James Dye (of the Camberwell Arms, Franks and Bambi fame) and Benjy Leibowitz (once of NYC’s NoMad hotel) have overhauled Shoreditch’s old Les Trois Garçons site into this: an appealing, clattering corner boozer doing a perfectly pitched line in unprepossessing bar snacks, toasties, and rotisserie chicken and porchetta. Located above the pub, One Club Row is a more chichi offering: a transatlantic, NY-Parisian mish-mash of a restaurant, where one can scarf pickled jalapeño gougères, steak tartare, delicate tuna crudo and big-bucks whole lobster tagliatelle in zhuzhed 19th-century surrounds, triple-cut on dirty martinis and swooning to louche piano jazz.
E1
Quality Wines
Cuisine: Modern EuropeanThe Vogue tip: The two-course £29 lunch deal is daylight robbery on the diner’s part.Neighbourhood: Farringdon
The candlelit little sister to the Quality Chop House, Quality Wines does what’s on the tin and then some. Yes, the natty plonk is lovely. But what Vittles columnist and chef’s chef Nick Bramham is cooking up in the tiny kitchen is spectacular. Start with the gildas and cured meats, plough through the ever-changing pastas and embrace as many of the hyper-seasonal and creatively zhuzhed plates of produce (gleamingly verdant asparagus in peppercorn sauce, say) and proteins (braised veal shin with vin jaune, perhaps; or roasted turbot with tzatziki) as you can fit.
EC1R
Dough Hands
Cuisine: PizzaThe Vogue tip: Make sure someone in your gang gets the Jode; topped with stracciatella, nduja and hot honey, it’s DH’s maximalist mainstay.Neighbourhood: Hackney and Nunhead
Even crap pizza is good food – but London is blessed with some absolutely top-tier pies, and Dough Hands sits near the apex. Via a long-term residency at Hackney’s Spurstowe Arms, and a rather fresher one at Nunhead’s Old Nun’s Head, mastermind Hannah Drye has helped define a conclusive “London-style” of pizza; a chewy, pliable dough with a faint crunch (made from regenerative British flour) and toppings that skew both ascetic (the tomato pie is a pared-back dream) and full-on (enter, the Verdino, with stracciatella, squash, pickled scotch bonnet, brown butter and crispy sage).