The Best Brunch In London For People Who Hate Brunch
There was a time, not too long ago, when the only people interested in finding the best brunch in London were Americans and Australians who hadn’t bothered to read their Lonely Planets before touching down at Heathrow. If brunch, as a concept, can be traced back to English aristocrats’ pre-hunt breakfasts (the portmanteau first appeared in Hunter’s Weekly, of all places, in 1895), it never successfully penetrated wider British culture.
It did, however, make inroads in America in the ’30s, becoming popular thanks to various silver-screen starlets’ penchant for poached eggs and Bloody Marys, particularly while speeding from LA to New York on The Transcontinental Railroad. Cut to the Noughties, and Carrie Bradshaw – whose influence stretched not just from sea to shining sea but across the Atlantic – made mimosa-fuelled brunches in credit-destroying Manolo Blahniks aspirational. By 2004, London had its own burgeoning brunch scene; by 2014, we had almost too much choice; and by 2024, Londoners largely agreed with Carmy and Sydney’s views on the meal.
And yet: brunch doesn’t have to mean wan eggs, pale avocados and mad influencers inexplicably queuing for hours at The Breakfast Club. You just have to shift your definition a little bit: London has umpteen fantastic restaurants, cafés and bakeries that sling up their shutters a little earlier on weekends (and often weekdays) to dish up delectable morsels – plus cocktails, if you need to shake off the night before.
As it stands, here are some of the finest brunches in the capital.
The Best Brunch In London, According To Vogue
Like the space itself – a mirror-lined, pan-North African counter spot in Neal’s Yard – the menu at Barbary Next Door is tiny but perfectly formed. Mid-morning, the options are twofold: there’s a smattering of sweet things (dinky knotted buns with clementine and chocolate, say, or the feted hash cake, dense with pistachio) and a couple of burnished, savoury böreks – including house standards such as salt beef and guest specials from the esteemed likes of Persian cookery doyenne Sabrina Ghayour, Ottolenghi-affiliate Noor Murad and Bocca di Lupo’s Jacob Kenedy.
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The Corbin and King glory days may be over – though the latter’s on a resurgent tear with Arlington – but Aldwych’s ever-glorious, Mitteleuropean-aping grand café remains steadfast. The plates are as timeless as the cultivated surroundings. In the long, languorous breakfast hours, there’s delicate viennoiserie, kedgeree, hot kippers and a bevy of egg dishes (Royale, Benedict, Florentine). Lunch service starts early on the weekends (at a liminally brunchy 11am on Saturday and 11:30am on Sundays), with a full smorgasbord of butter-crammed pan-continental treats available. Our choice is the walloping Wiener Schnitzel.
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London’s pre-eminent (only?) “purveyor of Scottish scran”, this airy Islington “shoap” and deli proffers the kind of inimitably beige bites fit to make any Caledonian emigré dewy-eyed for life north of the border. There are rolls – soft, crispy or well-fired – filled with lorne sausage, tattie scone, Stornoway Black Pudding or Ayrshire bacon; unsurpassed macaroni pies; and nostalgic titbits like sunny pineapple tarts and Dundee cake. Neck the lot with an Irn-Bru or, for the full Glaswegian effect, a draft of Tennent’s.
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Sat opposite the Beigel Bake perma-throng on Brick Lane, Hoko is a bustling and gleefully stylised Hong Kong-style café/diner with a focus on the island’s ubiquitous milk tea (a joyfully cloying blend of black leaves and evaporated and condensed milks) and weekend-only “sets” of ham macaroni soup, satay beef noodles, or tomato soup with macaroni and scrambled egg. All arrive with some variation of toasted buns, eggs and buttered corn, and there are lychee Yakult, sweet red bean and pineapple ice drinks to neck if you’re done with the steamy stuff. A hangover-busting, Insta-baiting dream.
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Balham’s beloved Australasian stalwart may have had a recent makeover – it’s now, courtesy of the dons at Duelle Studio, a vision of dusky muted pastels and stripped hard woods – but the seasonal brunch menus are as consistently good as ever. Therein, you’ll find the beautifully constructed likes of “Nutzilla” French toast (house brioche, strawberries, Madagascan sugar Chantilly, miso-chocolate caramel and candied pecans), “Sweet Maria” sweetcorn fritters (with halloumi and kasundi mustard relish) and a raft of buckwheat pancakes (with macerated oranges, whipped salep, Fuji apple jam and lavender honey, say), all put together with an eye-popping meticulousness.
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Cards on the table: Ravinder Bhogal is London’s most elegant chef and restaurateur, her Marylebone fiefdom its most colourfully winsome, and her new brunch menu one of the capital’s most alluring. Jikoni specialises in “no borders” pan-Asian cooking, which manifests here as “kuku paka” chicken curry with sukuma wiki greens and saffron rice; vegan khichdi dal with devilled cashews and carrot achar; and, crucially, a reinvented bacon sarnie in the guise of a bacon and mushroom bread and butter pudding, with pul biber maple syrup.
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With its firecracker noodles, tropical pineapple rice, and fiery larbs, this Thai-American diner – a spin-off of Kris Yenbamroong’s feted LA spot Night + Market – has put west London’s gastro-wasteland on the culinary map. Its natty brunch offering (served between 10am and 4pm) has all the maximalist clout of the evening menu. Classic stodge is given a global uplift (think spicy fried chicken and roti waffles with tom yum sauce, say, or banana French toast with caramel battered milk bread and pecan pandan cream). Plus, there are dragon fruit salads and Thai omelettes for the virtuous, and a full cast of punchy libations to crank up the vibes.
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Another US emigré dragged across the pond by the food-savvy Hoxton group – this time transposed from Brooklyn to a fern-laden rooftop in Shoreditch – Llama Inn is a slick contemporary Peruvian spot helmed by co-founder Erik Ramirez. The Sunday brunch menu cherrypicks a few of the usual menu’s highlights (including an ace pork shoulder slider with sweet potato and red onion salsa) but keeps its focus on South American riffs on the classics, like pancakes with chancaca and muña mint brown butter, caramelised onion tortilla with aji panca and shrimp scampi, and a Peruvian Grand Slam topped with rocoto cream.
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Whatever your take on Norman’s – “nu-school trad-caff pioneer”, “hipster grift” or something in-between – there’s no doubting the frenzied, near-inexplicable social cache this upmarket Tufnell Park greasy spoon has generated. Its opening hours (10am to 3pm, Wednesday to Saturday) skew brunchy by default, and all the paradigms are accounted for: full English sets, chicken escalope sandwiches, beans on toast, bread-and-butter pudding, syrup sponge with custard, et al (plus troughs of builder’s tea, naturally). Factor in the formica-heavy, Martin-Parr-goes-Insta aesthetic and the selection of merch, and lo: you’ve got the most modish eatery in London.
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Jack Croft and William Murray’s modern British joint (located in the soul-sucking, glassy expanse of Piccadilly’s St James’s Market) could legitimately lay claim to being London’s best restaurant – its menu a paean to the country’s farms, fields and coastline. Saturday brunch is comparatively pared down, subbing the smoked cod heads and corn ribs for superlative takes on hash browns, scrambled eggs and, crucially, the full gamut of “royales” reconfigured into breakfast sarnies: Fallow-branded croissants variously jammed with sausage and walnut ketchup, smoked salmon belly, wild mushroom parfait, or (for the sweeter-toothed among us) salted caramel, ice cream and leftover whey from Bermondsey’s Kappacasein Dairy.
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For all its bucolic, Thames-lapped charm, Richmond was long a neighbourhood bereft of genuinely good eating. Praise be, then, for the Gladwin brothers – the farm-to-table trio behind Sussex in Soho and Chelsea’s Rabbit (among others), whose restaurant The Fat Badger dishes up ace seasonal titbits in deepest TW10. Brunch is a mix of rustic standards, minor curveballs (Hackney burrata and Nutbourne tomatoes, say), and seasonal specials like butterflied Cornish mackerel with pickled grapes or Bosham tempura marrow with sriracha emulsion. Bottomless fizz and a resident acoustic jazz guitarist will further mollify your hangover.
TW10
Feroz Gajia’s halal bakery/café on Lower Clapton’s Evering Road is textbook IYKYK material. The weekday offering of pastries, brownies and buns is rightly feted, but as the clock strikes 11am on weekends, its pan-global, junk-adjacent menu springs into brilliant life. Come for the alchemical creme brûlée cookies, stay for the cheese-crisped birria lamb tacos (with non-optional, onion-spiked lamb consommé for dipping), majestic smash burgers and Bajan-spiced fish cutter sandwiches. Their tangy, dual-swirled soft-serve is some of the city’s best, as if you needed another excuse to fling wide your duvet.
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Year-on-year the capital’s most fervently awaited opening, Towpath Café – a winsome, glorified shack on the canal near Haggerston – is a seasonal daytime café par excellence that emerges from hibernation each spring, returning to dormancy come Fireworks Night. Not for nothing is it on every knowing London foodie’s favourites list – and the brunchy morning dishes exemplify the place’s simple allure: Turkish eggs with yoghurt and brown butter; grilled cheese sandwiches with quince jelly; coconut bircher muesli with clementine… You’ll have to wait until March to sample them, but owner Laura Jackson is offering tray bakes to take away and reheat for the first time this winter; sign up for the scheme here.
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Stoke Newington’s light-filled, bleached-wood idyll of a neighbourhood café doesn’t push an outré brunch. What it does offer – on Saturdays only, when laptops are banned – are seamlessly elevated takes on the staples. French toast? Zhuzhed with blood orange, bergamot oil and a macadamia panela cream. Fried eggs? Add braised chickpeas, chilli vinaigrette and St James halloumi. Better still are the prosaic sounding breakfast sarnie (thrillingly realised with scrambled egg, wild leek and Mull cheddar crammed into a potato roll) and the braised Swiss chard with stracciatella and black garlic. Est good.
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Tucked away on a dinky industrial courtyard off of Kingsland Road sits the OG site of fab bakery/café The Dusty Knuckle. The all-day breakfast menu of granola and things on bread is great (the fried egg, pickled chilli and cheese focaccia is miraculous); the early-starting lunch carte of more rarefied sandwiches from 11.30am truly irresistible. You’ll need to bowl up early to nab an inside table before the Salomoned hordes arrive, but there’s a sea of alfresco seating, too.
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Fine, it may technically have been invented by the English – the writer Guy Beringer defining it as a Sunday meal for “Saturday night carousers” in an 1895 issue of Hunter’s Weekly – but no one does brunch better than the Antipodeans (not least because they invented the flat white). Thus, Queen’s Park’s Milk Beach, an Aussie-style diner located in the serene, stable-strewn lane of Lonsdale Road, is a no-brainer. Get merry on classic breakfast cocktails before delving into mildly zhuzhed takes on the staples – avocado on St John’s sourdough with watercress pesto, soft-boiled egg in a jar with Delica pumpkin purée and soldiers, et al – and pan-Asian bowls like a koji-marinated chicken “schnitty” caesar salad. Bonzer.
NW6
Both brilliant Taiwanese bun purveyors and two of south London’s best-kept secrets, messrs Mr Bao (in Peckham) and Daddy Bao (in Tooting) go a little more pan-global on the weekends. The SW17 branch just about pips it on the menu. Lo: chicken waffles with spiced butter, Sichuan pepper and maple syrup; kimchi and crispy corn fritters with Thai basil sauce; a smoked salmon and cream cheese “everything” bao; gochujang enoki mushrooms with onsen egg and crispy pancake. It goes on. A pitch-perfect smushing of London and Taipei, basically (and an excellent contingency to the preternaturally popular Juliet’s across the street).
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Leading the vanguard of London’s achingly hip nu-bakery charge, Camberwell’s Toad Bakery offers a panoply of beatific, burnished titbits; from exemplary croissants, morning buns and caraway-spiked cheese straws, to the truly outstanding likes of the “everything bagel” croissant (more a spiral börek, humming with dill), a Japanese style “choco pan” bun stuffed with chocolate custard and dusted with matcha sugar, and a steak bake of beef rendang, red leicester and pickled daikon magicked up in collaboration with Peckham’s Mambow. There’s filter coffee and Orangina to sup; a few outside seats; and queues so sprawling they’re almost a bit of weird art.
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Speaking of which: what better way to see in the weekend than by necking your third coffee surrounded by a bevy of bona fide fine art (and not, we should add, by parking up in the café in the Tate)? At Mayfair’s Mount St Restaurant, owned by one half of art titans Hauser & Wirth, one can tuck into old-school English classics – London rarebit, Stepney kippers, eggs Arlington, omelette Arnold Bennett, a breakfast martini spiked with Durslade Farm marmalade, and so on – while eyeballing original works by little-known upstarts like Picasso, Warhol, Matisse and Freud (to say nothing of the frankly priapic Paul McCarthy salt cruets). Food for the mouth and the soul.
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Many are the savoury options (fried eggs in ras el hanout butter, say, or confit and winter tomatoes with butter bean purée) at this Neal’s Yard bolthole – but for the full brilliant brunch experience, plump for the zestier titbits on offer. As you’d expect from the name, the house porridge (made using not 21, but a still-respectable five grains) shakes off its gruelly, ascetic trappings for something more painterly: laced with banana, tahini, honey, cinnamon, sesame seeds and cacao nibs, or rhubarb compote, blood orange, almond brittle and yoghurt. Pastries come from the excellent Little Bread Pedlar – though the goods at St John Bakery next door are hallowed as they come.
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Every Sunday from midday to 4pm, live DJs descend on the psychedelic South American restaurant Yopo, where they lean into their Amazonian roots with a “shamanic” brunch, and ethnobotanical cocktails with tropical fruits like mangosteen. Based in the five-star hotel The Mandrake, it’s somewhere you can start with Ostra Regal oysters before tucking into buttermilk fried chicken buns or banana flour pancakes topped with cashew butter and crisp bacon. Pair it with a mini Oracle Card reading, so that you can enjoy the moment and glimpse into the future. AM
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