Soho is the most-recommended neighbourhood in London and the easiest to get wrong. The audience that has been visiting since the parents' generation knows which rooms have earned the postcode and which are running on it.
Soho receives more recommendations per square foot than any other London neighbourhood, and roughly half of them are wrong. The audience that has been visiting since the parents' generation worked out the filter twenty years ago: the Soho rooms that earn the postcode are the ones running on a single discipline, the ones to skip are running on the postcode itself. Three of each, on a single Friday evening.
Skip the Ivy Soho Brasserie. The Ivy proper, on West Street, was the West End theatre-and-publishing institution from 1917 onwards; the brasserie spinoffs that arrived in the 2010s — Soho, Marylebone, Chelsea Garden, etc — are running on the brand without the kitchen. The audience's mother went to The Ivy in the 1990s for genuine reasons. The audience does not need to repeat that visit at the brasserie offshoot. Skip the Quo Vadis-line tourist mimics, and skip Bocca di Lupo's neighbouring imitators (Polpo's last-decade pasta board format spawned a corridor of unimpressive lookalikes; Bocca di Lupo itself is the original and still works).
Skip the Soho Brewing Company. The cocktail-bar block — the Spuntino-line American small-plates rooms, the basement gin-bars on Greek Street, the rooftops that opened in 2018 with Aperol-spritz photography — has thinned. The audience that wants a proper Soho cocktail walks ten minutes to American Bar at the Savoy or to Lyaness on the South Bank, both of which sit on the World's 50 Best Bars annual list and have done for the last seven years. The Soho bar register that survived is the older one — Mark's Bar at Hix (closed but its register lives on at Quo Vadis), the back room at the French House, Bar Italia at any hour — and the new sequence of rooftops with the same Aperol on the menu does not.
Skip the late-night dim sum mimics. Yauatcha on Broadwick Street is the original Soho dim sum room and earned its Michelin star within twelve months of opening in 2004 (it has held it continuously). The dozens of Cantonese and Sichuan rooms that opened in the same Soho rectangle between 2015 and 2020 — most clustered on Wardour, Lisle and Gerrard Streets — are uneven. The cosmopolitan should book Yauatcha for the dim sum tasting at lunch, then walk north to one of the survivors (Rasa Sayang for the Malaysian, Four Seasons for the Cantonese roast duck) and skip the rooftop-with-disco-balls Asian-fusion places that opened post-COVID.
Keep Quo Vadis on Dean Street. Jeremy Lee runs a daily-changing menu in the upstairs dining room — the smoked eel-and-horseradish on toast at the bar, the pheasant pie on Sundays, the kind of cooking that the audience's older brother who has been eating in Soho since 1995 will recognise immediately. The downstairs members' bar is its own institution. Lunch is the easier booking and a third of the dinner spend.
Keep Bocca di Lupo on Archer Street. Jacob Kenedy's regional Italian — half-portion menu so two can share six plates — is the post-2008 Soho format that defined the chef-led wave. Sit at the marble counter for the early sitting; the room behind it is the Friday-evening crowd. The granita gelateria opposite (Gelupo) is the dessert. Both opened on the same day in 2008 and both have held since.
Keep Yauatcha. Alan Yau's dim sum room on Broadwick Street, Michelin-starred since 2005, is the second-best dim sum in London (after A. Wong in Pimlico, two-starred for the past five years) and by far the better Soho option. Book the lunch dim sum tasting; afternoon is quieter than evening; the patisserie counter at the front is where the macarons are. The audience that books Hakkasan in Mayfair for the cocktail-and-cocktail-and-late-dim-sum register books Yauatcha for the lunch register, and the two rooms cover the West End Cantonese map together.
What unites the keep list is a kind of consistency that the skip list cannot manage: the kitchen at the centre, the format unchanged for ten years or more, no apology for what it is. Soho will keep generating new openings — the post-pandemic recovery has been faster here than anywhere else in central London — and most of them will close within three years. The rooms in the keep list opened between 1948 (Bar Italia, not on this shortlist but representative) and 2008 (Bocca di Lupo) and have held the same standard since. The audience's filter is not nostalgia. It is the survival rate.
