Over the past few years, there’s been an evolution in the way London’s restaurant approach their bread offering. We’ve moved from complimentary bread through to spendy slices of sourdough, and now we’re at a stage where bread is so amazing it demands its own course.
If you’re a committed carboholic, here are the London restaurants serving up next-level loaves.
Row on 5 (Mayfair) - 5 Savile Row, London W1S 3PB
By the time you reach the bread course at this two Michelin-starred restaurant, you’ve already enjoyed a procession of beautiful snacks. But the bread here really steps things up. The restaurant’s shokupan bread comes from Hokkaido and is a mix between a brioche and milk bread. Here it’s glazed in fermented honey and sea salt and served with miso butter topped with fermented honey caramel.
Evelyn’s Table (Soho) - 28 Rupert St, London W1D 6DJ
Chef Seamus Sam and his team are constantly working on their bread course, and while the core offering stays the same - it’s a smoked potato and porridge sourdough - the accompaniments see subtle changes throughout the year. You might get house-cultured butter, a cashew nut parfait topped with Sauternes jelly, cep ketchup, and crispy barley, as well as a Tunworth cheese foam with fermented onions and truffle honey.
74 Charlotte Street (Fitzrovia) - 74 Charlotte St., London W1T 4QH
Milk bread is very much the bread option of choice for London’s high-end restaurants at the moment. And while the warm loaf at Ben Murphy’s Fitzrovia restaurant was on point, it’s what came with it that made his bread course stand out for us. Here it's served with a geometrically perfect cube of noisette butter and a little dish of gorgeous pumpkin seed hummus.
Kudu (Marylebone) 7 Moxon St, London W1U 4EP
The bread at South African-accented Kudu is now such a signature dish it merits its own section on the menu. It's inspired by mosbolletjies, a seasonal bread flavoured with grape must and enjoyed in the Western Cape wine district. Here it's served warm with a choice of three melted butters. It's your choice whether to dip it into cultured butter with house-cured bacon, melted shrimp butter with dulse or melted Cape Malay butter with curried pickled shallots. Frankly, we wanted all three.
Mangal 2 (Dalston) 4 Stoke Newington Rd, London N16 7XN
Two years ago, the kitchen at Mangal 2 had what you might call a Eureka moment. It came when they decided "to combine our two greatest dishes and pair them as one". Now their signature sourdough pide is always on the menu. It's grilled on their charcoal ocakbaşı and then served dripping with fat rendered from Cull Yaw ex-dairy mutton, or “liquid gold” as they put it.
Perilla (Stoke Newington) 1-3 Green Lanes, Newington Green, London N16 9BS
When you go for the tasting menu at the perennially popular Perilla on Newington Green, you actually get a double bread serving. There is some very good sourdough with brown butter but before you get to that the snacks section features the dish we really loved, Yesterday's Bread soaked in Moules Mariniere. It's a finger of bread that's absorbed all that gorgeous mussel and white wine liquor, topped with a crispy mussel puree.
Osteria Angelina (Shoreditch)
They take bread very seriously at Osteria Angelina, and the options reflect the restaurant's Japanese and Italian influences. And while the Nori focaccia is very good and the limited edition shokupan is worth pushing the boat out for, our favourite of their 'pane' is the Hokkaido milk bread. It's a doorstopper of a slice served warm with a perfectly contrasting combo of jam and burnt honey butter.
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