Gastropub birthplace, nose-to-tail dining, and quirky townhouse bars.
Daytime
(17)Exmouth Market lunch, St John bread & wine, architecture walks
Jerusalem Tavern
A tiny, beautifully crooked Clerkenwell pub behind a Georgian shop-front, serving only St Peter's Brewery ales — the Cream Stout is excellent, and the distinctive oval bottles are worth a try. The building is the draw as much as the beer: wonky, centuries-old, full of character, and almost always packed. Go at lunchtime, before the after-work crowd makes it impossible; if there's no seat inside, stand on the street like everyone else. It is a single-brewery pub of rare charm, the kind of place that feels like it has been pouring quietly forever.
Editor's Pick$$
Order: St Peter's ales - that's all they serve. The Cream Stout is excellent. Try the oval bottles.Best: Lunchtime before the after-work crowd. Gets absolutely packed. Go early.
Postman's Park
Small garden in the square mile with the Watts Memorial to Heroic Self-Sacrifice — 54 ceramic plaques commemorating ordinary Londoners who died saving others. Victorian melodrama and genuine pathos in a City of London pocket park most people walk past. Quiet, unexpected, moving.
Editor's Pick$
Order: The memorial wall is under a wooden shelter — read the plaques slowly. Each tells a compressed tragedy: a daughter who saved her mother from a fire, a train worker who prevented a collision. The park itself is a lunch spot for City workers. Stay a few minutes or thirty — the atmosphere invites reflection.Best: Weekday lunchtime when office workers eat sandwiches on the benches — the memorial becomes part of daily City life rather than a tourist curiosity. Quieter on weekends but also emptier. Any time works for a 10-minute detour.
St Dunstan in the East
A medieval church bombed in the Blitz and never rebuilt — its Wren-designed tower and shattered walls left standing, and the whole ruin quietly turned into a public garden where ivy and climbing plants now do what the roof used to. It is one of the City's best-kept secrets: a genuinely peaceful, half-hidden space two minutes from the Tower of London, and almost always empty of the crowds swarming the more famous sights nearby.
Editor's Pick$
Order: Nothing to order — bring a sandwich from a nearby City spot and eat it on a bench inside the ruined nave.Best: Lunchtime on a clear day, when the light comes through where the roof used to be.
St. John Smithfield
Fergus Henderson's restaurant that changed British cooking. Opened in 1994 in a former smokehouse near Smithfield Market, St. John made nose-to-tail eating — roast bone marrow with parsley salad, devilled kidneys, rolled pig's spleen — not just respectable but essential. Henderson, who has Parkinson's and is now less visible in the kitchen, built a philosophy: nothing wasted, everything honoured, simplicity as the highest form of respect for an ingredient. The room is deliberately austere — white walls, bare tables, no decoration — because the food is the decoration. The bread is baked in-house and is among the best in London. The wine list is French-leaning, personal, and priced to be drunk rather than admired. Every chef in London has eaten here and most have stolen something from the menu.
Editor's Pick$$$
Order: Roast bone marrow and parsley salad — the dish that defines the restaurant and arguably modern British cooking. The menu changes daily based on what arrives from the market, but devilled kidneys, ox heart, and any whole roasted bird for the table are all correct orders. The Eccles cake with Lancashire cheese is the dessert. The bread is made in-house — eat it with butter and attention. The wine list rewards exploration.Best: Lunch — the room fills with natural light and the daily menu is freshest. The bar area for a glass of wine and a snack (Welsh rarebit, a plate of charcuterie) if you don't want a full meal. Dinner is excellent but lunch captures the spirit of a restaurant built to feed Smithfield workers.
Prufrock Coffee
Gwilym Davies — 2009 World Barista Champion — opened Prufrock on Leather Lane as both a cafe and a training lab, and the dual identity defines the place: you drink coffee made by people who compete at the highest level, in a room where the next generation of baristas is learning the craft at the machines behind you. The space is large by London coffee standards — the Leather Lane location has room for proper seating, a retail section, and the training area — which makes it one of the few specialty coffee shops where you can actually sit down, spread out, and stay. The espresso programme rotates guest roasters alongside house blends, and the filter options are brewed with the precision of someone whose livelihood depends on extraction accuracy.
Stamped$$
Order: Filter coffee — the pour-overs are where the barista training shows. Espresso for speed. Ask about the current guest roaster — the rotation means each visit is slightly different. The pastries are sourced well. Buy beans if you want to take the roast home.Best: Morning on a weekday — Leather Lane is a Clerkenwell lunch street, so mornings are calm. Lunchtime for the combined experience of Leather Lane's street food market and Prufrock's coffee. The training lab is visible from the cafe, which adds interest.
Scarfes Bar
A hotel bar in the Rosewood London that earns its place through Gerald Scarfe's original drawings covering the walls — savage, brilliant caricatures of politicians, writers, and public figures that give the room a satirical intelligence missing from most luxury bars. The cocktails are well-made, the leather armchairs are deep, and the live piano adds warmth without overwhelming conversation. Named after the artist (whose Pink Floyd wall drawings and political caricatures made him a national institution), the bar treats his work as both decoration and provocation. High Holborn, between Covent Garden and the City.
Stamped$$$
Order: A classic cocktail — the bartenders are skilled with the old-fashioned, the martini, and the negroni. The menu changes seasonally but the classics are always available. Match the drink to the Scarfe drawing nearest your seat. The bar snacks are hotel-quality (good, not revelatory).Best: Late afternoon for the most peaceful appreciation of the Scarfe drawings — the room glows and the piano hasn't yet competed with crowd noise. Post-work hours (6-8pm) bring energy. Weekend evenings are busier.
Evening & Night
(9)Gastropubs, intimate cocktail bars. Quieter than Shoreditch.
69 Colebrooke Row
'The Bar With No Name' — Tony Conigliaro's Islington cocktail bar that pioneered the scientific approach to drinks in London. Conigliaro, who stepped back from daily operations after a serious health crisis in 2020, treated cocktails the way a research chemist treats compounds: rotary evaporators, flavour distillation, and a fanatical attention to how ingredients behave at the molecular level. The bar continues under the team he trained, maintaining both the technique and the warmth that made the room feel like a neighbourhood bar rather than a laboratory. The space is deliberately small — a narrow room with a short bar, where every drink is made with the precision of someone who spent years studying how flavour actually works. Colebrooke Row itself is a quiet Islington street that rewards the walk from Angel tube.
Editor's Pick$$$
Order: The Terroir cocktail — a martini variation that tastes of the earth and became Conigliaro's most famous drink. Ask the bartenders what's new in the lab; the menu evolves with ongoing experimentation. Anything involving house distillations or infusions will showcase what makes this bar different from everywhere else. Trust the recommendations — the staff were trained by Conigliaro and carry his precision.Best: Early evening, 6-8pm, when the room is intimate rather than crowded and you can talk to the bartenders about the drinks. Weekend nights fill quickly. The Islington location makes it a natural start to an evening — Angel tube, then a walk through the backstreets to the bar.
Little Bat
A cosy Islington cocktail den of maybe twenty seats, built on carefully crafted drinks and a loyal local following. The menu is small and everything on it is executed well — trust the bartenders' recommendations and you won't go wrong. Weeknight evenings, when it's locals only, are when it's at its best; the size means weekends can overflow and getting in can be a challenge. It is quality over quantity in physical form, a neighborhood bar small enough that the regulars treat it as an extension of their living rooms — and worth timing your visit to join them.
Editor's Pick$$
Order: Small menu, everything executed well. Trust the bartenders' recommendations.Best: Weeknight evenings when it's locals only. Small enough that weekends can overflow.
Sir John Soane's Museum
The former home of neoclassical architect John Soane, preserved exactly as he left it in 1837 — a labyrinth of rooms crammed with antiquities, paintings, and architectural fragments. Hogarth's Rake's Progress, a sarcophagus of Seti I, mirrored domes, and spatial illusions. One of London's most extraordinary interiors.
Editor's Pick$
Order: Entry is timed and must be booked online (free but limited capacity). The house is arranged as a museum-in-a-house rather than a house-as-museum — every surface is covered. The Picture Room has folding walls that reveal three layers of paintings. The Crypt holds the sarcophagus. Move slowly — the density of objects rewards close attention.Best: First slot of the day (10:00) for the quietest experience. Tuesday evenings once a month are candlelit tours (book well ahead). Avoid rainy weekends when the limited capacity fills instantly. Winter weekdays are ideal.
The Blackfriar
An Art Nouveau fantasy wedged into a wedge-shaped building by Blackfriars station — bronze friars, marble columns and mosaic ceilings, all built around 1905 to celebrate the Dominican priory that once stood on the site. It survived a 1960s demolition threat only because Sir John Betjeman led the campaign to save it, and the City has been grateful for a proper drink inside a proper piece of architecture ever since.
Stamped$$
Order: A cask ale in the back room under the mosaic ceiling — the room does the rest of the work.Best: After work, when the City crowd files in and the marble catches the evening light.
Vertigo 42
A champagne-and-cocktail bar on the 42nd floor of Tower 42 (once the NatWest Tower), circling glass walls giving one of the City's best skyline views without the crowds or queues of the newer sky-bars — security screening and a booking are the price of the quiet. It is where the City itself goes to look down on the City, glass of champagne in hand, well above the noise.
Stamped$$$
Order: A glass of champagne from the serious list, or a classic cocktail, taken slowly by the window.Best: Sunset, booked well ahead — the view is the whole reason to climb this high.
Ye Olde Cheshire Cheese
Rebuilt in 1667 after the Great Fire and barely touched since — low beams, sawdust-and-tradition floors, and a warren of small dark rooms where Dr Johnson, Dickens and a procession of Fleet Street journalists drank across three centuries. No music, no screens, nothing to distract from the fact that you are standing in one of the oldest continuously operating pubs in London.
Stamped$$
Order: A pint of cask ale in the ground-floor bar, or push further into the cellar rooms for the full warren.Best: Early evening, when the City crowd has thinned and the old rooms feel their age properly.