Personal touch: Tom Aikens’ menu explores his past, both professionally and at home
(Picture: Food Story Media)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 closeby; 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
Muse
In 1997, aged 26, Tom Aikens pipped Marco Pierre White to become the youngest British chef ever to win two Michelin stars and 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 seven-course tasting menu (£140) suggesting this is not somewhere to come for a quick supper, though the four-course lunch (£80) does offer the prospect of something speedier. 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. One year later, though, and all anyone is talking about is the quality of cooking from Andy Beynon — 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 an eight-course menu based on sustainable seafood are given a final tweak before being presented to guests who have booked for the lunch and dinner sitting (£54/£88 respectively). 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
Kitchen Table
After a some kerfuffle in the press earlier this year — caused by a hiking prices to a £450 minimum spend — Kitchen Table has recently calmed its charging down. The minimum spend is now £300 plus a mandatory 15 cent service charge (which works out at £45), though that’s only for those sticking to tap water: a Champagne pairing comes in at £250, wine matching costs £190 and the restaurant will even partner soft drinks for £95. Still, with the 18 high-chairs always fully booked (despite reservations running three months in advance), it seems there’s no shortage of deep-pocketed takers. James Knappett and his team of chefs painstakingly explain the painstaking technique behind each of the 20 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
The Sea, The Sea Hackney
A sequel to the fishmonger-cum-seafood bar The Sea, The Sea in Chelsea, this Hackney outpost immerses diners even deeper in the flappingly fresh produce sourced by owner Alex Hunter and cooked by chef Leandro Carreira (Hunter also supplies the two-Michelin-starred likes of The Clove Club and Ikoyi). The evening’s first sitting begins at 6pm as the day’s catch is unloaded straight from the West Country and diners see their meal being filleted, shucked and shelled in the fish prep room before a £150-a-head, 14-course tasting menu is served at a 12-seat chef’s table arcing around an open kitchen. Dishes mix native seafood with seashore produce and ingredients washed up from further afield, notably east Asia: crab, onion noodles and smoked eel dashi, for instance, or trout and banana miso. Amuses and petits fours such as preserved kumquat macaron are no less intriguing while a pudding of pão de ló and toasted fennel ice cream with caviar makes a compelling case for fish eggs as an avant-garde dessert topping.
337 Acton Mews, E8 4EA, theseathesea.net
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 their 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 £95 menu, the talented trio of Selby brothers — head chef Luke and his younger siblings Nat and Theo — show off their globetrotting training by grafting 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 February; 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 (2.4 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. Former Le Gavroche chef Manuel Canales serves six courses of deconstructed and re-invented ’bab 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 Canales and his team is just as rewarding. As is the cost: £95 for six 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 — honestly, mainly food-obsessed couples — 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. Fifteen courses clock in at £155; given how much effort has gone into pairing each ingredient, it would be remiss not to order the £78 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 £50 a head, the four-course menu costs what a single steak might set you back in a Mayfair beef specialist. Cuadril carpaccio in a juniper and mustard cure is followed by lomo tiradito in green horseradish mayo, chorizo tartare with palm-heart emulsion and the menu’s high-point: a selection of 200g of grilled Argentine steak (all carbon-neutral, Gaucho promises). The evening is as much a lesson in how to cook the perfect steak as how to eat it; a personal chef is on hand to discuss the precise way you like your meat, or you can cook it yourself on a hot stone. The wine matches are less South American, with Chablis and Fleurie poured by the glass as well as the expected malbec, including an unexpected sweet variety to go with the Valrhona milk chocolate block.
60a Charlotte Street, W1T 2NU, gauchorestaurants.com
The Drunken Butler
Most chef’s tables are really counters in what is basically a tiny restaurant; at 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 chef Yuma Hashemi, while the handful of tables behind feel almost as personal. The cooking is homely, too: Hashemi recently replaced the Drunken Butler’s French-influenced menus with the Persian feasting experience previously only offered on Sundays (£120 at the counter). Expect classic dishes from Hashemi’s Middle Eastern childhood: the bread, cheese and herb starter of noon-panir-sabzi; aubergines with cucumber and rose; Iran’s national dish of tahdig — crispy rice to soak up barbecue saffron chicken — and sweets to finish. 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
Social Eating House
Tucked away in the basement of Jason Atherton’s Soho restaurant, the chef’s counter at Social Eating House lives up to the name with space for eight diners looking straight into the kitchen. With dishes also being prepped for the main dining room upstairs, the experience feels more like having a ringside seat watching the inner workings of a hectic West End restaurant than most chef’s tables. The six-course menu (£95) brings Atherton’s fresh takes on seasonal British dishes, often with a witty update. Dinner kicks off with a Waldorf salad of Brixham crab and scallops with smoked avocado and Japanese relish ahead of the likes of flank tartare with Marmite and radish, lamb with ricotta, Jersey royals and cucumber, and Oakchurch Farm strawberries with basil ash, marigold and goat’s curd. There are over 20 wines to match by the glass or a full list offering a curated list of Europe’s main grape-growing regions.
