Many enjoy living in London for the anonymity that sharing a city with nine million others affords. Eating at a chef’s table is not for these people: it demands talking not only with the chefs, but to the total strangers sat close by; hiding in the corner is not the done thing.
Still, for restaurant obsessives these tables are the ultimate dining experience — the next best thing to hiring a chef at the top of their game to cook at home. Diners get a next-level insight into the food on their plates, while those cooking have the chance to show off their experimental side.
There tend to be some rules, of sorts. Diners are often seated at the same time — so latecomers should expect to be greeted with the sort of welcome usually reserved for theatregoers sitting in the middle of a row who arrive halfway through the first act. Secondly, requests to accommodate dietary requirements sometimes get short shrift — the menus tend to be built around particularly fine or hard-to-source ingredients in limited quantities. Pick your place wisely; ring them, if in doubt.
Several of the restaurants below demand an upfront payment at the time of booking, with no refunds for cancelling, but be sympathetic to this: with space for fewer than 20 customers, even one no-show can be the difference between a place making a profit or loss.
Granted, if all of this seems faintly — whisper it — inhospitable, it’s better to approach the chef’s table experience as closer to an evening at the opera, or any other high-end, non-refundable entertainment. Certainly, a chef’s table offers unparalleled foodie theatre: where else can diners get quite so up close and personal with some of the most lauded chefs in the capital, where every seat is the best seat in the house?
So, from sushi counters to Soho cellars, and tasting menus of everything from cakes to kebabs, here are the best chef’s tables in the capital. Pull up a chair and make yourself comfortable.
Sushi Tetsu
There is bagging a table in the garden of the River Café on a Saturday night in summer, and then there is booking a seat at Sushi Tetsu on... well, any day of the week, in any month of the year. This next-level endurance test to secure one of the seven spots at the blond-wood sushi counter will be familiar to anyone who has ever attempted to secure a reservation at the sort of high-end restaurant in Tokyo where single-digit dining capacities are common and a personal introduction is required to gain admittance. Sushi Tetsu, overseen by chef Toru Takahashi and his wife Harumi, isn’t quite so hardcore, although expect the booking process to involve a fair bit of to-ing and fro-ing over email. Beyond bragging rights, the reason the capital’s Japanese food purists put themselves through all the rigmarole is peerless nigiri, maki and sashimi, with sea bream and scallops, sea urchin and sweet shrimp treated to a lick of ponzu here, a dab of soy there and perhaps the briefest of searings. The sushi rice — lightly vinegared, almost lukewarm and composed of both Californian and Italian varieties — is as much of an attraction as the raw fish.
12 Jerusalem Passage, EC1V 4JP, 020 3217 0090
Ekstedt at the Yard
Chef Niklas Ekstedt comes across like a real-life Viking, combining the clean flavours of the new Nordic movement with cooking over open flames in the great outdoors of his native Sweden with an abandon which makes one salute his skill at ensuring his beard never catches alight. His seven-seat chef’s table at his Whitehall hotel restaurant brings the flames inside for a nine-course meal; dishes cooked over the fire or in a birchwood-fuelled oven might include smoked celeriac tart with sherry vinegar, ember-baked scallops with sugar kelp and roe emulsion, and juniper-smoked venison with summer truffle and smoked shallot purée. The inspiration might be Scandinavian, but ingredients are British wherever possible.
3-5 Great Scotland Yard, SWQ1A 2HN, ekstedattheyard.com
Abajo
Miller Prada cooks Colombian-Japanese fine-dining dishes in his Michelin-starred Mayfair restaurant Humo, but his basement chef’s table Abajo is focused purely on the cuisine of his native Colombia. The L-shaped counter is surrounded by wine in temperature-controlled cabinets for ageing meat and cellaring wine; with room for only 10 diners, it is an intimate experience, and an intricate one, too. Each of the five courses (or ‘chapters’, as Prada calls them) on the £150 tasting menu focuses on a single hero ingredient, but something as simple-sounding as corn will be treated to multiple interpretations and paired with high-end produce such as morel mushrooms or a mousse of trout killed ikejime-style. Note, however, that vegan and vegetarian diners cannot be accommodated.
12 St George Street, W1S 2FB, abajolondon.com
Dosa
The flagship restaurant of Korean-born, Colorado-raised Akira Back at the new Mandarin Oriental Mayfair has come in for some flak as another bland outpost for the global superrich. Dosa, his chef’s table offering, is another kettle of fish entirely. A Korean-inspired tasting menu is served to 14 diners at 7pm sharp from Tuesday to Saturday, with executive chef Jihun Kim manning the stoves in front of guests. Kim was born in Korea and launched the original Dosa in Seoul for Back. Here he puts an up-to-date spin on traditional Korean cooking; the chilled fishrman’s soup of mulhoe from Pohang arrives as wild pink Cornish sea bream with a wasabi sorbet, red pepper and salsify. In case one forgets the Mandarin Oriental location, the price tag of £185 for eight courses is a punchy reminder.
22 Hanover Square, W1S 1JP, mandarinoriental.com
Muse
In 1997, aged 26, Tom Aikens pipped Marco Pierre White to become the youngest British chef ever to win two Michelin stars. He honours both his haute-cuisine heritage and his personal history at this finest of fine diners in Belgravia. Two chef’s tables seat five downstairs and six upstairs — there are barely more seats in the ‘proper’ dining areas — with a 10-course tasting menu (£170) suggesting this is not somewhere to come for a quick supper, though the chef promises that the three-course lunch (£50) can be done-and-dusted in an hour. Descriptions of dishes are endearingly open-hearted — or deeply pretentious, depending on your level of cynicism — and might include “a slow-paced life” (snails, garlic and red wine), inspired by Aikens’ time with legendary French chef Pierre Koffmann, or “strawberry fields forever” (strawberries with yoghurt and basil) recalling childhood fruit-picking in Norfolk. The intensity of flavours matches the Proustian nostalgia while theatrical presentation enhances the impression of a maverick talent digging deep for inspiration.
38 Groom Place, SW1X 7BA, musebytomaikens.co.uk
Behind
Tongues were set wagging in food circles when this 18-seat chef’s table on the edge of London Fields won a Michelin star in 2021, despite having been open for only 20 days. A couple of years later, though, and all anyone is talking about is the quality of cooking from Andy Beynon (pictured at the top of this feature) — who happens to be Jason Atherton’s former development chef — and how the Red Guide demonstrated uncharacteristic foresight for once. The counter surrounds an open kitchen with a prep table as its focus, where dishes from a 10-course menu (£118) based on sustainable seafood are given a final tweak before being presented to guests who have booked for the lunch and dinner sitting; there’s also a six-course lunch (£64) on Thursdays and Fridays. The meal usually begins with delicate seafood — think roasted lobster tail and ponzu-dressed claw atop an English muffin — before heftier fish, like beautifully timed roasted hake with cockles and sherry, finished with a solo meat dish such as guinea fowl with pumpkin seeds and pumpkin vinegar. Ace wine bar, too.
20 Sidworth Street, E8 3SD, behindrestaurant.co.uk
Counter 71
Chef Joe Laker caused a stir at Fenn in Fulham. When that closed, he opened this chef’s table in Shoreditch, where 16 diners sit at a green marble counter while the chef and his small team beaver away on the other side. Ten courses clock in at £130 at lunch and dinner; expect the sort of ultra-seasonal British produce and terse menu descriptions that give little hint of the artistry that ends up on the plate in the likes of ‘Tunworth-beetroot-marigold’ or ‘cuttlefish-mushroom-spring onion.’ Add a seasonal pairing of five wines for £85 or the fancier sommelier’s selection for an extra £130; there’s even-more drinks wizardry on offer in the basement bar Lowcountry where fat washing, milk washing, maceration and gelling are very much the order of the day.
71 Nile Street, N1 7RD, counter71.co.uk
Kitchen Table
The first thing to know about Kitchen Table is that it ain’t cheap. The tasting menu costs £250 and, assuming one isn’t going to stick to tap water, either the grower Champagne pairing (a further £250) or wine paring (£160) are the sensible way to match the 20 courses. Is it worth the money? Well, Michelin certainly thinks so, awarding the place two of its stars, while the 18 high-chairs are always fully booked, despite reservations running three months in advance. James Knappett and his team of chefs painstakingly explain the painstaking technique behind each of the dishes handed over the oak counter: how the butter coating a single sweet prawn is infused with Tahitian vanilla, say, or cherry stones transubstantiated into a sauce for breast and leg of Anjou pigeon. It is, then, one for patient sorts. Wines kept in a purpose-built cellar are selected by Knappett’s partner Sandia Chang.
70 Charlotte Street, W1T 4QQ, kitchentablelondon.co.uk
Evelyn’s Table
Zoe and Layo Paskin are responsible for some of London’s best counter dining at the Palomar and Barbary, but this is the siblings’ only place with a Michelin star, a 12-seat chef’s table hidden in the cellar of their Chinatown pub The Blue Posts (Evelyn Mulwray is the heroine of Roman Polanski’s Chinatown, and there is a swell first-floor bar called The Mulwray in which to start the evening.) On a five-course, £135 menu, head chef Seamus Sam and his two chef sidekicks graft international technique, often with a strong Japanese accent, onto fish-forward British ingredients. A hand-dived Orkney scallop sits in tomato essence, raw beef comes with wild nettle tempura and wasabi, while Cornish crab gets courgette, lemongrass and ginger. Saké is just as important as wine here, and there are low- and no-alcohol pairings too.
28 Rupert Street, W1D 6DJ, theblueposts.co.uk
Cédric Grolet at The Berkeley
Can’t stomach the idea of 20 courses washed down with a wine pairing to match? Try seven courses of cake with a nice cuppa instead. Cédric Grolet had people queuing from dawn when he opened at The Berkeley hotel in 2022; before rocking up on Knightsbridge, the patisserie pin-up was not only a huge star in his native France for his two pastry boutiques in Paris but a massive deal on Instagram too (11.5 million followers and counting), to say nothing of winning the title of the world’s best pastry chef. Grolet’s signature trompe-l’œil fruit and flower patisseries — edible optical illusions which reproduce the natural world in startlingly realistic detail — are the star turn of a £135 menu served in three sittings in an open kitchen surrounded by eight seats at a horseshoe counter with leafy views over Hyde Park. The performance works better as afternoon tea: with only one savoury course — a beguiling rendition of avocado toast — surely only the sweetest of tooths could sit through this for lunch.
The Berkeley, Wilton Place, SW1X 7RL, the-berkeley.co.uk
Kebab Queen
A tasting menu eaten with one’s hands straight from a heated counter in a fake kebab shop sounds like the sort of experiment that even Heston Blumenthal in his prime might have judged a wheeze too far. Kebab Queen, however, is nothing if not admirably experimental. Here in a Covent Garden basement, eight courses of deconstructed and re-invented ’bab are served onto a hygienically treated surface of non-porous Dekton. Rest assured that things get sexier-sounding from here on in. Some courses come in easy-to-eat wraps such as the scorched cabbage holding a monkfish shish; others involve chunks of protein like retired dairy cow skidding through sauces on the counter in a Jackson Pollock smear of colour. Somewhere around the midway point of the meal you’ll forget that eating with your hands is meant to be a homage to the post-pub kebab-van visit and instead focus on the enhanced connection with what you’re eating, though the connection with head chef Pamir Zeydan and his team is just as rewarding. As is the cost: £110 for eight courses. Still hungry? Maybe give the kebab on the way home a miss...
4 Mercer Walk, WC2H 9FA, eatlebab.com
Aulis
Simon Rogan has two other outposts of Aulis, one in Hong Kong and the other attached to his three-Michelin-starred Cumbrian restaurant L’Enclume, but the sociable chef’s-table format suits Soho best. Curious passers-by can peer through the windows from the alleyway outside, while the eight curious diners within — food-obsessed couples, mainly — can quiz the team of young chefs about the intricacies that have gone into each dish: a truffle pudding glazed with birch sap and blanketed with shavings of Berkswell cheese, perhaps, or the smoked bone sauce poured over a piece of Newlyn turbot once diners have had a moment to appreciate the fish’s silvery shimmer. Mostly, though, there’s the silence of communal appreciation for combinations such as crispy chicken skin with Cornish crab and sea herbs, or mussel and seaweed custard with beef tendons and caviar. Sixteen courses clock in at £185; given how much effort has gone into pairing each ingredient, it would be remiss not to order the £88 wine pairing to go with them.
16a St Anne’s Court, W1F 0BF, aulis.london
Gaucho Beef Bar
If your perfect night out involves steak, steak and more steak then the Beef Bar at the Charlotte Street Gaucho is for you (and three other diners). Not least because at £55 a head, the six-course menu costs what a single steak might set you back in a Mayfair beef specialist. Beef tartare tacos are followed by lomo tiradito in green horseradish mayo and a duo of steak (carbon-neutral, Gaucho promises): churrasco cuadril with chips and peppercorn sauce, and barbecoa-marinated beef with chargrilled baby gem and chimichurri. The evening is as much a lesson in how to cook the perfect steak as how to eat it, with a personal chef on hand to discuss the precise way you like your meat. The wine matches are less South American, with Whispering Angel poured by the glass as well as the expected malbec.
60a Charlotte Street, W1T 2NU, gauchorestaurants.com
Humble Chicken
This Soho site has form; it was once the home of the original Barrafina, which introduced Londoners to the joys of watching chefs cook pretty much everything on a plancha in a tiny open kitchen. Now it’s overseen by chef Angelo Sato, who bravely swapped his crowd-pleasing yakitori chicken concept (hence the name) a year or so ago for a 16-course tasting menu priced at £185, inspired by the chef’s Japanese childhood and European career. That might translate as a snack of foie gras with persimmon and hazelnut, a selection of sashimi or a sukiyaki course involving beef short rib with Cévennes onion and a crispy egg. Note no kids under 12 are allowed, which should at least keep the bill down, and with all food planned and prepped fresh each morning, dietaries cannot be accommodated.
54 Frith Street, W1D 4SJ, humblechickenuk.com
Tehran_Berlin
Most chef’s tables are really counters in what is basically a tiny restaurant; at Tehran_Berlin (formerly the Drunken Butler), the chef’s table for two overlooks an open kitchen that feels as if one is dining in the home of Iranian-born, Berlin-raised chef Yuma Hashemi, while the handful of tables behind feel almost as personal. The cooking is homely, too, albeit focused on a contemporary interpretation of Iranian cuisine, with the centrepiece of the tasting-menu experience (£160 at the chef’s table) focused on the iconic Persian rice fish of tahdig, with detours along the way of breads, snacks and seafood. Much of the food is phenomenal, but what really makes the experience so special is being in the hands of a host like Hashemi, who genuinely cares that his customers feel welcome — never more so than when being served Negronis made with vintage spirits.
20 Rosebery Avenue, EC1R 4SX, thedrunkenbutler.com
