Rooftop Café (CLOSED)

Please note, Rooftop Cafe is now closed. Time Out Food & Drink Editors, December 2016.

Admittedly, just getting here is half the fun – there’s a sense of achievement once you’ve successfully navigated entry-phone, lift and winding stairs and corridors. But what you find at the end of the journey is also pretty special. The café of a co-working enterprise that happens to be open to the public, the Rooftop has exceptional views over the City, along with a neck-cricking, vertiginous proximity to the Shard next door.

In summer, the enormous deck terrace planted with herbs and vegetables is a wonderful treat, while the small inner café with its wooden floor and colourful furniture is a pretty eyrie on cooler days. We relished the breakfast – excellent, generous bread and scrambled eggs with thick-cut smoked salmon or luscious bacon, flanked by sparky bloody marys – but the kitchen also runs to lunch and tea during the week, and dinner Wednesday to Saturday, when a cut-above menu features the likes of ‘rabbit, prosciutto, mango, almond, watercress’ or ‘flourless chocolate cake, blackberries’; a winter’s day was brightened by crunchy potato cake topped with a portobello mushroom and poached duck egg.

Wines are well chosen and sensibly priced; the bread is also excellent.