For some, Valentine’s Day is the most romantic day of the year, while for others, it marks the start of a new dating season full of promise and adventure. Whether you’re looking to go all out with a candlelit dinner or opting for a casual – albeit whimsical – day drink with light bites, these are some of the most romantic London bars and restaurants designed to impress.
We can’t guarantee that sparks will fly over dinner, but if there’s one thing these locations have in common, it’s good architectural bones, served with a side of design. And that alone is a good conversation starter.
Sessions Arts Club, Clerkenwell
The interiors of this former courthouse are as romantic as they come, with peeling paint and raw plaster walls, restored mouldings and patinaed floors adding to the sense of faded grandeur inside the restaurant, and walls a revolving gallery of contemporary art. Beloved London chef Florence Knight’s seasonal but sumptuous menu will impress and satisfy guests.
As a rule, tables book a month in advance for this sought-after spot. If you’re grabbing brunch, head out afterwards on foot to explore nearby Exmouth Market and the quaintly cobbled streets of Clerkenwell – or head to Hoxton and Shoreditch for an afterparty following a late dinner.
Nightingale, Mayfair
This avant-garde Mayfair spot takes the classic Vienna coffee house and gives it a contemporary spin. Nightingale is the inaugural London design project from studio Tutto Bene, aka Felizia Berchtold and Oskar Kohnen, and is a step apart from other Mayfair offerings. The day-to-night haunt features ‘dancing’ chandeliers which spin overhead. Pale greens and metallic surfaces feel utterly modern while recalling the colours and textures of Milan. Circular orbs and curves are a recurring motif throughout the space, which seats up to 60 guests for lunch, mid-week cocktails and private dinner parties. The menu is packed with fresh ingredients and seasonal dishes, presenting modern British and European cuisine from starters such as Dorset Crab Salad to meaty mains like Beef Wellington, Roasted Sea Bass or, Butternut Squash and Sage Ravioli.
Sale e Pepe, Knightsbridge
Sale e Pepe has been a fixture of the West London dining scene for half a century, popular with movie stars and theatre folk. Its interiors were given a glamorous makeover last year to mark its important milestone, courtesy of Hamilford Design. The bar is reimagined as a grand Italian ristorante, complete with wood panelling and bronzed mirrors. At the same time, the dining room is daubed in a moody dark blue, patterned wallpaper and bronzed mirrors, inspired by the grandness of early 20th-century Milanese townhouses. It is simple but elegant. The menu’s also undergone an update, with light, crudo-style dishes and ‘famiglia’ plates such as the polpo grigliato, linguine vongole and salt-baked cod that are great for sharing.
Goodbye Horses, Hackney
If you’re looking for somewhere casual with excellent natural wines and music, Goodbye Horses could be the place for you. The North London wine bar is located in De Beauvoir Town and is the brainchild of founders Alex Young and George de Vos. The pair tapped Swiss architect Leopold Banchini to restore the Victorian-era pub and create its elegant, understated interiors where ambience is king.
Hand-painted murals by Lucy Stein add to the charm, while Chef Jack Coggins’s simple but tasty menu includes dishes such as sardines on milk bread, steak tartare with smoked chilli and sourdough crisps, langoustines, and prawn dolma. And while it doesn’t explicitly market itself as a listening bar, Goodbye Horses has a 4,000-plus vinyl record library set in wooden shelving behind the bar. Audiophiles will be impressed by Izaak Gray’s sound system, featuring vintage, restored Tannoy Lancasters, which offers high-fidelity audio for an immersive listening experience that still allows for comfortable conversation. Isn’t that the perfect alchemy?
64 Goodge St, Fitzrovia
Housed inside a restored 18th-century townhouse, 64 Goodge Street offers fine ‘French cooking from an outsider’s perspective’ and is an intimate and domestic feeling space, with rustic interiors daubed in inky hues.
The Fitzrovia restaurant was designed by Studio Found and is part of the Woodford Restaurant Group, whose other dining spots include cult favourite Quality Chop House. Interiors flirt with French country touches, refined for a London audience: the dark colour palette is enlivened by brass and marble surfaces and antique furniture, with a spectacular dried flower sculpture hanging above a dining nook created by Design By Nature. Among Chef Stuart Andrew’s a la carte delights are snail, bacon and garlic ‘bon bons’, smoked eel, quail forestière, cod à la grenobloise and saddle of rabbit.
Dalla, Hackney
Modest and unassuming, Dalla is a restaurant celebrating life’s ‘simple pleasures’ and was founded by furniture dealer Gennaro Leone of Spazio Leone, who enlisted his friend, artist and designer Oscar Piccolo to hone the interiors. Cream and white painted walls and white dining chairs and tables topped with crisp linen create a paired-back environment inside the restaurant, whose simplicity is meant to echo the familiarity and warmth of a Sicilian family dinner. As you’d expect from Leone, there are furniture and design objects to excite, including decorative mirrors by Gio Ponti, a midcentury Stilnovo chandelier, a 1930s Piero Fornasetti fish painting and hardware designed by Luigi Caccia Dominioni. Chef Mitchell Damota’s menu pulls on northern Italian cuisine, while lighter, southern fare is available during warmer months.
Ikoyi, Temple
Brutalist riverfront culture hub 180 The Strand isn’t short of fantastic dining options. There’s the arty Toklas (created by the founders of Frieze), 180 Corner, showcasing emerging chefs, and the eighth-floor and rooftop restaurant 180 House. But Ikoyi is in a league of its own. Led by Chef Jeremy Chan and Restaurant Director Iré Hassan-Odukale, Ikoyi’s experimental and highly personal menu draws on West African spices and hyper-seasonal British ingredients. Bookings open a month in advance, with Ikoyi ’s tasting menu featuring dishes such as smoked jollof rice, grilled lobster and lobster custard, and Peking duck, caramelised and grilled in suya tamari served with a sauce of liver, heart and hazelnut butter.
The restaurant’s design is just as delicious, conceived by Copenhagen-based architect and designer David Thulstrup. A swooping stainless steel mesh gives form to the space, creating the feeling of being cocooned within the earth—a sentiment echoed through rustic and neutral shades, walls covered in robust copper panelling, and wooden tables paired with butter-yellow dining chairs.
Claude Bosi at Bibendum, South Kensington
If your date is a fan of architecture and design, it’s hard to find a better date spot than Claude Bosi at Bibendum. Housed within the iconic Grade II listed Michelin House in South Kensington, it was originally built as the headquarters of the Michelin Tire Company, with the Art Deco landmark envisaged as a ‘palace of industry’.
Chef Bosi’s eponymous, two-Michelin-starred restaurant is located on the first floor, its dining room enlivened by colossal, colourful stained-glass windows. The menu changes seasonally, but Bosi’s signature menu features Bibendum eggs, duck jelly with caviar, Cornish turbot, and Brittany rabbit, polished off with double chocolate soufflé with Tahitian vanilla ice cream.
If seafood is more your thing, Claude Bosi’s Oyster Bar is located on the ground floor and offers a great view of the building’s glorious mosaic floors.
Saltine, Highbury
Saltine, like the cracker, is straightforward and unfussy, billed as a ‘modern neighbourhood restaurant’. Occupying what was once a fried chicken shop, the space has been reimagined by owners Mat Appleton and Jess Blackstone, who are the creative force behind the ever-popular Fink’s Cafes in Finsbury Park and Clapton. Blackstone led the renovations, installing a modest casual bar at the front and an airy glass-roofed dining room at the back. Guests can expect simple but flavourful dishes from Chef Phil Wood – previously of Spring and St John Marylebone – whose menu favours whole animals and seasonal ingredients. Sample dishes include roast chicken and bread salad, cured bream with fennel seed saltine, slow roast lamb with braised wax beans and green anise, and sweet treats such as sticky toffee apple cake and raspberry ripple ice cream with blackberry and verbena jelly.
Pollini at Ladbroke Hall, North Kensington
If you want to wow your guest, Pollini at Ladbroke Hall packs an impressive design punch. Opened in October 2023, the striking London restaurant was designed by Vincenzo de Cotiis, the brainchild of the creatives behind the Carpenters Workshop Gallery. Ladbroke Hall is a Grade II-listed Beaux-Arts building that, like Michelin House, was also designed as a palace for industry: this time, as the car factory, showroom, and office of the Sunbeam Talbot Motor Company.
In 2019, Carpenters Workshop Gallery founders Loïc Le Gaillard and Julien Lombrai started converting the 120-year-old building into a new arts and culture hub, bringing in Avanti Architects to lead Ladbroke Hall’s renovation. Pollini’s was the cherry on the cake. Helmed by Chef Emanuele Pollini, the restaurant and bar occupies the building’s grand lobby, crossed by arched ceilings, decorative columns and marble details and illuminated by towering arched windows. Spend some time exploring the gallery’s exhibitions before grabbing a cocktail at the striking, black, angular bar and diving into Chef Pollini’s menu, inspired by his childhood in Italy and formative experiences eating in his grandmother’s kitchen.
www.ladbrokehall.com/restaurant
