Chiltern Firehouse

Getting a table has always mattered as much as what turns up on it at Chiltern Firehouse, and more than a decade after opening it remains one of the hardest bookings in London, a fact the restaurant seems entirely comfortable with. Housed in a converted Victorian fire station on Chiltern Street, the building itself does a lot of the work, red brick, a courtyard garden, and a warren of rooms that never quite reveal their full layout on a single visit.

Andre Balazs opened it in 2014 and it has stayed a fixture on the celebrity circuit ever since, though the kitchen, working in a broadly American register with grilled meats, oysters and dishes like short rib and lobster spaghetti, has always had its own following independent of who else is in the room that night.

The atmosphere is the main draw, glamorous without being stuffy, the kind of place where a table by the open kitchen feels like the best seat and one tucked in a back corner feels like a demotion. Cocktails at the bar have their own reputation and are a legitimate reason to visit even without a dinner reservation, assuming you can get past the door.

Prices sit at the upper end of casual fine dining, mains regularly in the thirties, and the restaurant makes little effort to disguise that value for money is not really the point of the exercise.

The honest caveat, raised consistently by reviewers over the years, is that the food can feel like a supporting act to the scene, decent rather than exceptional given the prices charged, and portions that some find stingy relative to the bill. Go for the atmosphere and the people watching, treat a genuinely excellent dish as a bonus rather than a guarantee, and be prepared for the booking process to be its own small ordeal.