The Best Places in London

Wisteria climbs the exterior of this large Georgian pub tucked into the residential quiet between Islington's Upper Street and the Caledonian Road, far enough from the tourist drag to feel like a neighborhood secret. Inside, a sweeping oak bar counter rises from worn floorboards, and the walled garden out back is why people bother with the walk. The kind of pub that makes the surrounding gentrification feel earned rather than imposed.

1. Difford's Guide 4.5 stars · Difford's Guide

1. Difford's Guide 4.5 stars · Difford's Guide

The Sunday flower market on Columbia Road starts right at The Birdcage's corner, which means this old East End pub spent years famous almost entirely for its postcode. Gentrification caught up with the street eventually, and the surrounding restaurants and bars have turned it into a nightly destination rather than a once-a-week pitstop. A proper neighbourhood pub, worn in the right ways, with a crowd that arrived before the area did.

1. Difford's Guide 4.5 stars · Difford's Guide

1. Difford's Guide 4.5 stars · Difford's Guide

Cherubs drip from a ceiling above walls painted in a shade of blue that became known as "Lutyens" blue after this room, which is a bit like naming a color after a single very good outfit. The Blue Bar, tucked into the Berkeley Hotel, is a small, opulent cocktail bar with a white onyx counter and a black crocodile-print floor. Sit at the bar itself; the entrance annex is quieter but you'll feel like you're watching through a window.

1. Difford's Guide 4.5 stars · Difford's Guide

Bare brick walls and mismatched chairs upholstered in Chelsea blue give this Fulham Road gastro pub away before you've ordered. It sits directly opposite Stamford Bridge, which is either a selling point or a warning, and the football club was reportedly founded here when the place went by a different name. A long communal table keeps things convivial, and the overall room lands somewhere between slick and genuinely warm, which is harder than it looks.

1. Difford's Guide 4.5 stars · Difford's Guide

A members-only cocktail bar perched above one of London's great theatrical restaurants, where getting in requires an invitation rather than a reservation. The Ivy below has been a star magnet for generations, and the club upstairs distills that mythos into something even more rarefied. If you have to ask whether you're a member, you are not.

1. Difford's Guide 4.5 stars · Difford's Guide

Brown and white Victorian factory tiles wrap the corner exterior of this Spitalfields pub, a former industrial boozer that had its brickwork stripped bare and its bar topped in zinc during a thoughtful renovation years ago. Named after the 17th-century herbalist who lived nearby, it sits opposite Middlesex Street Market and carries its history lightly, the kind of place that looks like it always looked this way, which is the highest compliment a pub can get.

1. Difford's Guide 4.5 stars · Difford's Guide

A corner pub in Bermondsey where the Victorian bones are still visible under a liberal coat of white paint, with crystal chandeliers doing their best to class the place up. The beer list leans heavily London-brewed, and the room fills fast with warehouse-flat residents and office workers who treat it like a local because it is one. Named for the satirist dean himself, which feels right for a pub that doesn't take itself too seriously.

1. Difford's Guide 4.5 stars · Difford's Guide

Seven hundred and fifty scarlet glass spikes cover the back wall of this hotel cocktail bar, which is not what anyone walking through the Dorchester's stately lobby expects. The room went full nightclub somewhere along the way, all high-backed booths and bronzed glass, with a DJ where a pianist used to sit. The drinks, to their credit, stayed classical, which is probably what the older regulars are quietly clinging to.

1. Difford's Guide 4.5 stars · Difford's Guide

1. Difford's Guide 4.5 stars · Difford's Guide

1. Difford's Guide 4.5 stars · Difford's Guide

1. Difford's Guide 4.5 stars · Difford's Guide

The bar's name comes from an old method of slow-stewing whole hare in an earthenware jug with red wine and juniper, which should tell you something about the kitchen's seriousness with game. This is a City gastropub, the kind where the suits come in loud and leave later than planned. The drinks list is long and handled properly, and the food leans heavily British, with the eponymous dish on the menu for anyone who wants to commit.

1. Difford's Guide 4.5 stars · Difford's Guide

You get into this basement cocktail bar by walking through a Smeg fridge in the back of The Breakfast Club. Ask quietly at the door whether there's room downstairs, because the whole point is that it's a secret, and they'll let you hold that fiction together. Below, rough wood, vintage posters, and unsettling dolls set the mood, while the bathroom wallpaper is an education in one-hit wonders and deeply regrettable 1980s haircuts.

1. Difford's Guide 4.5 stars · Difford's Guide

The Georgian bay window at the front does a lot of the work here, pulling Mayfair's more well-heeled regulars in off Charles Street to lean against it with a pint. This is a proper pub, if a rather polished one, with crisp white linen in the dining room at the back and private floors above for when you need to be discreet about something. The footman of the name is long gone, but the postcode still sets the dress code.

1. Difford's Guide 4.5 stars · Difford's Guide

1. Difford's Guide 4.5 stars · Difford's Guide

Old film posters and mismatched paraphernalia cover every wall of this Chelsea gastropub, which takes its name literally enough to put an actual pig's ear on the menu. The bar gets busy, so regulars tend to slip through to the Blue Room or up to the panelled first-floor dining room when they want to settle in. Solidly British, pleasantly worn-in, and exactly as chaotic as the name suggests.

1. Difford's Guide 4.5 stars · Difford's Guide

1. Difford's Guide 4.5 stars · Difford's Guide

1. Difford's Guide 4.5 stars · Difford's Guide

1. Difford's Guide 4.5 stars · Difford's Guide

Reclaimed oak panelling and copper-topped tables give The Rose the look of a Victorian tavern that was never actually Victorian. It's a gastropub near London Bridge, sitting in the shadow of the Shard, close to Bermondsey Street's more self-conscious end. The owners set out to build an old English pub from scratch, and the herringbone parquet and twin-seater benches suggest they took the brief seriously.

1. Difford's Guide 4.5 stars · Difford's Guide

A carved wooden horse's head peers out from the dark panelled walls, which tells you roughly everything about the vibe here. The Running Horse is an old-school Mayfair pub with bare floorboards, a country-house feel, and a weekday crowd of local office workers piling in after hours. The food is better than it needs to be, but this place has no identity crisis: it knows it's a pub, and leans into that completely.

1. Difford's Guide 4.5 stars · Difford's Guide

Trailing ivy, hanging baskets, and window boxes facing the gardens of Edwardes Square give this Kensington pub a village-green quality that feels almost aggressively picturesque. Inside, etched windows, an open fire, bare wooden tables, and a Tudor-style moulded ceiling keep the mood warm and slightly grand at once. Locals lean in over pints and plates without any tourist-pub self-consciousness, which is the harder trick to pull off than the ivy.

1. Difford's Guide 4.5 stars · Difford's Guide

Meat butchered on site, much of it smoked or grilled over charcoal, is the reason a forgotten backstreet boozer in Canonbury became somewhere people make a point of visiting. The Smokehouse looks like a pub from the outside, and it mostly is, though the inside skews closer to a restaurant than a proper dive. It sits at a fork in the road a short walk from Highbury Corner, which is exactly the kind of neighborhood detail that makes locals feel smug about where they live.

1. Difford's Guide 4.5 stars · Difford's Guide

Dark leather armchairs and pine-toned wood give this cocktail bar the feel of a library where someone eventually brings you a drink. It sits inside Jason Atherton's Mayfair flagship, though the Social Room earns its own orbit, unhurried and a little more stylish than the average hotel bar shortcut off Oxford Street. Settle into a couch along the wall and let the bar team do the rest.

1. Difford's Guide 4.5 stars · Difford's Guide

A Victorian mid-terrace pub in the village-quiet back streets of Pimlico, a short walk from Victoria. The chesterfield sofas, mismatched tables, and token church pew tell you someone has been tasteful about the gastro conversion. Three cask ales on draught, a solid wine list, and a Bloody Mary that apparently earns its spicing. The food runs from bar snacks to full meals on the floor above, which is more than most pubs manage with either.

1. Difford's Guide 4.5 stars · Difford's Guide

The back of this canal pub looks exactly like the dodgy 1970s estate boozer it once was, which makes rounding the corner onto the Grand Union Canal towpath a genuine surprise. A 120-foot deck faces south over the water, and floor-to-ceiling glass doors open the whole thing up. Inside runs to bare wood and white paint, more museum café than gastropub, but on a sunny afternoon nobody is sitting inside anyway.

1. Difford's Guide 4.5 stars · Difford's Guide

1. Difford's Guide 4.5 stars · Difford's Guide

The wooden panels dividing the bar were supposedly salvaged from a ship and once kept different classes of drinker from seeing each other, which tells you something about both the pub's age and its Campden Hill postcode. A proper old-school London pub, all low ceilings and snug corners, in one of the city's more conspicuously wealthy neighborhoods. It draws the kind of locals who've stopped noticing how nice everything is.

1. Difford's Guide 4.5 stars · Difford's Guide

1. Difford's Guide 4.5 stars · Difford's Guide

1. Difford's Guide 4.5 stars · Difford's Guide

The oyster farm is owned by the Duchy of Cornwall, which is a sentence you don't get to say about many bars. This Borough Market oyster bar runs a chalkboard of a dozen-plus varieties on any given day, served at a narrow wooden counter or communal high tables under exposed brick and industrial light. It's a tight, warehouse-feeling room where the kitchen operates with no illusions of space, and the crowd leans into raw shellfish and porter with equal commitment.

1. Difford's Guide 4.5 stars · Difford's Guide

Wood-fired and dry-aged on the King's Road, Chelsea Grill is a steakhouse that takes British provenance seriously, working directly with farmers and letting the beef do the talking. The room is warm timber and soft light, the kind of place that feels polished without trying to remind you of it. It landed on the World's Best Steak Restaurants list at number 55, and the kitchen's restraint makes that feel like a natural fit rather than a surprise.

1. World's 101 Best #55 · World's Best Steak Restaurants

Wood-panelled walls and the low murmur of a room that has been doing this for a long time set the tone at this Mayfair grill. The Guinea Grill is a proper old-school steakhouse, serious about British beef, grass-fed and both wet and dry-aged, cooked on a char grill without any theatrics. It ranked among the World's Best Steak Restaurants, which tracks. Service runs on calm experience rather than performance, and the wine list follows the same unfussy logic.

1. World's 101 Best #99 · World's Best Steak Restaurants

The Campari and Aperol left out on the bar-top are a deliberate tell: this isn't your average Islington local. Hunter S. is a spirits bar with around 150 bottles leaning heavily into Scotch, American, and international whiskies, plus rum, and respectable depth in everything else. The vibe runs closer to a relaxed brasserie than a reverent whisky library, which means you'll end up talking flavour profiles without feeling like you're taking an exam.

1. Difford's Guide 4 stars · Difford's Guide

1. The Infatuation The 17 Best Italian Restaurants In London
2. The Infatuation The 21 Best Restaurants In Chelsea

The txuleton, a thick bone-in steak from older Basque cattle, is cooked over a wood-fired grill with nothing but salt and a lot of patience. This Shoreditch asador brings Basque grilling culture to London without softening it for the audience, and the room, all wooden tables and open flames, smells accordingly. It landed on the World's Best Steak Restaurants list, which tells you what to order. Service runs on warmth rather than ceremony, the way it would back in San Sebastián.

1. World's 101 Best #90 · World's Best Steak Restaurants

1. The Infatuation The 17 Best Ice Cream Spots In London

1. The Infatuation The 17 Best Italian Restaurants In London

1. The Infatuation The 17 Best Ice Cream Spots In London

1. The Infatuation The 17 Best Ice Cream Spots In London

1. The Infatuation The 17 Best Ice Cream Spots In London

1. The Infatuation The 17 Best Italian Restaurants In London

1. The Infatuation The 17 Best Ice Cream Spots In London

1. The Infatuation The 17 Best Ice Cream Spots In London

1. The Infatuation The 17 Best Ice Cream Spots In London

1. The Infatuation The 17 Best Italian Restaurants In London

1. The Infatuation The 17 Best Ice Cream Spots In London

1. The Infatuation The 17 Best Ice Cream Spots In London

1. The Infatuation The 17 Best Ice Cream Spots In London

1. The Infatuation The 17 Best Italian Restaurants In London

1. The Infatuation The 17 Best Ice Cream Spots In London

1. The Infatuation The 17 Best Italian Restaurants In London

1. The Infatuation The 17 Best Ice Cream Spots In London

1. The Infatuation The 17 Best Ice Cream Spots In London

1. The Infatuation The 17 Best Ice Cream Spots In London

1. The Infatuation The 17 Best Ice Cream Spots In London

1. The Infatuation The 17 Best Italian Restaurants In London

1. The Infatuation The 17 Best Ice Cream Spots In London

1. Difford's Guide 4 stars · Difford's Guide

A zinc-topped island bar anchors this wine bar on a quiet Marylebone lane, surrounded by old wine packing cases and champagne cellar racks softened by bare Edison bulbs. The list is long without being intimidating, and the staff are polished enough to guide you through it without making you feel like a student. The kind of place where a quick glass reliably becomes two.

1. Difford's Guide 4 stars · Difford's Guide

A blackboard on the street gives the game away, so it's not quite a speakeasy, but climbing past the packed pub downstairs still earns you the reveal: a dark, narrow cocktail bar of leather, wood, and slatted blinds that feels like a 1930s detective agency someone converted into a gentlemen's club. Copper tables catch the low light, the L-shaped room keeps things intimate, and the crowd upstairs tends to know exactly what they came for.

1. Difford's Guide 4 stars · Difford's Guide

1. Difford's Guide 4 stars · Difford's Guide

A big central island counter, worn banquettes, dark panelling, and naval prints on the walls: this Chelsea pub reads like someone described a proper London boozer from memory and then built it. Tucked away on a quiet side street off the Brompton Road, it draws the kind of locals who come for the chat, not the Insta moment. The covered tables outside are never quite sunny enough, yet somehow always full.

1. Difford's Guide 4 stars · Difford's Guide

Formerly a bank vault, which explains both the bolt-studded pillars and the sense that you've stumbled somewhere you weren't supposed to find. All Star Lanes is a basement bowling alley and bar off Bloomsbury Place, where four lanes share space with a cocktail bar and a tucked-away VIP room with two more. The Americana theme leans in hard, but the converted vault setting earns it a little irony the décor didn't plan for.

1. Difford's Guide 4 stars · Difford's Guide

Rows of glass demijohns packed with house-infused vodkas line the bar, each one a slightly different shade of amber or red depending on what's steeping inside. This is a Polish vodka bar hiding behind a narrow Blackfriars Road frontage, opening up into a surprisingly long, modern space. The caramel and cherry infusions are the ones regulars point you toward. The vast coach-builder's dining room next door is its own operation; the bar is the move.

1. Difford's Guide 4 stars · Difford's Guide

1. Difford's Guide 4 stars · Difford's Guide

The bar sits upstairs in Jamie Oliver's barbecue restaurant next to St Paul's, and the smell of smoking ribs hits you before you've even found a seat. Getting that seat is the sport: staff with headsets will try to park you in the basement holding area, so hold firm and wait for the bar proper. Once you're there, it's warm and easy, and the room does the rest.

1. Difford's Guide 4 stars · Difford's Guide

1. Difford's Guide 4 stars · Difford's Guide

1. Difford's Guide 4 stars · Difford's Guide

1. Difford's Guide 4 stars · Difford's Guide

Two railway arches near Hoxton Station, with the London Overground still rumbling overhead, house this bar and restaurant combo named after one of the old North London line locomotives. The bar takes one arch, the restaurant the other, and old railway sleepers frame the terrace outside. Inside, the look is contemporary Danish furniture against sand-blasted brick, which sounds like a contradiction until you're sitting in it.

1. Difford's Guide 4 stars · Difford's Guide

A two-floor bar tucked into the heart of Covent Garden, with a ground floor that wraps around a central staircase and a basement fitted with booths and a shelf of cocktail books for anyone who wants homework with their drink. The bar itself is the focal point, bottles lined up in lit rows against the dim room. Stools go fast, but there's standing room, and the crowd tends toward the pre-theatre and late-staying alike.

1. Difford's Guide 4 stars · Difford's Guide

The building looks enough like a factory that you'll second-guess yourself on the walk up. Once inside, this cocktail bar in East London's Bethnal Green-Hackney corridor keeps the industrial mood going: white walls, exposed bulbs, and a big island bar where you can watch the dining room below get on with its evening. The crowd skews local and knowing, which is really the only way you'd find it.

1. Difford's Guide 4 stars · Difford's Guide

1. Difford's Guide 4 stars · Difford's Guide

The sixty-foot vaulted ceilings of St Pancras's old booking hall are now a cocktail bar, which means you're drinking under gothic ironwork built to sell train tickets to the Victorians. The drinks lean into that: the menu is built around Victorian-era recipes and English ingredients, the kind of concept that could easily be too clever, but the room is so genuinely cathedral-scale that the theme disappears into the architecture.

1. Difford's Guide 4 stars · Difford's Guide

1. Difford's Guide 4 stars · Difford's Guide

1. Difford's Guide 4 stars · Difford's Guide

The bar worth finding at Gordon Ramsay's Bread Street Kitchen is upstairs, not the low-key lounge you walk into on the ground floor. That front room handles daytime coffees and quiet drinks just fine, but the real reason to come is the upper bar, where you're above the dining floor action and the cocktails have clearly had some attention paid to them since the early days.

1. Difford's Guide 4 stars · Difford's Guide

1. Difford's Guide 4 stars · Difford's Guide

Grower champagne and hot dogs, together at last. Bubbledogs is a small, lively bar on Charlotte Street in Fitzrovia where the pairing sounds like a dare but draws a queue outside most nights, since reservations are reserved for larger groups. Bare brick, high tables, and lab stools set the tone: this is not a place for ceremony. The menu is narrow by design, which is the whole joke, and somehow the joke holds up.

1. Difford's Guide 4 stars · Difford's Guide

1. Difford's Guide 4 stars · Difford's Guide

There's no sign outside, and the door is behind the counter of a juice bar, which is either annoying or part of the fun depending on your mood. BYOC is a candlelit basement speakeasy in Covent Garden with a twist: the house doesn't sell alcohol. You bring a bottle, pay a flat fee per person, and the bartender spends two hours turning it into bespoke cocktails using a vintage trolley of juices, herbs, bitters, and spice.

1. Difford's Guide 4 stars · Difford's Guide

The 1937 Cafe Royal Cocktail Book was written here, which tells you something about the building's relationship with a good drink. The bar itself, tucked off Air Street behind a discreet Art Deco sign, is darker and more industrial than the grand hotel around it would suggest. Dark green glass bricks line the walls, and an island bar anchors the room. A cocktail bar, in other words, that takes its history seriously without making you sit through a lecture about it.

1. Difford's Guide 4 stars · Difford's Guide

A Spanish bar tucked below Westferry Circus where the bank-to-bank ferry actually docks, with a patio that puts you close enough to wave at the party boats passing on the Thames. Inside, the decor leans loud and the music louder, with visiting DJs turning a tapas bar into something closer to a night out. Sangria and Spanish beer flow freely, and no one seems to be here for a quiet drink.

1. Difford's Guide 4 stars · Difford's Guide

Five pages of sherry is not a typo. Capote y Toros is a Spanish bar on Old Brompton Road that has quietly made the case for fino, manzanilla, oloroso, and everything in between, long before sherry became the thing sommeliers talked about. The range runs from bone-dry to treacly sweet, with a serious selection of Spanish wines for anyone whose great aunt never got them started.

1. Difford's Guide 4 stars · Difford's Guide

1. Difford's Guide 4 stars · Difford's Guide

1. Difford's Guide 4 stars · Difford's Guide

1. Difford's Guide 4 stars · Difford's Guide

1. Difford's Guide 4 stars · Difford's Guide

1. Difford's Guide 4 stars · Difford's Guide

1. Difford's Guide 4 stars · Difford's Guide

Diamond-studded Chesterfields and a members-only door policy set the tone at this tucked-away cocktail bar off Seven Dials. The room runs on silver, gold, velvet, and leather, and the cocktail menu is as lavish as the decor suggests. No flames, no rope out front, no scene to perform for, just a small, opulent lounge where the bar is well-stocked and the tables seat two.

1. Difford's Guide 4 stars · Difford's Guide

Five salvaged Royal Automobile Club fireplaces line the wall behind the bar, now stocked with premium spirits instead of logs. This basement cocktail bar in Fitzrovia earns its descent: leather floors, ostrich-skin chairs, art deco lamps, and padded booth tunnels that feel like a Bond villain's living room. The sunken bar puts bartenders at eye level, which is either democratic or theatrical, probably both.

1. Difford's Guide 4 stars · Difford's Guide

1. Difford's Guide 4 stars · Difford's Guide

Candlelight and wooden paneling do a lot of heavy lifting against the glass-and-steel hotel lobby just outside the door. This bar leans into rustic Italian warmth, with big flower arrangements that tip the room back toward opulence whenever it gets too cozy. It sits inside the ME Hotel on the Strand, so the crowd skews toward the well-heeled and the well-traveled, but the cocktail menu is doing its own thing.

1. Difford's Guide 4 stars · Difford's Guide

Twenty-five seats and no reservations, which means the beer is doing all the heavy lifting on busy nights. This cozy craft beer bar on Goodge Street mixes old-pub bones with pops of color from newer furniture. The tap list leans international and pleasantly obscure, served in vessels so elaborate that one requires a credit card deposit, presumably because someone, somewhere, walked off with it.

1. Difford's Guide 4 stars · Difford's Guide

The original outpost of the Draft House chain, a specialist beer bar on Northcote Road where the tap list runs to around 18 rotating draught options and north of 40 bottles. The staff know their brewing methods, their glassware, and what pairs with what, so being lost is fine. The crowd leans toward the kind of people who read long articles about things and feel strongly about them, but they're having a good time regardless.

1. Difford's Guide 4 stars · Difford's Guide

1. Difford's Guide 4 stars · Difford's Guide