London has long been home to a particularly moneyed set of restaurants. Think high falutin’ fine dining, edgy Japanese hot spots and just about every restaurant to have opened in Knightsbridge.
But once upon a lunchtime, diners were spoiled for choice when it came to three-course, £30, high-end dining. Perhaps it was a Wednesday and perhaps the table was only for an hour. But who cared? You were at Arbutus!
More recently, though, and it’s a depressing state of affairs in which the average lunch bill reads more like the maths round on Countdown — and that’s if the restaurant is even open at lunch.
Happily, there appears to be a bit of a sea change. Some of the better known money-pits have launched, at least on the face of it, affordable set lunch menus.
This appears to be good news. But what’s that coming over the hill? It’s a man with salt on his arms. Of all the people to launch a new set lunch in these cash-strapped times, no-one predicted Salt Bae would rise to the challenge. The creator of the golden clad £100 burger and the £1000 steak has just released a £39 three-course set lunch offering at Knightsbridge’s Nusr-Et Steakhouse (101 Knightsbridge, SW1X 7EZ, nusr-et.com.tr). And he’s not alone: Sexy Fish (Berkeley Square House, W1J 6BR, sexyfish.com), the gilded Berkeley Square restaurant of Damian Hirst artwork and Frank Gehry fish-core, is at it too with a Kuikku lunch at £38 a head. Even restaurateur Richard Caring’s latest inflation-ignoring Bacchanalia (1-3 Mount Street W1K 3NA, bacchanalia.co.uk) is doing a £40 two-course lunch, which can be upgraded to three for an additional £9.
On paper, these lunches offer a chance to forgo the usual dinner bills, which can lurch upwards of £250-a-head with ease, giving Londoners the chance to access the good life for less. They are the grifter’s paradise.
But what are these restaurants actually like? The core issue surrounds the conflation of value with cost. True, food is more expensive these days, but a less expensive lunch bill does not mean better value. Take the Turkish butcher: Salt Bae’s lunch includes three meagre pieces of flavourless sushi, a dry puck of beef filet and an inedible, sickly-sweet thumb of baklava. You’d be better off spending that £39 on a colonic (which, after all that meat…). Sexy Fish, meanwhile, describes its offering as “the perfect synergy of pleasure and performance” — which sounds less like a set lunch and more like an advert for condoms.
Looking beyond these offerings of lifeless sushi and existential suffering, one can still find proper lunchtime luxury in town without breaking the bank. First at bat is the excellent Bibi (42 North Audley Street, W1K 6ZP, bibirestaurants.com), the Michelin-starred Mayfair restaurant by Chet Sharma. His one-star restaurant offers a punchy dinner menu at £125-per-person but at lunch, three courses plus snacks comes in at £35. That’s a genuine bargain when you consider the restaurant is within sight of Selfridge’s and just seconds away from Park Lane. This is Monopoly board luxury, for less than four tenners.
You want something moody, atmospheric and sexy? Opt then for the lunch at Hakkasan (8 Hanway Place, London W1T; 17 Bruton Street, W1J, hakkasan.com) which includes classic steamed dim sum, stir fry black pepper rib eye and a dessert for £39. If that doesn’t quash the dim sum craving, then why not A. Wong (70 Wilton Road, SW1V 1DE, awong.co.uk)? The two Michelin-starred restaurant in Victoria by Andrew Wong has a lunchtime dim sum a la carte starting at just £3 a piece. Choosing wisely, one could very easily have eight to ten delicious dim sum for under £40 a head.
Better yet, there’s still some luxury to be had at under £30. The Ninth (22 Charlotte Street, W1T 2NB, theninthlondon.com) — Jun Tanaka’s Michelin-starred, perennially underrated restaurant — is offering two courses for just £28 and the fabulous Frenchie (16 Henrietta Street, WC2E 8QH, frenchiecoventgarden.com) in Covent Garden has a two-course lunch offer for £29.
There may be a naysayer who’d argue these dining rooms are perhaps not as special as the likes of Bacchanalia, but if a showy dining room is all that matters, why not head to Carlotta (77-78 Marylebone High Street, W1U 5JX, bigmammagroup.com) ? Here, one can indulge in more-than-serviceable Mediterranean food in a showy space, but without the need for a payday loan to do so. Why drop a small fortune on three courses in Mayfair when up the road in Marylebone it’s possible to enjoy some stracciatella affumicata (£8) followed by a truffled fettuccine alfredo (£23) safe in the knowledge you’re not surrounded by a glut of boring, besuited hedgefunders?
But would you like to be? Consider the revised Pollen Street Social (8-10 Pollen Street, W1S 1NQ, pollenstreetsocial.com) lunch menu, recently trimmed down from around £70 to under £50 for three courses, or the “Working Lunch” at Anthony Demetre’s Wild Honey (8 Pall Mall, SW1Y 4AN, wildhoneystjames.co.uk) on Pall Mall: just £40 for three delicious (and Michelin-starred) dishes.
It is possible, then, to indulge in luxury living without breaking the bank, swerving the gawdy and cashing in on the good. And for those seeking everything wrapped up in one: real value, a grand dining room, exceptional gastronomy and a taste of the good life, look no further than The Ritz Restaurant (150 Piccadilly, W1J 9BR, theritzlondon.com)
Yes, it’s the most expensive lunch of the list at £82 a head, but it’s the indelibly beautiful, timelessly brilliant Ritz. Statement eating of the grandest proportions, with three seasonal, terrific courses of utter excellence served in a dining room that can rival any palatial neighbour. For under £100, this one feels a steal: a luxury-lunching grifters dream.
