People tend to come to Hammersmith with steely intention: for a gig at the Apollo, a play at the Lyric or a film at the Studios. There’s foliage to part, too, with a walk along the Thames Path when the weather gets its act together, or a look at Bazalgette’s green-and-gold bridge, kept to foot and bike since 2019 and all the better for it. Getting in is easy. Leaving is where things fall apart, and basic befuddlement curdles into raging anger somewhere around your third lap of the gyratory.
Two underground stations sit within a few hundred yards, both called Hammersmith, on opposite sides of a roaring one-way system, one buried inside the Broadway shopping centre for some reason, the other only reachable across a million pedestrian crossings and through what looks like a red brick university. Many have succumbed and now circle forever, searching for a sign. Just how the fuck do you get out of here?
You’re here forever now, so you’re going to need to eat. Fortunately, the best eating in W6 is close to hand: King Street, the long retail spine, carries most of it; the river hosts the grandest names and the freshest breeze; and the unlovely run of Hammersmith Road by the bus station is where the young upstarts have found a home.
With all that in mind, here are the best restaurants in Hammersmith.
Sam’s Riverside
When The Sun starts showing photos of a heaving Brighton beach on its front page and gets frothy about a hosepipe ban, there’s no setting in the world that rises to the occasion quite like Sam’s Riverside.
The terrace sits right on the Thames with Hammersmith Bridge in view, and because Crisp Walk funnels the river breeze straight at you, it stays bearable when the rest of London is melting. It fills first, and if you don’t land a table out there you might feel briefly hard done by. Right up until you’re inside, that is, when the indoor dining room’s floor-to-ceiling windows reveal themselves, the Thames sitting almost flush with the room like a murky infinity pool.
Then the rest: big marble-topped booths, sunlight dappling in extraordinary ways, and a vast open kitchen behind glass that leaves no doubt this is a serious operation. It’s always full and it’s always buzzing, with a mix you rarely get in one room, first dates, grandparents being taken for lunch, families with little ones tearing around, mates at the start of a big piss-up, mates at the end of one, and people who’ve just pitched up at the bar for something sweet to cap their day.
Though the view knows it’s all that, shellfish is the real reason to come to Sam’s. Go big and the Deluxe Fruits de Mer is £110 of Carlingford and Jersey oysters, crevettes, langoustines, dressed crab, sea bream ceviche, tuna tataki and smoked salmon, built for two people and a slow afternoon over ice, the shellfish all sourced from Wright Brothers. All that needs to precede it is a couple of snacks; the signature parmesan churros, say, and a plate of fried artichoke with sun-dried tomato.
If the Deluxe is a commitment, a half-dozen Jersey rocks is £26 most of the time, which makes the weekday Oyster Happy Hour, when they drop to £2 each between 5pm and 6.30pm, one of the better deals on the river.
Away from the seafood, the meat holds its own: a Hereford rib eye from HG Walter, with chips and béarnaise, or a Cornish lamb rump with peas, carrots and Roscoff onion, both precisely cooked and sharply plated.
The drinking here is half the fun; Sam’s is definitely a place built for boozing. The salted caramel martini, bourbon and cream liqueur and double cream, is basically pudding in a glass; the house watermelon margaritas pour out of a slushy machine and were going faster than the kitchen could shuck on the hottest day of the year; and this summer the terrace is pouring Pommery. Which brings us to the move: lunch outside with chilled seafood and satisfied sighing, then decamp to the bar for dessert. Make it the lemon and elderflower soufflé with brown butter crumble, the espresso macarons, or the Amalfi lemon sorbet served the old-fashioned way in a hollowed-out lemon, which half the terrace seems to order the moment the sun’s out.
The real surprise is how accomplished it all is. Going in, you half-brace for somewhere either stuffy or maybe even a bit empty, and it’s neither. It delivers on the promise of the place and then some. On our visit Fanny Stocker, one of the owners, worked the room at a relentless pace and didn’t miss a beat: greeting regulars by name, clocking a table whose mains were running late before they’d thought to flag it. A 150-cover room going full tilt on a hot Bank Holiday weekend is exactly where service tends to fray, orders crossed, the bar backing up, tables left hanging, and the fact that none of it does here was impressive.
The name is hard to miss in this stretch of W6 now, with Sam’s Larder for provisions next door and Sam’s Kitchen doing all-day brunch and a walk-in smash burger night from Thursday to Saturday, but this is the headlining act, and arguably Hammersmith’s true trump card, even more than that café down the river.
Address: 1 Crisp Rd, London W6 9DN
Website: samsriverside.co.uk
The River Café
Down an unpromising backstreet off Rainville Road sits the restaurant that dragged British Italian food out of the red-checked-tablecloth era and never looked back. The River Café opened in 1987 as a staff canteen for the architecture practice of Richard Rogers, set up by his wife Ruth Rogers and the late Rose Gray inside a former Duckhams oil store to cook simple lunches for the team. Word got out, the public talked their way in, and by the time the first River Café Cook Book landed in 1995 the place had rewired how the country thought about Italian cooking: seasonal, regional, ingredient-led, lemon tart, chargrilled squid, the works.
A Michelin star followed in 1997. Its kitchen has since turned out a remarkable roll call of talent, Jamie Oliver, Theo Randall and April Bloomfield among those who passed through, while other alumni have gone on to open some of London’s best modern Italian restaurants, Moro, Trullo and Café Cecilia among them.
All this totemic weight might feel stifling, but the room is light, bright and unfussy, and the breeze coming off the actual river ruffles everyone’s hair the same way. It opens onto a wood-fired oven that dresses the room democratically in something more elemental than absurdly expensive perfume.
The menu is rewritten twice a day around whatever is best, treated with restraint: split Scottish Langoustines wood-roasted with lemon and wild oregano, artichokes alla Romana, tiny, expensive plates of exemplary fresh pasta. However you play it, finish with the Chocolate Nemesis, the dense flourless cake that has been copied across London for thirty years and bettered nowhere. The all-Italian wine list is among the deepest in the city, strong on small regional growers and gentler than you’d fear by the glass, a Lazio Frascati clocking in at around £17, which is, admittedly, punchy if you’re walking in blind.
You’ve read about the prices before, so is it even worth retreading old, hallowed ground? I guess all that’s worth saying is that a single secondo reaches past £66, but there’s a set lunch for £65 for two courses and dolci, so there are modest savings to be made. The verdict remains the same: fresh, satisfying, lovely to be in, and dear with it.
Address: Thames Wharf, Rainville Rd, London W6 9HA
Website: rivercafe.co.uk
The River Café Café
Twenty metres from the dining room, across a car park, the River Café runs an all-day café and shop that neatly answers the only real objection to the place next door, which is the bill. The cooking comes from the same kitchen and the same chefs, the same pasta made fresh each morning, but a plate of it lands at, say, £25 rather than the £38 you’d pay a few steps away. What you give up for that saving is mostly the grander room and a bit of pointless celeb spotting, no great loss when you’re sitting on the café’s own terrace with the river going by.
The genuine find is breakfast, which the main restaurant doesn’t serve at all, so from nine in the morning this is the only way to eat the kitchen’s cooking before lunch. There are cornetti from £4, a brioche stuffed with mortadella and Alpine butter, bruschetta with Cantabrian anchovies, and a full Tuscan spread of prosciutto, finocchiona and Pecorino Toscana at £16.
Come midday, the menu fills out. Rosemary bruschetta comes two ways, with Lardo di Greve or with smashed chickpeas and new season olive oil, and there’s vitello tonnato and a zuppa di pesce besides. The buffalo ricotta gnudi with speck, sage and Pecorino is the one to order; dressed elegantly and ethereally light. Then pizza Romana by the slice at £12, and main courses that top out at a £36 chicken, half the price of mains next door. Even the Chocolate Nemesis turns up for £3 less than across the way.
You can’t book the terrace, only the inside, so for anyone who has wanted the River Café without the full reckoning, the trick is to wander down off the towpath and hope for a table. We wonder when the River Café Café Café is set to launch.
Address: Thames Wharf, Rainville Rd, London W6 9HA
Website: rivercafe.co.uk/river-cafe-cafe
Faber
Faber sits on a handsome white-stucco corner of Hammersmith Road, the arched windows and 1861 datestone lit up at night above the traffic. Inside is just as good-looking, a high room of stone arches, parquet and woven banquettes under clusters of brass globe lights.
It’s the first standalone restaurant from Anthony Pender and Matt Ward, who started out delivering shellfish and cocktails by bike around East London during lockdown before taking over a Hackney pub kitchen. In the kitchen here is Ollie Bass, formerly of Quo Vadis and Sessions Arts Club, and the cooking is built around sustainable British day-boat fish. The menu follows the catch on a board that changes every morning in an increasingly illegible scrawl as the week hots up.
Start with the Coombeshead bread with butter and Dorset sea salt to pair with mangalitza charcuterie from the same esteemed farm, before the chilled seafood takes over; Devon diver scallop crudo, chalkstream trout tartare with keta caviar, and spiced Dorset brown crab with cheddar biscuit and winter citrus (a personal favourite).
Then, the larger plates; St Austell Bay mussels in a beautiful mariniere perfumed with lemon thyme, Cornish John Dory blistered and burnished on the grill, and a couple of meat and veggie options for the holdouts. Dessert, because it would be rude not to, has got to be the poached Kent quince with meringue, which was superb on a recent visit.
The drinks are as patriotic as the food: British-led wherever possible, drawing on home distilleries, breweries, orchards and vineyards, with European bottles allowed in only where Britain can’t grow them, and nothing from beyond Europe, to keep the food miles down. That means cocktails built on Cornish foraged gin and Welsh sugar kelp, a wine list deep in English and Welsh sparkling from the likes of Wiston and Chapel Down, and a pair of house-made soft drinks, a starflower honey iced tea and a sea buckthorn lemonade, that are worth ordering even if your focus is myopically on celebrating Thirsty Thursday.
The weekday lunch, fish and chips for £15, is one of the better bargains in the borough and the easy everyday answer to the River Café’s grand occasion.
Address: Welbeck Mansions, 206-208 Hammersmith Rd, London W6 7DH
Website: faberrestaurants.co.uk
Master Wei Xi’an
A short walk from Faber, on the ground floor of a glassy new office block on Hammersmith Road, Master Wei is the newest London room from chef Guirong Wei, who built her name with Xi’an Impression in Islington and the original Master Wei in Holborn, and whom Netflix made the subject of an episode of Chef’s Table: Noodles in 2024.
The cooking comes from Xi’an in Shaanxi province, an old Silk Road city with a bold, cumin-heavy, chilli-driven style shaped in part by its Hui Muslim community. The dish to commit to is the biang biang noodles, wide hand-pulled belts of dough in chilli sauce and the plate the show lingered over in slow motion. That’s why you’re here, but since you are, start with the cold plates, thinly sliced pig’s ear in chilli oil with cucumber and coriander, or a spiced cumin beef bun. Or, you know, both.
This branch of Master Wei Xi’an opened only recently, and the setting is the least romantic thing about it. You reach the door across a corporate plaza at the foot of a building that could just as easily house a mid-tier law firm, all polished stone and trophy planting in place of a soul. You’re not here to eat the pavement though. Inside it’s small, lantern-strung and tightly packed, the service quick, the prices kind (the headliner biang biang is £12.30), and there are a few cocktails and a short wine list if you want them.
Address: 245 Hammersmith Rd, London W6 8PW
Website: master-wei.com
Indian Zing
Indian Zing is the most polished Indian cooking in Hammersmith by a clear margin. On King Street, it draws regional dishes from across the subcontinent into a contemporary register without stripping out their backbone or marshalling them into an arc of graduating dots and smears. It’s the work of chef-patron Manoj Vasaikar, who cooked at Chutney Mary and Michelin-starred Veeraswamy, the latter the oldest Indian restaurant in London, before going his own way.
At the Ravenscourt Park end of Hammersmith, the room is calm and considered, designed along the principles of Vastu Shastra and fronted in a recognisable deep purple (more TAFKAP than ‘Smoke On The Water’, we should make clear).
The cooking favours clarity of flavour over visual fireworks, and that’s fine by us. Expect Prawn Lonche, jumbo prawns and aubergine in a caramelised onion, tomato and pickle masala; deeply spiced Duck Chettinad; coastal Karwari fish curry, sharpened with tirfal; a Kerala fish stew poached in coconut milk. Spicing is exact and sourcing careful, and there’s a pleasing throughline of acidity bouncing over the dishes like the ball on a karaoke screen. And the Zing part suddenly makes sense, three paragraphs and many meals in.
The bill stays in the gentle middle until you reach the Gymkhana lamb chops at £34, the same Raj-club reference that Mayfair’s Gymkhana takes its name from, where the equivalent chops are £75, incidentally. Everything’s relative, hey?
Wine, so often warm and white and enamel-stripping in settings like this, is no afterthought here. The list was put together with sommelier Vincent Gasnier, the youngest person ever to pass the Master Sommelier exam, with house glasses from around £8. The Masala Negroni is the pick of a gently inventive cocktail list, if you want one. You do. You want two, actually.
Address: 236 King St, London W6 0RF
Website: indian-zing.co.uk
101 Thai Kitchen
Behind a vivid pink frontage on King Street, 101 Thai Kitchen does something most London Thai places won’t commit to: it picks two disparate regions and cooks both with a straight face. The menu is split between Isaan, the dry, landlocked northeast, and Pak Taai, the deep south, and the two could hardly be further apart. Southern Thai food is coconut-rich and built on the sea, premium prawns, whole seabass, crab. Isaan has no coconut cream to speak of, uses freshwater fish and grilled meat, and souses everything in fermented funk. What they share is a fearsome appetite for chilli and rot, the two spiciest, most pungent cuisines in the country, whether the source of that funk is pla raa, nam budu or tai pla.
So order along the fault line and stop fussing about dogmatic regionality like some of those nu-Thai joints across town. From the south, the gaeng tai plaa is the one to reckon with, mackerel in a jungle curry sharp with fermented fish innards, the dish the region is most known for and not one for the timid. The kua gling, a near-dry mince stir fry of chilli, lemongrass and turmeric, comes at four chillies on the menu but contains five times that.
From the Isaan side, the laab and nam tok are both pitch-perfect, textbook versions, minced or sliced grilled meat dressed with toasted rice powder and herbs. The som tam list goes deep enough to lose an afternoon in, most sitting in the £12 to £18 region. And before that one prick starts bleating about how “you could get a som tam in Udon for a tenth of that price”, have you seen the price of green papaya in London lately? Or, indeed, the price of flights…
Anyway, the standard tum Thai with peanuts and dried shrimp is all good and a little on the sweet side, as it should be, but push on to the Lao-style tum pu plaa raa with salted rice crabs, or the kitchen’s groaning tum mua, papaya piled with rice noodle, pickled cabbage, pork cracklings, salted duck egg and Vietnamese sausage, because that’s what you came for.
The room is modest, portraits of Thai royalty on the walls, a telly murmuring cookery shows in the corner, and a table of Thai aunties putting the world to rights nearest the kitchen, and sometimes venturing into that kitchen to randomly cook a dish. There’s a wine list and a curiously deep gin selection, though cold Singha is the only pairing for food this loud.
One word to the wise: the website nicely suggests you eat ‘the Thai way and share several dishes’, but the staff go further, known to gently overrule anyone who turns up wanting a single laab and a basket of rice.
Address: 352 King St, London W6 0RX
Website: 101thaikitchen.uk
Read: The best Thai restaurants in London
Azou
Halfway between Hammersmith and Chiswick, and easy to walk straight past, Azou has been outlasting trends for a quarter of a century. Chef-patron Chris Benarab runs it with his wife Christine, and the welcome has the warmth of a place where some regulars first came as children.
The menu travels across Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia: a brik or a bastilla to begin, then couscous, grilled meats and a long list of tagines, all lined up like a queue of pointed hats against the midday sun. Most are a touch over £20 but generously proportioned and expansively seasoned. The one to order is the Constantine, the tagine of lamb shank in a hot, spiced chilli sauce with potatoes that took the North African category at Gordon Ramsay’s Best Restaurant in 2010. Our words, not theirs; Azou isn’t coasting on a glory from way back when. They let these victorious tagines do the talking.
The setting is the other draw. Low seating, coloured-glass lanterns, fabric across the ceiling and dim lighting put real distance between you and the King Street traffic. A pot of mint tea is the right way to finish, though there’s wine, beers and cocktails, too.
Address: 375 King St, London W6 9NJ
Website: azou.co.uk
The Anglesea Arms
The Anglesea Arms is one of those pubs that, back in the 90s, started taking the food as seriously as the beer: restaurant cooking in a room that stayed a pub. We have a word for it now, that reminds me of heartburn for some reason…
It wasn’t the first, that’s usually pinned on The Eagle over in Farringdon, but this Victorian corner site on Wingate Road, near Ravenscourt Park, was an early convert, opening in 1995. Two changes of hands and three decades on, the surprise is how consistent things have remained on both sides of the operation, the Anglesea not a slave to trends or the urge to adhere to them. It stays a pub first, a rotating trio of real ales on the bar and people dropping in for a pint with no thought of eating, and the kitchen behind them works to a standard the front room doesn’t even need to know about.
The menu is rewritten through the week, modern British with a heavy Mediterranean bent: ham hock croquettes with tomato chilli jam, chargrilled squid with rocket and chilli (a River Café cookbook on the kitchen shelf, perhaps?), pappardelle with beef ragù (hang on, that too), monkfish saltimbocca under prosciutto and sage (erm…), then a sticky toffee pudding with ginger ice cream that assuages fears that we’ve entered tribute act territory. There’s a sharing showpiece too, a 45-day aged grass-fed Aberdeen Angus T-bone with hand-cut chips and béarnaise at £100, and a Sunday roast with enough of a following that turning up on spec is optimistic.
The wine list is long and Italian before anything else, serious at the top, with a £90 Barolo and Brunello and a couple of the grander Chiantis, the Fontodi and Selvapiana, going out by the magnum to those who drink that way. This is deep Ravenscourt Park, and the room sounds that way; there’s a fair bit of braying, and rich, worn floorboards that sound so satisfying under the click-clack of buffed Church Graftons.
We realise we’ve buried the affection here, but only familiarity breeds this level of scrutiny. You’ll find us in here next Sunday and the next, braying and click-clacking with the best of them.
Address: 35 Wingate Rd, London W6 0UR
Website: angleseaarmspub.co.uk
Pizzeria Pellone
The newest arrival on this list, Pizzeria Pellone brings three generations of Neapolitan pizza-making to King Street. Antonio Pellone’s grandfather opened his first place in a working-class corner of Naples in 1972, before his grandson brought the family expertise to London, first to Battersea, then East Finchley, now here. This is wood-fired, Naples-style pizza made with conviction: a soft, blistered, leopard-spotted base made with Caputo flour, topped with Divella tomato and Ciro Amodio fior di latte, the ingredients shipped in direct from Italy.
A Margherita is a shade over a tenner, and well worth it, the standard around which the run of pizzas below should be judged. Reference point locked in, the calzone fritto, the fried, folded version stuffed with ricotta, fior di latte and Neapolitan salami, is the thing to order. Just take care when it lands; the insides are as hot as Vesuvius and about as forgiving.
In true Neapolitan style, the restaurant is so wound up about the whole pineapple-on-a-pizza thing that they’ve put one on the menu, the Pineapple and Ham, at £99.90. It would be quite amusing to order one, to be fair.
Address: 264 King St, London W6 0SP
Website: pizzeriapellone.com
HG Walter
Strictly a butcher rather than a restaurant, but no honest Hammersmith eating guide leaves it off. The Walter family have been on Palliser Road by Barons Court for over five decades, supplying the River Café, Sam’s and a long list of London kitchens, and dry-ageing their beef for weeks in a Himalayan salt room.
The pork pies, sausage rolls and Scotch eggs are made in house and as good as a sit-down lunch on King Street, eaten on a bench by the river with a couple of cans and a swarm of pigeons after errant flakes of pastry.
You know what? We think we might just stay here a while…
Address: 51 Palliser Rd, London W14 9EB
Website: hgwalter.com
