Every so often a restaurant arrives with a reputation so far ahead of it that the meal cannot possibly keep up. Camille is not one of those. It is genuinely as good as everyone says, and the best thing on the menu costs about a tenner.
It opened on Stoney Street in February 2024, from Clare Lattin and Tom Hill, who ran Ducksoup in Soho, with Elliot Hashtroudi in the kitchen after a training that went through St John and P Franco. In 2026 Time Out named it the best restaurant in London and it came twentieth in the National Restaurant Awards. Grace Dent called it “a truly great little restaurant”. All of that for a room you could walk past.
Order the potato first
A deep-fried brick of potato, laid up in dozens of thin layers so it shatters at the edges and collapses in the middle, buried under crème fraîche and more chopped chives than looks sensible. It is the best cheap thing in Borough Market and we have never managed to share one politely. Order it before you have read the rest of the menu.
The rest of the cooking is doing something quieter. A chicory salad comes with plums and capers cutting through it. The two dishes it gets written up for are the pâté en croûte and the grilled ox heart with Café de Paris butter, and both deserve it. But the real instruction is to read the specials board before the printed menu, because that is where the kitchen is actually working.
The room
Small, red-panelled, low-lit, and served on green and white transferware that makes the whole thing feel forty years older than it is. There is a bar, a window counter and a terrace. It is tight, and it is meant to be: this is a restaurant built for two people and a bottle rather than a table of eight.
Why it works here
A French provincial bistro two minutes from a produce market is not a coincidence, it is the business plan. The reason the vegetables taste like something is that they were bought about forty feet from the kitchen door, and the reason the menu changes daily is that it has to. Plenty of restaurants in London talk about sourcing. This one has the shortest possible version of it and does not make a fuss about saying so.
It is also worth understanding what Camille is not. It is not a destination tasting menu and it is not trying to be clever. The cooking is old-fashioned in the best sense: pâté, offal, chicory, potatoes, done with total conviction and no garnish for the sake of it. If you have had a run of restaurants that arrive with tweezers, this is the correction.
What it costs
Mains run £22 to £30 and you should budget around £100 a head with service, which makes it the most expensive thing we would send you to in Borough Market. It is worth it, but it is a decision rather than a drop-in. Book ahead and take a card, because they hold one against the reservation.
The London x London Take: exceptional, and the rare case of a restaurant that has been showered with praise and simply deserves all of it. The cooking is precise without being fussy, the room is one of the best small dining rooms in London, and the potato alone justifies the trip. Save it for something, book two weeks out, sit at the window, read the specials board, and do not pretend you are going to share the potato.
Rating: 5/5
Need to know
- Address: 2 to 3 Stoney Street, London SE1 9AA
- Nearest station: London Bridge, three minutes
- Website: camillerestaurant.co.uk
- Booking: essential, and they take card details
- Price: mains £22 to £30, around £100 a head with service
- Worth knowing: the specials board changes daily and is usually the best thing on offer
More of the neighbourhood in our guides to Borough Market restaurants, London Bridge restaurants and things to do in Southwark.
“Exceptional. The rare restaurant that deserves every word written about it, and the potato is worth the trip on its own.”
