In Marylebone. We’ve read the name of this wealthy West End neighbourhood hundreds of times, but we still don’t know how to say it. We do know, though, where to eat in Le Bone. Or, how about Mary? What about Boney M? Why should I care? We were taught not to talk when our mouths were full anyway…
This food lover’s dream has something for everyone, from Mexican food with a Michelin star to classic British bar food with a twist or two. That being said, these are the best places to eat in London’s Marylebone.
Church of St. John Marylebone, Marylebone Lane
Great for eating from the nose to the tail and a bloody brilliant British cooking experience…
Our family has grown even bigger! The newest member has arrived, bringing a new and exciting style that is both distinctly St. John and perfectly fits the tastes of its trendy London area. It’s already one of the best places to eat in Marylebone.
Anyone who has eaten at a Fergus Henderson restaurant before knows that the bright white, clinical surroundings make you feel like you’re going to be fed very well, and St. John Marylebone lives up to that promise.
While this menu isn’t as big or even as fancy as the ones at the main restaurant or Bread & Wine, it still has some of the restaurant’s famous treats. The famous Welsh rarebit is shown here as a croquette, which is a wonderfully weird piece of art. Those “nose to tail” leanings are all there and right, too. A recent dish of lightly pink lamb’s liver and horseradish was sour, sharp, and unforgettable.
A plate of lamb sweetbreads, wilted young salad leaves, and the fresh scent of tarragon from earlier in the year have stuck in my mind even longer.
As you sit on a window stool and watch the people walking down Marybelone Lane, these smaller plates go well with the wine that is being poured by the glass. You might even start to think about how far we’ve fallen. You have to get a plate of madelines for the road. A small one costs £5.50, but you know you want the bigger one for £11.
Check the daily menu to see what’s ready to eat. It’s put online as a picture of the restaurant’s blackboard at 11:30 a.m. for lunch and 5:30 p.m. for dinner.
Tressna, 101 Blandford Street
Perfect for seaside Indian food that has earned a Michelin star…
Trashiana is a great place to eat if you want a focused, flavor-forward experience. This restaurant has a Michelin star and serves coastal Indian food with a focus on fresh British seafood cooked with spice and energy. This sounds like everything you need for a great meal in Marylebone, don’t you agree?
It’s kind of funny that the restaurant is on Blandford Street, because cook Sajeev Nair’s modern take on Indian food is anything but bland. Growing up in Palakkad, Kerala, Nair knows a lot about Indian coastal food. One of the best shellfish meals in London has to be the signature dish of funky, rich Dorset brown crab with butter, pepper, and garlic, all mashed up and spoonable.
The nandu varuval is another famous Trishna crab dish. It has crispy soft shell crab, green chilli, a rocher of white crab meat, and a smooth tomato chutney that all work well together. Really tasty.
From 5 to 6:15 p.m., the early dinner menu is a steal at £45 for four courses.
The Boxcar Bar & Grill is on New Quebec Street.
Perfect for home-grown steaks with beautiful marbling…
It’s nice that Boxcar Bar and Grill is in a quiet part of New Quebec Street, away from the chaos and mayhem on Oxford Street, Marylebone High Street and Edgware Road. It feels like a real hidden gem in the neighbourhood. In other words, if the hidden gem in your area had perfectly marbled steaks and swinging lamb legs in a fridge outside…
This trendy restaurant in Portman Village has slowly built a reputation for serving delicious, ingredient-driven meals by focussing on high-quality British food that is sourced in an ethical way.
The food at Boxcar is hearty and tasty, with a focus on prime cuts that are grilled over a charcoal flame until they get that all-important bark. If we’re talking about bark, the dining room is decorated in a variety of soft wood tones, with some floating plants thrown in for good measure. Because of all the wine and steak you’ve eaten, the place makes you feel almost clean after a night there.
The restaurant now has a redesigned outdoor area with a chef’s table for two. The atmosphere inside is a perfect mix of a cosy British bar and a Manhattan speakeasy.
You can work on a tight, sure plan in a nice place. For the first round of snacking, you have to get the Herdwick lamb croquettes. They taste a little funky from being made with a long-braised, fatty cut of lamb in the best way possible. A nice aniseed kick from the lovage emulsion rounds everything out just right, and it stays with you until your steak (Hereford rib eye, 225g at £31, for us) arrives.
What else is there to say about a restaurant steak that is cooked perfectly? There are marks on it. It’s turning pink in the middle. Cracks in the top look like big chunks of sea salt. It feels very country. If you’re not quite so hungry, Boxcar has four lighter mains. The pan-roasted cod with peas and broad beans (with their outer sleeves taken off, yay!) is the best of the bunch.
Like the rest of the menu, the desserts are expertly made. The drinks, especially the Twice Smoked, which is a lively mix of Calvados, Laphroaig 10, apple, and maple, are the perfect way to end the night.
That is, unless you came here for the ridiculously cheap “quick lunch,” which costs only £19. If you have plans in the afternoon, we don’t think you should drink that big of a drink because you will also feel twice as drunk.
It’s possible that that doesn’t even work as a queue, but Boxcar Bar and Grill does.
Lita, on Paddington Road
Great for high-end Mediterranean dishes that are made with great care…
A new Mediterranean restaurant in the middle of London that cooks over an open fire… To be honest, we could be talking about most of the new restaurants in the city right now…
…but Lita isn’t where you normally live, let’s be clear. Lita is short for “abuelita,” which means “granny” in Spanish. It’s not really the kind of place where your grandmother would cook.
Unless your grandmother is a young culinary apprentice who has worked as head chef at Corrigan’s Mayfair, at the Michelin-starred The Clove Club, and at its sister restaurant, the Luca. All of this happened before she turned 30.
It’s pretty complicated, but we’re talking about the job path of Lita head chef Luke Ahearne, who has a great culinary background. He has kept going in that direction in a stylish way. Lita has only been open for a few months, but it has already gotten some amazing reviews across the country. Jay Rayner called it “in heavenly raptures,” and Jimi Famurewa said it left him speechless. We don’t want to think about that scene ever again, Jesus.
That being said, it’s easy to see why they loved it; the food is truly amazing, and even the most basic items are made with great care. Two smoked basque sardines are served with a beautifully smooth ajo blanco and tart cherries. The sardines have been carefully pinboned and then – at least clearly – glued back together. It shows the level of skill Lita has already reached in her food, which has a depth of flavour that takes your breath away.
Don’t let it throw you off too much; you need to get back on track for the fresh, bright Dorset clams with Roman-style artichokes. In other words, they were simmered in white wine and olive oil until they were soft. You would expect it to be great for £28.
Okay, let’s talk about the big Galician cow in the room. Lita costs a lot. We know it’s rude to talk about prices so directly, but fuck me, there are snacks for around twenty pounds, starts for over thirty pounds, and several main courses for over one hundred pounds.
No pan con tomate should ever cost £17, not even one with Cantabrian anchovies on top, but this is a very good one. Lita doesn’t have many bottles of wine that cost less than £60. Desserts will not move out of the mid-teens.
Without a doubt, this is a place for a special event. But wow, what a place to sink into. The inside has a warm, earthy colour scheme with reused terracotta tiles, a bar made of wood with a deep red, veined marble top, blood-orange banquettes and restored antique tables that make you think of your grandmother’s grand chateau kitchen from fifty years ago. She might not have liked the prices here, but she would have been happy to send some of these dishes to her friends and family.
The Orrery is on Marylebone High Street.
Perfect for French grace that is soft and filled with natural light…
The fine French restaurant Orrery is on the first floor of a building that used to be stables. Its name comes from a mechanical model of the solar system. You can feel the natural light as soon as you walk into the restaurant. The big arched windows and skylights let in so much that you need sunglasses on London’s brighter summer days. The fact that the starched white tablecloths reflect light only makes this clear.
The elegant menu, made by Chef Igor Tymchyshyn, has traditional French foods with a modern twist. Even though the menu items are pretty basic (like salmon, polenta, asparagus, veloute, or seabass and chive sabayaon), the way they are presented is anything but. There are artistic touches like dots and scrapes that sometimes remind me of a Masterchef episode from a few seasons ago. We can’t argue with how clear the flavours are here, though.
Some people like to smoke at the end of a meal, but this chicken parfait cigar is the best way to start it. Close with a strawberry and elderflower pannacotta that tastes like summer, topped with a big puck of champagne jelly. Boom!
With views of St. Marylebone Church and a beautiful rooftop terrace where you can start your meal with Orrery’s signature Old Fashioned, Orrery is one of the best restaurants in Marylebone. It’s a great place for a special event or a leisurely lunch.
The Thayer Street Pachamama in Marylebone
Great for a celebration of British and Peruvian land…
Pachamama, which means “Mother Earth,” is all about strong Peruvian flavours made with British ingredients. They put a lot of stress on seasonality and sustainability, which is something we can really get behind.
The menu is split into sections called Raw, Snacks, Sea, Land, and Soil. The Raw section has four really great ceviches, with thinly sliced pucks of scallop that look so fresh they’re beating, covered in a spicy aji verde sauce with smoother edges made of a mild cheese. Since it’s March, the weather is changing, and we’re in the UK, thin strips of the first asparagus sliced very thinly serve as a fresh af topping.
You can get anticucho skewers with either lamb or chicken. They get their flavour and lift from a red wine vinegar marinade, and the grill makes the sides of the skewers rough. The beef short rib croquettes here might be even more hard to stop eating.
Get the seafood plate with grilled prawns, octopus, squid, scallops, sea bass fillet, and roasted lemon if you’re with a group. Remember to leave space for the churros. Also, as a sort of public service announcement, do not miss the crab churros if they are available. They taste like the famous Chiltern Firehouse crab cakes from the restaurant’s glory days.
On top of that, since Pachamama is billed as a “pisco bar” first and foremost, you have to have at least one pisco sour. This one is perfectly balanced. Given that the business shuts down at midnight, don’t you think it would be rude not to have a few more?
The Old Pizza Place Baker Street, Da Michele
Great place to try one of the most famous and proudly Neapolitan pizzas in the world…
L’antica, which has been called “The Best Pizza in the World” and was featured in the movie “Eat, Pray, Love,” is a great, very cheap place to grab lunch or dinner quickly.
Forget about the bad fight that happened before the opening of the first London location in Stoke Newington; the second location on Baker Street is still happily serving the best Neapolitan pizzas. This isn’t the place to go if you want something with lots of sauces. The basics are done right here, and less is more.
One thing that might not be typical is their “Marita” pizza, which is a mix of margherita and marinara sauces and is one of their best-selling items. Still, it works like hell.
People who don’t want to go to Marylebone can now find outposts in Soho and Manchester as well.
Fisker’s, High Street Marylebone
Great for schnitzel, spätzle, and lots of sweets…
Fischer’s is one of our favourite places in Marylebone. It’s a Viennese-style brasserie that makes you feel like you’re in Austria in the early 1900s. This cosy restaurant has a lot of old-world charm, with dark wood walls, artwork from the time period, and staff members dressed in traditional clothes. Austrian classics like wiener schnitzel and spätzle are on the menu. The desserts and cakes are, of course, the real stars.
Since Fischer’s is open from morning until night without a break, it might be best to go there for breakfast. The “Franz Joseph Kaiserschmarrn,” an Austrian favourite, seems like a good choice right now. This chopped pancake with cherry compote will satisfy any craving. The Holstein Schnitzel with anchovies, capers, and egg is also great if you want something spicy that is still “brunch-like.”
We love the “Coupe Liegeois,” which is a dessert made with vanilla and chocolate ice creams, whipped cream, and bitter chocolate sauce. Instead, try the rich and decadent Sacher torte with the required mountain of whipped cream. The layers of apricot jam in this case make it perfectly balanced. A coffee will make everything better, no matter what.
You can also come in the evening for a real feast. The restaurant has a great range of Austrian wines and beers, as well as lots of hearty, meat-heavy dishes to go with them.
Cavita, 22nd Street
Ideal for a light and energising Mexican meal in a fancy setting…
Not able to make an appointment at Kol? Cavita is another beautifully designed Mexican restaurant. The “see and be seen” atmosphere doesn’t take away from the great food, which is a good thing. If you’re dining with a group, make sure to share the whole grilled octopus and the delicious pig’s head tamal. Both are full of interesting textures and spicy bursts, and the famous cook Adriana Cavita has a great way with protein. It works so well together.
In our list of the best places in London to eat delicious Mexican food, you can read more about Cavita and the KOL we just talked about.
Charlotte Street and the Carousel
Great for checking out what some of the hottest new cooks in the world are cooking…
If you’ve already eaten on every street in Marylebone and aren’t feeling very inspired, Carousel might tempt you back to this part of London to eat again with its constantly changing cooks and cuisines.
In the middle of Marylebone, Carousel is a one-of-a-kind place to eat. It’s part restaurant, part artistic hub. From Tuesday to Saturday of every week, a different guest chef takes over the kitchen. The diner shows off some of the best young chefs from around the world to the hungry people of Charlotte Street.
Some of the best chefs of late have been Venezuelan-born Patxi Andres, whose time working at Boragó, which is probably Chile’s best restaurant, and Black Axe Mangal in London has given his food a rebellious, no-holds-barred feel. Later that same month, Hugo Durán from Mexico City brought his celebration of native food from the southeast of Mexico to the tables. Recently, in February, two-Michelin-starred Thai superstar chef Chudaree “Tam” Debhakam brought her strong, balanced tastes to the merry-go-round.
Carousel is a real culture destination because it has more than just a dining area. It also has art shows, workshops, and live performances.
Blandford Street and Jikoni
Perfect for fusion food with roots in the Indian region…
Jikoni, which in Swahili just means “kitchen,” is a cosy and colourful restaurant that honours the chef Ravinder Bhogal’s rich cooking background. Her Indian, Kenyan, and British backgrounds have influenced the menu, which is a delicious mix of flavours and a way of thinking about “cooking without borders.”
A famous dish is the prawn toast scotch egg, which tastes even better than it sounds. Another great dish is the pressed and crispy shoulder of lamb with a house ras el hanout sauce and flatbread. Also, that’s the banana cake with miso butterscotch and Ovaltine kulfi.
Jikoni’s Weekend Brunch, which is from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m., is a lot of fun; you should definitely make a reservation ahead of time.
Cafe Locatelli on Seymour Street
Ideal for a fancy meal at a famous Italian restaurant…
Since it opened twenty years ago, Locanda Locatelli has had a Michelin star and is run, at least in name, by the charming, starry-eyed famous chef Giorgio Locatelli. The restaurant serves traditional Italian food with a focus on fresh, seasonal ingredients.
The executive chef Rino Bono and his head chef Sergio Fontana now work at the 5-star Churchill Hotel on Seymour Street, which is across the street from KOL. They are in charge of making Locatelli’s signature dishes, such as the hearty oxtail ravioli with wild mushrooms and the chargrilled mackerel with agrodolce onions and capers, which tastes like the best sweet and sour Sicilian food.
You can have one of the best relaxed lunches in London by sitting down in one of the large banquette seats, eating food that comes in large portions, and drinking one or two bottles of wine from the restaurant’s all-Italian wine list. It’s important to note that this restaurant isn’t cheap; main courses cost at least £35 and pasta stays in the mid-twenties. Still, there are worse places in Central London to spend a lot of money if you have the money!
The Goat That Grazes, New Quebec Street
For handsome, honest British bar classics that can be enjoyed on a sunny terrace when the weather is nice…
The Grazing Goat is one of the best bars in Marylebone, which isn’t known for having many of them. When Coombeshead Farm bread and butter starts the party, you know you’re in good hands. Those hands also make a great Scotch egg with anchovy mayonnaise that is so salty it’s almost spicy, but in the best way possible. It’s like devilled eggs, but not quite.
You should stay in the snack area because that’s where most of the best food is. A plate of lightly fermented black cabbage and crispy lamb salsa goes great with another round of beers.
If you’re hungry, the bar also makes a great pie. At the moment, it’s a great chicken and bacon dish, with a strong Montgomery cheddar sauce instead of the usual gravy. It’s a pretty expensive pie at £23, but it’s enough for two people. The Sunday roast is also worth writing about, but since we’re not writing to our parents, we’ll leave it here for now…
The Grazing Goat is a great place for drinks and snacks after work or before dinner. On sunny days, you can sit on the deck outside. Just give me a Doombar, please.
BAO Mary, James Street
The perfect place for a unique and tasty take on a Taiwanese dumpling house…
Another BAO location, and yet another great place that does everything right. At this point, you might want to know if these guys ever miss.
Like most new BAO locations, this one has some unique features that make it stand out from the others in the city, from Battersea Power Station to Shoreditch and beyond. The all-conquering Taiwanese street food group has a location in Marylebone that is open “all day” from 10 a.m. to midnight and specialises in dumplings.
It’s no surprise that they’re great since the restaurant is so good at working with dough. The mutton dumplings in chilli oil are especially tasty, and the cumin gives everything a nice musty smell. We feel bad for you if that doesn’t make you happy…
…The pan-fried beef dumplings have also been praised as the best and most popular item. They come in a set of five, but when you open them, they look like one big piece, with a caramelised outside and chopped beef inside that is hotter than the sun if you eat them too soon. Let them cool down a bit, and then dig in. There aren’t many things in the world that are more rewarding to the senses.
Of course, BAO Mary’s famous stars are all there and right. The classic version might have more peanut powder than usual, but it’s still as tasty as ever.
Pizza place Alley Cats on Paddington Street
Great for New York-style pizza with toppings that are just right…
Going through the streets of Marylebone scratching an itch that can only be scratched by a New York-style pizza? Then you should go to Alley Cats.
You should actually read our guide to London’s 15 best pizza places for 2024 first. It has more information about Alley Cats and another five. You know you want to…
