No matter how low your tolerance for caviar pomp and suited-service glory is, Otto’s in Holborn is an immersive French experience that will turn you into a proud walking slab of butter and a lobster annihilation apologist. Here, they kick it old school. Any gentlemen present will receive encouraging shoulder pats, a sommelier circulates like dapper Jaws with a taste for Pouilly-Fumé, and the aesthetic is best described as “velvet and every relic ever featured on Antiques Roadshow”. It’s one of London’s last great maximalists and once you step across its threshold, you’re firmly planted in Otto’s world. It’s a world that everyone should experience at least once—for the stories, for their sheer, die-hard commitment to grandeur, but most of all, to experience the famed ‘a la presse’ pre-booked tasting menus.
video credit: Heidi Lauth Beasley
video credit: Jake Missing
You’re doing Otto’s a disservice if you don’t lean all the way in with one of the pre-booked ‘a la presse’ options. If you’re picturing a glorified lemon squeezer, think again. The towering, traditional presses—ornate, with a history featuring the words ‘Cristofle the Silversmith’ and ‘Titanic’—play the tableside leads in their gout-courting tasting menus. Creatures from land, sea, and sky aren’t safe from these machiavelian antique torture devices and you can choose between a whole pigeon, duck, or lobster. The latter is an experience that will stay with us—and inevitably, our arteries—for the foreseeable future.
Spoiler: don’t get too attached to the live, jiving lobster you meet in act one. Sweet, innocent Monsieur Claws is destined for a fate—within eyeline and, in a harrowing turn for sadistic, sword-swinging soundtracks, earshot—that even the producers of Wolf Hall would deem ‘a bit grisly’. What follows is a baptism of butter, sweetbread, foie gras, and consommés so rich and sweet that any dessert ambitions exit the building quicker than a “would a lobster survive in my bathtub” crustacean pardon.
video credit: Jake Missing
photo credit: Jake Missing
video credit: Jake Missing
Around the time caviar started getting dispensed like ketchup and literal fire was being ladled into a pan of sweet booze a metre from our table, we started to question whether any of it was necessary. It is, but only if you have the good sense to think of Otto’s as less of a restaurant, and more as a flamboyant tribute to true excess where you and a date or sweetbread-seduced friends are granted permission to indulge in the kind of hedonism rarely witnessed outside of state banquets.
It’s as set in its ways as a centurion patriarch who would rather set fire to their large collection of Marilyn Monroe wall art than trade their foie gras for hummus, but we wouldn’t want it to change anyway. Even if a meal here requires a cream exorcism and three-day recovery time, the ‘a la presse’ experiences are a unique tableside show you won’t forget.
Food Rundown
The following dishes appear on Otto’s pre-ordered ‘Homard A La Presse’ menu.
Domed Lobster Consommé With Flamed Scallop And King Prawn
This starter is pure theatre. After witnessing the juices get pressed, set on fire, and simmered for so long that its molten scent lets everyone in a two-mile radius know that you’ve ordered the lobster, it arrives on your table with a pastry hat, before a fat, juicy scallop is ceremoniously plopped inside. The result is just as dramatic: comforting, a touch briny, and all-out moreish thanks to the buttery pastry.
video credit: Jake Missing
10g Oscietra Caviar, Lobster Claws, Morel Mushroom Sauce
We’ve met some pretty OTT dishes in our time, but this is hands-down the richest thing we’ve ever politely asked our bodies to digest. The sauce is deliriously creamy and thick, with a boozy dessert wine sweetness. We’re unclear why caviar was invited to this particular party—the subtle saltiness is as good as a blow-up dinghy in a tidal wave in the face of all that sweet richness, but it sure does look pretty.
Lobster Tail, Raviolo, Otto’s Pressed Lobster Sauce, Seared Veal Sweetbread And Foie Gras
Congratulations to this luxe collective for being the first dish to ever make us consider an early retirement. Between the wedge of fatty sweetbread, cream-centric sauce, and—why Otto’s, why?—foie gras, it’s the final frontier of consumption, even for seasoned professional eaters like ourselves. Otto’s may have gone too far with this one, and it would be better if one component was removed, but somehow, we’re still impressed with their commitment to excess.
photo credit: Jake Missing
Dining and Cooking