A Modern Guide to Eating and Drinking in London

Photos: Peden + Munk 

Nowhere else do 200-year-old restaurants feel so buzzy, or avant-garde newcomers so classic. American expat Lauren Collins dines her way through the city, savoring the best of both worlds.

“You know what they say,” the woman whispered. “Red shoes, no knickers.” I did not know what they said! If I had, I might not have shown up at the party, three days after moving to London from New York, in a pair of scarlet flats. No matter: We were picnicking in Regent’s Park, enjoying a midsummer’s spread of strawberries, hummus, and a fine chilled white rain. My interlocutor was probably 70, with a white bun and shirtwaist dress. Chastened, I stared at the grass. Which is where I noticed that the woman’s own feet were clad in orthopedic sandals the color of a tomato.

London, playground of Pepys and Pippa, city of old ladies going commando at sodden 30-something birthday fests. In L.A., everyone is the same age. In New York, hipsters and breeders and grandees socialize on separate tracks. One of the major charms of London is its demo­graphic untidiness. Pensioners get pissed. Students cook. Babies go to pubs. The city’s age agnosticism is on its most splendid display in the restaurant scene, which hails the Mayfair dowager as enthusiastically as the Shoreditch punk. ­Londoners won’t abandon a restaurant after six months, or six years, just for novelty’s sake, nor is brand-newness a sufficient condition for adoration. The Concorde is out of commission, but get to London with an appetite and you can still bend time.

RELATED: Fish and Chips with Minty Mushy Peas

Rib of beef for two with Yorkshire pudding and Dauphinoise potatoes at Rules.

A week spent bingeing one’s way through the city offers an atemporal mix of pleasures—correctness and cool at the same time, the finger bowl and the slab of slate. We might as well begin our survey at the beginning, with Rules, which, at 217 years, claims to be London’s oldest restaurant. A food-­minded traveler to Paris may be unlikely to dust off his blazer for Le Grand Véfour, but a meal at is worth spiffing up for. ­Graham Greene celebrated his birthdays there. In The End of the Affair, his trysting lovers order pork chops, but the thing here is game: woodcock, wigeon, teal, snipe. Soon after the Glorious Twelfth—August 12, the opening of the grouse-­shooting season in the UK—the tables abound with fowl. With red velvet upholstery and a Kate Middleton cocktail, Rules is not untouched by kitsch. But it does high England with such glee, and so winkingly, that the act comes off as inclusive ­rather than reactionary. The restaurant has a house Rolls-Royce, built in 1935. It is named Bubbles. You have to love a place that says, simply, of its mission, “We serve the traditional food of this country,” and posts a review on its website in which Kingsley Amis savaged “two of the most disgusting full-dress meals I have ever eaten in my life.” The food at Rules is in fact very good. The roasted grouse, available hot-crossed with strips of bacon and served with latticework chips and bread sauce with a stutter of nutmeg, is reason alone to join the Windsor-knotted after-workers ordering by the bottle not the glass. So is the superb rib eye for two with Yorkshire pudding. What did Kingsley Amis know? He liked ketchup in his Bloody Mary.

Chiltern Firehouse; pomegranate molasses chicken at Honey & Co.

Another perennially winning option is J Sheekey, the venerable Covent Garden seafood and game restaurant (c. 1896), a warren of photo-lined rooms adjoined by a glamorous horseshoe-shaped oyster bar. There, in late spring, you’ll find gulls’ eggs with celery salt and the world’s most theft-worthy napkins, yellow monogrammed dish-towel-size things that would stanch a tidal surge. “May I offer you a newspaper or a Wi-Fi password?” the host asked as I waited in the bar for friends.

I said yes to both. “I’m sorry, I only have the Evening Standard,” he said upon returning, handing me a card printed with the code. The rock oysters—Lindisfarne Rocks, Gillardeau Spéciales—came with little wild boar sausages. Trendy herbs (wood sorrel, hedgerow garlic) spruced up the proteins (eel, steak) like high-tops to tweeds. Even the traditional fish and chips with minted mushy peas, served with a cruet of vinegar, takes on a nattily modern air. The crusty, creamy, faintly mustardy fish pie bubbled as though someone were snorkeling beneath the surface. It is canonical, and I don’t like fish pie.

RELATED: Pomegranate Molasses Chicken with Bulgur Salad

London locavorism at Fera at Claridge’s.

The hope and glory of the land of hope and glory is lunch. I don’t mean a Pret A Manger sandwich involv­ing some humid combo of mayonnaise and prawns. (Pret does have its moments: The arrival of “Christmas Lunch”—turkey, cranberry-port sauce, stuffing, spinach, and crispy onions on brown bread—heralds the season as happily as any turtledove.) I mean a sit-down affair, an all-­afternooner, distinguished from its American counterpart both by shocking amounts of booze and by the fact that, in Britain, lunch is the first-pick meal for a meandering catch-up session with someone you really enjoy. The best place in London to have this sort of meal is the River Café. Ruthie Rogers and the late Rose Gray opened the restaurant in 1987 and, as it has often been said, revolutionized British food with their focus on stellar hyperseasonal, then-obscure Italian ingredients. Their stock-in-trade remains the most authentic preparation at the highest possible prices. A quarter of a century on, the River Café is a prosperous, stable democracy: You go there because you know that everything, from the bowl of freshly ground pepper on the table to the handwritten menu with just one suggestion for an aperitivo written in the top right-hand corner, will be just so. Vitello tonnato, insalata di carciofi, risotto nero, branzino al forno, pappardelle with sage, and veal braised in what seems like liquid gold. The food is Italian, but the mood is Switzerland. The only threat to the peace is the famous Chocolate Nemesis, a cake so decadent it could incite a coup. (Gray and Rogers published the recipe in a 1995 cookbook; famously, no one could get it to work. Julian Barnes, describing one failed ­effort as “a kind of cowpat,” wrote, “The paranoid explanation was that some key element of the recipe had been deliberately omitted, thus driving customers back to the restaurant for the authentic item.”) Lunch at the River Café, amid minimalist furnishings that must have once seemed futuristic in the Richard Rogers–designed space, is the sort of idyll that you’ll do anything to draw out (which is perhaps why the restaurant will remain open while the surrounding Thames Wharf development undergoes a major renovation). So: maybe a Vin Santo. Coffee, yes. Secrets, confidences, gossip you probably shouldn’t have let rip—especially since the subject may well be sitting within hearing distance.

RELATED: 7 Amazing Fantasy Food Destination Weddings

At the River Café, a proper British lunch means flawless Italian food (and Scottish langoustines).

Right, but what about the upstarts? Where do you go for a breather from claret and lavender socks? ­Cherie Blair and Rita Ora might say Chiltern Firehouse—the newish hotel, restaurant, and PR mill from AmericanAndré Balazs—where, amazingly, both were seen dining in the space of a week. Chiltern Firehouse, which the Daily Mail has deemed “the world’s hottest celebrity hangout,” can be an unrelaxing experience for the rest of us. You get out of a cab and are met by a top-hatted bouncer masquerading as a doorman. He hustles you past a lovely courtyard and slots you in front of the maître d’ stand, where you jostle for attention withBryan Ferry and Alannah Weston (the creative director of Selfridges, which her family owns). The room is beautifully lit and home to a supremely seductive bar, but so frantic that you fear someone’s going to come sliding down one of the columns that support the ceiling, ready to put out a blaze. The hostesses wear Spock-like jumpsuits the colors of a rainbow in space. There is a place for all of this, but, to my mind, it’s the Meatpacking District, not Marylebone. Followers of executive chef Nuno Mendes, who earned a Michelin star and much admiration at Viajante in Bethnal Green, might find it somewhat of a shame that he now presides over a place where his garlic-marinated Ibérico pork loin—so precisely pink it could have been chargrilled by laser—is sold with the promise: “There’s not much fat.”

Inside the light and airy space at Lyle’s.

The graft of celebrated youngish chef to ambitious hotel restaurant seems to have taken much better at Fera at Claridge’s, where Simon Rogan serves a tasting menu brimming with locavore vocab quizzes such as lovage (an herb from the parsley family) and hogget (a lamb slaughtered at between 12 and 18 months). A pea wafer, like a florentine, delivers fennel pollen and marigold petals. Mackerel, served in a box of rocks, tastes like riding a wave.

  Beef tartare at Lyle’s; an Avenue Cocktail at the Connaught Bar.

Rogan’s food is probably more itself at L’Enclume, his two-Michelin-star restaurant and farm on the River Eea in Cumbria, but it looks perfectly good in a suit. He even manages to make the bread course thrilling: a malt loaf, brushed with ale before baking and served on a bur oak wood platter with bone marrow butter and an austerely intense mushroom broth that you drink from a ceramic mug. It was as if an ukiyo-e painter had been commissioned to cook a ploughman’s lunch.

For those who prefer something less affected but genuinely cool, there is40 Maltby Street, a biodynamic wine warehouse in Bermondsey that serves small plates (asparagus fritters, a cheffy almond soup). The space, tucked under the railway arches near Tower Bridge Road, feels like sitting inside a cut-open can. The tables are made of packing pallets. Young couples sit strewn among them taking beautiful selfies that would make the work of any paparazzo pale.

Aloo chaat at Gymkhana.

Honey & Co., in Fitzrovia, belongs to the chef Itamar Srulovich and his wife, Sarit Packer, who were born in ­Israel, she to British parents. Packer was the executive head chef at Nopi, where Yotam Ottolenghi and Sami Tamimi solidi­fied the status of za’atar, tahini, and pomegranate as national staples. Honey & Co.—with its simple white room, herb-centric cuisine, and platters of sweets—makes nice use of the Ottolenghiaesthetic without aping it. It is a different kind of British lunch: The day I went, everyone around me was guzzling mint lemonade along with their makluba (an upside-down dome of chicken and saffron rice). A dessert billed as “cold cheese cake” actually consisted of a nest of kadaif pastry, crowned by a dollop of whipped feta and cream cheese, which was, in turn, topped with almonds, blueberries, and pine-and-fir honey from Greece. It was the single best thing I ate all week. All cheesecakes should trade in their maraschino cherries for marjoram leaves. Luckily, the recipe is in their cookbook, which will appear stateside this spring.

RELATED: Aloo Chaat

Chiltern Firehouse chef Nuno Mendes.

Lyle’s, in Shoreditch, takes as inspiration another school of London cooking: the revered Fergus Henderson’s nose-to-tail. James Lowe, the chef and proprietor, ran the kitchen at St. John before opening a pop-up as part of the collective the Young Turks. (One of his former cohorts opened the dangerously fun Clove Club nearby.) The stripped-down set menu, at £39 ($60) for dinner, is like an ambitious Ph.D. student’s acknow­ledgment to his beloved advisor: Smoked Eel & Horseradish, Blood Cake & Damson, Mutton & Turnip Broth, served in a gorgeously spare room. You want to applaud Lowe’s seriousness, but when Asparagus & Walnut Mayonnaise turns out to be four spears to be shared between two people, you’re left hungry enough to eat an ampersand.

New and old favorites: Ibérico pork with raw and roasted turnips at Chiltern Firehouse; fish and chips at J Sheekey.

By the end of the week, the old chaps seemed to have it by a hair—until I went to Gymkhana, which, in its own words, seeks to fuse the Raj with modern Britain, where curry is as popular as fish and chips. (Gymkhana, from Hindi and Urdu words, came to refer in Anglo-Indian to a gentleman’s sporting club.) The Mayfair restaurant is the latest project of the Sethi family, which also owns Trishna, a Michelin-starred spot that focuses on the cuisine of India’s coastal southwest. Walk in the door and encounter nary a filament bulb. Instead: a polished oak ceiling humming with fans, and cut-glass sconces from Jaipur. Grandmother Sethi’s barometer hangs on a wall. Even the porcelain pull-chain toilets announce the Sethis’ confidence that they have built something that will last:

“Gymkhana, Albemarle Street.”

The Regent’s Punch at Gymkhana comes with your own tiny nutmeg grater.

The menu is catholic and encourages sharing: There are nashta (duck dosas), kebabs (beetroot with chutney), tikkas (chicken with kachumber, or cucumber salad), curries (suckling pig), biryanis (wild muntjac), game and chops (wood-­pigeon pepper fry). There’s no standing on tradition or pandering to inexperience; you have to either know your stuff or ask your waiter, who will help you come up with a course of action so fluidly that you’ll think you’ve thought of it yourself. The one-bite gol guppas erupt in a burst of tamarind-and-chile-flavored water. The pao filled with minced kid goat is the only interesting slider in the world. Regent’s Punch comes with a tiny crystal carafe of Champagne and your own nutmeg ­grater, an outlandishly pleasing touch. Gymkhana serves food that you have only ever been able to get in one place, at one time. Old, young, past, future, whatever. This is London. Go now.

Lauren Collins, a staff writer for The New Yorker, is working on a book about learning French.

More from Bon Appétit:

Healthy Snacks That Won’t Spoil Dinner

DIY Wedding Cocktail Hour: Cheese, Charcuterie, Oysters. Done.