Every restaurant has a lineage, whether it says so or not, and London's best new ones say so loudly. At 43 Upper Brook Street, where the Roux family cooked classical French food until January 2024, a chef who came up through Gordon Ramsay's kitchens now holds two Michelin stars. In Cromwell Place, a dining room takes its name from the painter Sir John Lavery, who once lived in the building. In the Strand, the chess divan founded in 1828 has put its silver carving trolleys back. Hardly anyone here is starting from nothing.
The people matter as much as the rooms. Nieves Barragán Mohacho came through Fino, Barrafina and Sabor. Clare Smyth spent thirteen years at Restaurant Gordon Ramsay before Core. Yohei Furuhashi cooked for nine years at The River Café. Having served their time in other people's kitchens, they are cooking narrower and more local: Awadhi court cooking in Borough, Thai flavours from British produce in Marylebone, a Mexican casona off Regent Street that does without avocados.
That is the quiet argument of this moment. Restaurants are paying their respects to a place or a family before they reinvent it, and Poon's, revived in Somerset House by the founders' daughter, is the clearest case. The order below runs by how much each one tells you about how London eats now, which is a different thing from how hard it is to book.
