ending about three hundred years of ownership by the Hampstead Wells and Campden Trust.
The Holly Bush
22 Hollymount, NW3 6SG · up the steps off Heath Street
The prettiest pub in Hampstead and the hardest to find, up a flight of steps off Holly Hill in a tangle of lanes that feels like a village within the village. It is a Fuller’s house now, gas-lit in feel if not in fact, with small panelled rooms and no music.
The reason to come for food rather than just a drink is the Sunday roast, which runs off its own separate menu rather than being a line on the main one. Book it. The rest of the week the kitchen does a decent gastropub list, and the room is worth the climb regardless of whether you eat. It is also the most obvious place in the village to end up for one more, which is how most Hampstead evenings finish.
When to go
The dead hour is real and it is at five. By then Sourdough Sophia has shut at 4.45pm, Ginger & White at 5.30pm on a weekday, and the Kenwood cafes have closed with the house at five. Meanwhile 28 Church Row has only just opened its doors, L’Antica does not open at all before five from Monday to Thursday, and Jin Kichi’s dinner does not start until six. The Flask is the exception that saves the afternoon, because its kitchen never stops.
The other pattern to plan around is the weekly closures, which are unusually severe here. Jin Kichi is shut on Mondays. Delicatessen is shut on Fridays and Saturdays. INÉ only opens Wednesday to Sunday. A Monday visitor to Hampstead has markedly fewer options than a Thursday one, and nobody tells you that either.
Sunday is patchy in a way that will surprise you. Ottolenghi’s kitchen stops at half three, 28 Church Row does lunch then shuts until five, and The Wells has a gap from four to seven. Sunday roasts are on at The Holly Bush, The Wells and The Flask. If you want a single plan for a Sunday: Hampstead Butcher for a sausage roll on the way up, the Heath, then the Flask in the late afternoon when everywhere else has given up. Our best walks in London guide has the routes, and the Hill Garden and Pergola is the quiet corner most people miss.
The London x London Take: For a special dinner, book the counter at INÉ and pay the £85 rather than sitting at a table for £55, because the counter is the whole reason the place works. For everything else, the village rewards going early: Ginger & White or Sourdough Sophia before ten, the Hampstead Butcher for a weekend sausage roll on the way to the Heath, and Harley’s for a £16.95 half chicken that will feed two people on a bench better than most restaurants manage indoors. And write down one address: The Flask, Flask Walk, kitchen open noon to half nine without a break. It is the only thing in Hampstead that will feed you at five in the afternoon, and at some point it will rescue your day.
