Sessions Arts Club
A patinated 18th-century courtroom turned dining room, Clerkenwell's most photographed kitchen
EC1 chef-led axis, Moro, St JOHN, Sessions Arts Club
Clerkenwell and Farringdon together cover the EC1 wedge between the City and Bloomsbury, the post-1990s wave of producer-and-chef-led rooms (Moro 1997, St JOHN 1994, Quality Chop House 1869 in its Searley revival) that effectively wrote modern British dining north of the river. The traveller uses the hood for the cooking-as-the-headline weekday lunch, not the hotel-bar evening: Exmouth Market on a Saturday morning, the Smithfield meat-market periphery, Sessions Arts Club's painted-ceiling room. Less branded than Mayfair, less loose than Shoreditch, more grown-up than both.
6 places
A patinated 18th-century courtroom turned dining room, Clerkenwell's most photographed kitchen
Sam and Sam Clark's Exmouth Market Moorish room, the 1997 landmark that taught London Spanish-and-North-African cooking.
Sam and Sam Clark's tapas-bar sister to Moro, eight metres along the same row, the small-plate version of the same kitchen.
Fergus Henderson's nose-to-tail manifesto since 1994, the white-walled Smithfield room that wrote modern British cooking.
Farringdon Road's Grade II 1869 working-class chop house, Shaun Searley's revival of the listed-bench institution.
Seven seats, one chef, Edomae discipline, London's hardest reservation