Looking from the bar into the restaurant at Lunette
So what do we need to know about Lunette?
This is the much-anticipated return to the London restaurant scene by chef Florence Knight, who left Sessions Arts Club two and a half years ago. If you hadn't tried her food there, you might have enjoyed it back in the day at Polpetto, the Russell Norman restaurant she fronted in Soho.
Where is it?
It takes up the 11th floor of the St Clement hotel by Nick Jones on the river at Temple. If you're coming here (the nearest tube is, as you'd expect, Temple), you enter the hotel's main entrance, head right to the back to the lifts and then take that up to the tenth floor. There's then a small staircase which leads you up into the light-filled restaurant.
It's a rooftop restaurant?
Technically there is a penthouse one floor up, but to all intents and purposes this is very much a rooftop restaurant. The views over the river are superb. It's the kind of vista that Hollywood movies use as a shorthand to explain that the action is in London, England. Big Ben, the London Eye and Westminster are all laid out in front of you like a London landmark bingo card.
The view from the restaurant's terrace. Not bad. Not bad, at all.
Where should we sit?
This is a room of two halves. The first section closest to the bar probably has the best views, but the tables are closer together. If you want to discuss state secrets, or you're an A-lister looking for a little more privacy, then the tables in the second half are more spaced apart. It's a big room, but with space for just 30 diners.
This is the view from the other end of the dining room, looking towards the bar at the end.
Let's talk about the food...
Lunette is a tasting menu restaurant, serving four courses at lunch (£70) and six at dinner (£110). Although we were here for lunch, they kindly let us try the dinner menu in order to be able to give you the full picture. Menu descriptions are sparse, like "Custard, onion and caviar", but we'd describe the food as thoughtful modern British, with a keen sense of seasonality.
Here's what we had:
Starting with the prettiest canapés we've had a while, these were teeny pommes soufflés with roe and smoked eel.
Runner bean, squid sage - slowly cooked squid with French and English runner beans and tomato water
Cock crab, pepper yolk - rice cooked in crab stock and topped with shellfish butter along with picked Cornish crab and an egg yolk jam. Comforting and delicious.
Custard, onion, caviar - soft set custard with onion caramel, burnt roscoff onion petals and caviar. Such a delicate savoury custard dish.
Guinea fowl with beetroot, celeriac and a hazelnut and tarragon oil, served with a choux bun with a Comte craquelin and a mustard leaf salad with puffed buckwheat and beetroot. Every element of this main course was fabulous but we're singling out that cheesy choux bun for particular praise.
Room for dessert?
Definitely. Our pre-dessert was a lovely milk sorbet with slices of damson followed by this beauty of a tart.
Chocolate feuilletine tart served with a salted cream and a caramel sauce. We're going to say that this is second only to the pistachio tart at Impala for the best tart we've had this year in a London restaurant. And that's high praise indeed.
What about the drink?
We would very much urge you to go for one of their alcoholic or non-alcoholic 'house serves' to start, if for no other reason that they're served in the most beautiful glasses. As for the wine, it's an exclusively European list, at least at the moment. And we found it surprisingly well priced for such an upmarket restaurant, with a house wine starting at just £39 and a decent amount of interesting wines in the £40-£60 range.
Left to right: Garnet Negroni and Cedro Martini (both £16) - extra marks awarded for the fact that the martini came in two servings, so it didn't go warm.
Overall thoughts
We first tried Florence's cooking upstairs in the teeny restaurant space at the French House (and then again when she moved Polpetto to its own space). Next she wowed us on the top floor of Sessions House in Clerkenwell, and now she's here up at the top of the St Clement, cooking perhaps the best food of her career. There's an absolute confidence in the food being served here that we couldn't fail to be impressed by.
And it's a very stylish spot, from the frankly exquisite hand-blown glassware, through to the Onitsuka Tiger-sporting front-of-house staff.
Expect this to be a restaurant that every London food-obsessive wants to try (not to mention the odd A-lister).
More about Lunette
Where is it? Level 11, 180 The Thames, London WC2R 3DA
When does it open? 13 November 2026
How to book: book online
Find out more: Visit their website or follow them on Instagram @lunette.london.
Hot Dinners dined as guests of Lunette. Prices correct at time of publication.
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