The Best Brunch Spots In London Right Now
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 didn’t successfully penetrate wider British culture until much, much later.
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 2005, London had its own burgeoning brunch scene; by 2015, we had almost too much choice; and by 2025, 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
The baguette-centric offshoot of evergreen Vietnamese spots Cây Tre and Viet Grill, Kêu’s London Bridge branch is a sunny, bustling gem that serves from 11am daily. The bánh mì are exceptional – particularly the signature Hội An Deluxe, the lightly crunchy baguette stuffed to capacity with pork belly, chicken liver pâté, Vietnamese mortadella, ham, daikon pickle, coriander, chilli and spring onion and cucumber – but the sundries and sides, from the Cơm Vịt Quay Canton-style duck rice bowl to the deeply burnished spring rolls, are wild, too.
SE1
As London’s Mexican boom continues apace (in the greasy-fingered fashion of Guacamoles and Bad Manners rather than the fripperies of, say, Kol), breezy stalwart Santo Remedio has become a kind of colourful elder statesman. Its Marylebone outpost’s nuevo weekend brunch offering skews transatlantic – with beef birria crumpets and ‘Mexican eggs benedict’ among the more conventional standards of churros, chilaquiles and huevos Motuleños – but it’s a zesty way to shake off the indiscretions of the night before all the same.
W1U
A compact gem of a Japanese café near the King’s Cross end of Caledonian Road, Ikoi’s pacific setting – all slatted wood panelling, ascetic greenery and a mutedly autumnal palette – makes for a particularly zen morning stop-in (from 9am Tuesday to Friday, and 11am Saturday). Fill up on a plethora of freshly made onigiri, tamago egg mayo sandos (in properly pappy white milk bread, studded with half a soft-boiled egg), rejuvenating bowls of udon, tempura, glistening dango mochi skewers and glasses of verdant matcha panna cotta, before loading up on the fine selection of imported Asian sweets and snacks for the road. Oishi!
N1
Dishoom, the ever reliable and beautifully designed homage to Bombay’s Irani cafés, may be a bona fide chain, but it’s a cold fact that it broke London’s Antipodean breakfast/brunch yoke and has continued to set standards for over a decade. Yes, the go-to bacon naan, slicked with chilli jam and cream cheese, is famous for a reason. But the menu is jammed with plenty of other powerfully flavoured titbits to replenish oneself with – whether the kejriwal of two fried eggs on chilli cheese toast, chole puri halwa (chickpeas, sweet semolina, pickles and a puri) or the walloping keema per eedu (chicken keema and livers, two fried eggs, potato chips and puffy, butter buns), plus bountiful chai. Plump for the beautifully Art Deco Kensington branch.
W8
Upper Dalston’s sleeper Mexican classic – a winsomely rustic and very pretty restaurant, taqueria and agaveria opened by Guadalajara man Daniel Carrillo in 2021 – has recently expanded its breezy remit of heartfelt Latino titbits into the not-technically brunch hours of noon til 3pm on the weekends (but they’re calling it that and everyone likes a lie-in, so we’ll overlook). Micheladas and margaritas abound (the latter of which are actually some of London’s best), and the menu is full of variations on huevos; a torta ahogada (or “drowned sandwich”) of prawns, avocado and salsa roja; grilled cactus or birria tacos; and a heartstopper “burrito de machaca”, filled with salt-dehydrated beef rump, blended with garlic, scrambled eggs, onion and tomatoes.
N16
Not content with leading in the charge in the bleary-eyed, martini-sloshing nocturnal NY diner stakes, Shoreditch bolthole One Club Row is making a play for Saturday morning domination with its brunch offering. Booze-wise, the inevitable Bloody Martini will invariably act as cure and cause to whatever hangover designs you’ve got in the works – if zhuzhed takes on brunchy standards like trout pastrami with potato latke and mustard crème fraiche, rosti with boudin noir, duck egg and jalapeno hollandaise, or the classic steak and eggs don’t finish you off first.
