Joe Bishop

Sandwiched between the City of London and Shoreditch, Liverpool Street – and its main thoroughfare, Bishopsgate – is packed with high-end spots. Lots of them have breathtaking views due to being halfway up skyscrapers such as the Heron Tower, while you'll find more casual and quite literally more down-to-earth eateries in the Broadgate development. Stroll down in the general direction of Monument and you find The Wolseley City, or go east to Spitalfields. Whether you’re splashing your bonus or just killing time waiting for a train at Liverpool Street station, here’s a selection of the area’s diverse eateries. RECOMMENDED: The very best restaurants in London. 

Tom Brown, the head chef and owner of Pearly Queen, a new seafood restaurant in Shoreditch, is staring at me. Well, not the actual Tom Brown, but a purple-hued, post-impressionist portrait of him that sits high up on the wall near the bar. Every time I glance to my left, there he is; a slightly disapproving look in his eye, awaiting my reaction to each dish. A neon sign that says ‘the world is yours’ illuminates the room. It’s the sort of interior design you can imagine the wayward son of a wealthy despot to have; part megalomania, part Grand Theft Auto: Vice City. Tom Brown is the man behind Cornerstone, the Michelin-starred Hackney Wick seafood favourite. Pearly Queen features some hits from it, but the menu is largely original, with a specific focus on oysters, which come both fresh and interfered with.  Of the dressed oysters the star was the pate with champagne jelly, transporting you joyfully to the French riviera The bread, sourdough, arrived upright, in the shape of a dorsal fin. It was accompanied by a seaweed butter which, had it not had a dusting of desiccated green kelp on the top, drawing the mind to imagine a flavour of the ocean, would not make it past the Trades Description Act. Similarly, slivers of ‘hake ham’, dry cured slices of hake served with olive oil, were decidedly un-fishy, which for fish is quite the feat. When eating an English oyster right now, you feel slightly like you’re taking your life into your own hands. Deluging our island’s waters with

Uh oh – a new restaurant has opened in Peckham. Set your London discourse phasers to nuclear and prepare for a lumpy and scolding essay.  Only joking. This is all about Little Kudu, the latest gland on the Kudu ‘collective’ udder, which started as a single, South African-inspired restaurant and has now branched out into a grill, a cocktail bar in a Chelsea clothing shop and, somewhat inexplicably, a private dining space that is also gallery. There is no pie on the menu, but you can imagine if there was, owners Amy Corbin and Patrick Williams would have their fingers firmly in it.  More in the traditional Saffa canon was an amazingly tangy slopfest of braaibroodjie, a sort of luxury open-faced cheese toastie. Little Kudu sits unassumingly in the arches under Queen’s Road Peckham station. It’s an unlovable patch of street, thronged by new builds and a graveyard of abandoned e-scooters and bikes. Mercifully the tiny interior, all dusty pinks and light browns and crowned with a rather stunning Murano glass chandelier, is a pokey oasis.  The ‘collective’s signature cocktail, the Smokey Kudu (also the name of their bar – keep up) take on a Manhattan, came in a little pour-it-yourself corked bottle, and, with a blend of Laphroaig and Japanese whisky, was a delicious and blood-thinning way to start a meal.  Little Kudu markets itself as a kind of tapas restaurant, and so not one for anti-small-plates crew. The Little Kudu loaf with Cape Malay butter was a salty brioche accompanied b