London's best late-night restaurants
Where to grab a bite in the capital after-hours
Looking for somewhere you can have a pleasant, relaxed meal after 11pm - but want to avoid the late-night party venues where food is secondary to drinking? Here's our pick of places in the West End.
La Bodega Negra
- Rated as: 3/5
Beneath a lurid Soho shopfront, ablaze with neon signs screeching ‘sex shop’, is a new transatlantic import – the London outpost of the NYC-based La Esquina, an ultra-trendy downtown café-taqueria. As at La Esquina, La Bodega Negra is an upstairs-downstairs...
- 16 Moor Street, W1D 5NH
Brasserie Zédel
- Rated as: 4/5
- Price band: 2/4
Corbin and King, the restaurateurs behind the Wolseley and the Delaunay, know how to run grand brasseries. When you combine this with a historic and impressive art deco setting – the former ballroom of a vast hotel at Piccadilly Circus – you already know...
- 20 Sherwood Street, W1F 7ED
The Delaunay
- Rated as: 5/5
- Price band: 4/4
As you might expect from the younger sibling of the Wolseley, there’s glam-factor aplenty here, and the Delaunay manages to attract the intelligentsia out on smart dinner dates. Its interior provides more than a fitting setting, echoing European grand...
- 55 Aldwych, WC2B 4BB
Dishoom
- Rated as: 3/5
- Price band: 2/4
- Critics choice
Dishoom describes itself as ‘a Bombay café in London’ and is fashioned after that city’s ‘Irani’ caffs, where a cup of spicy masala chai and small eats are always on offer. Design-wise, it could have all gone depressingly ersatz, but the ceiling fans...
- 12 Upper St Martin's Lane, WC2H 9FB
Lahore Kebab House
- Rated as: 4/5
- Price band: 1/4
There are three great places to eat Indian food in Whitechapel. Along with Tayyabs and Needoo, Lahore dishes out generous portions of brilliantly bold Punjabi grills, snacks and curries, and has been doing so for decades. A recent expansion has eased...
- 2 Umberston Street, E1 1PY
Mamuska!
- Rated as: 4/5
- Price band: 1/4
Think of Polish home cooking and you’re probably not imagining eating it somewhere like this: a simple yet swish café, stylishly and humorously branded. ‘We have a vast wine selection’, says the menu, ‘one white, one red and even a rosé’. Orders are taken...
- 1st floor, (Elephant & Castle Shopping Centre), SE1 6TE
Mangal II
- Rated as: 3/5
- Price band: 1/4
Can you judge a restaurant by its decor? Mangal II’s red interior walls certainly suit the intense atmosphere of the place. With tables packed like lily pads on a pond, waiters stretch awkwardly behind diners’ backs to lay down plates. For some this might...
- 4 Stoke Newington Road, N16 8BH
Spuntino
- Rated as: 4/5
- Price band: 2/4
At lunchtime at least, the long queues that used to discourage visits to this no-phone, no-bookings and not-exactly-large retro American joint have dissipated. The lovely tiles behind the bar are original to the premises, a former butcher’s shop, which...
- 61 Rupert Street, W1D 7PW
The Wolseley
- Rated as: 4/5
- Price band: 3/4
- Critics choice
Self-described ‘café-restaurant in the grand European tradition’, the Wolseley is one of London’s premier destination restaurants, as popular for power breakfasts as it is for birthday celebrations. It takes itself seriously (‘no photographs’, memorabilia...
- 160 Piccadilly, W1J 9EB
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