'WORST' FRENEMIES?
A honky-tonk roadhouse serving deep-fried pickles and chili-cheese fries. A Parsi café straight out of old Bombay. A semi-secret chef’s table, tucked behind a hot dog joint, that’s giving Copenhagen a run for its foraged nettles. If you haven’t eaten in London lately, get back as soon as you can—and expect the unexpected.
One: you can travel a long way to eat at a great local restaurant here. (On, Bermondsey, Clapham, Hackney, and Brixton!) Today’s standouts are often in neighborhoods well beyond the West End. You could liken it to the Brooklyn effect in New York, but a proper comparison would have to throw in the Bronx, Staten Island, and New Jersey as well. Still, central London is far from over: Soho is enjoying its umpteenth revival, and Covent Garden is suddenly red-hot for dining. Meanwhile, the buzz has shifted to such once-humdrum enclaves as Marylebone and Fitzrovia—the latter home to two of the city’s best restaurants.
Two: there is no “London dining scene,” in the singular sense. Though certain tropes and trends pop up, there’s little to unify the city’s food offerings, except that the bill is calculated in pounds sterling. As with music and fashion, the culinary realm here has been niched and sub-niched so much that the options are now near-endless.
Three: few cities on earth offer food this good across the board. That’s not a judgment; it’s a fact. Pound for pound, nose to tail, there’s never been a better—or, frankly, wackier—time to eat here. So which London are you after?
The City of Amazing Breakfasts
What a drag to live in London and have a job—a dreary morning-interrupter that keeps you from lingering over the day’s best meal. Options are myriad: Tom’s Kitchen for the full English, Daylesford for poached eggs, the Wolseley for every damn thing on the menu. But the new Granger & Co. is not only the prettiest breakfast spot in town, it’s arguably the best. Opened by Australian chef Bill Granger, whose Sydney café Bills is legendary for eggs and pancakes, it occupies a prime block of Notting Hill where geraniums fill every window box. For a more old-world vibe, head to Sloane Square and join the air-kissers at Colbert, the latest from Chris Corbin and Jeremy King, the gifted duo behind the indefatigable Wolseley. They’ve taken over the corner spot long occupied by Oriel, whose food was so lousy that the building’s landlord, the Earl of Cadogan, purportedly refused to renew the lease.
