Wapping Wharf must have the highest concentration of great independent restaurants in the whole world. Wall to wall, corrugation to corrugation bangers. BOX-E, Ragù, Seven Lucky Gods, Bertha’s Pizza, Cargo Cantina, Gambas, Root. There’s even a celebration of Royal Vietnamese cuisine called Hue, which, on closer inspection, is actually a hairdresser. Wouldn’t Root have been a better name for that? Anyway, if this cargo were jettisoned into the Floating Harbour you could drift for weeks and not eat the same meal twice.
Lapin is one of the Wharf’s newer additions, opened in April 2025 by restaurateur Dan O’Regan and chef Jack Briggs-Horan, the pair behind BANK in Totterdown. It’s a French bistro in a shipping container. At a time when Joséphine, Camille and, erm, Henry Harris have made the bouchon London’s hottest reservation, that might sound engineered to be on the pulse. But in practice it works. More than works. In less than a year it has picked up a glowing review from Grace Dent, who called it “peculiar, meta, slightly earnest and definitely delicious”, and a Good Food Guide listing earned through public nominations.
O’Regan has also been generating attention of his own through his Substack, Notes on a Napkin, and a new food column in Country Living. One lively piece for the Bristol Sauce on the value of restaurant critics went up the same week as Dent’s review, describing the moment she walked in during Sunday lunch: “I felt the blood drain from my face,” he wrote. O’Regan argued that the best reviews don’t just describe the meal but decode the whole moment. A good critic, he wrote, doesn’t just tell you something is good or bad – they tell you why.
You’d think the staff might have been feeling the pressure, then. On a busy Friday night, they didn’t know who the fuck we were, but when William Sitwell walked in five minutes later, they barely broke stride. Sitwell: the Telegraph’s restaurant critic, MasterChef judge, and now restaurateur himself, having recently opened the White Hart in Somerset. A national critic strolling into the restaurant whose owner has recently published an impassioned essay on the sacred value of national critics. What was Dent saying about peculiar and meta again?
O’Regan wrote of her visit that “there’s a specific voltage in the air when a proper critic walks in. Not panic. Not fear. Reverence, maybe. Because someone who actually knows what they’re looking at is now looking at you.” On Friday night, if the needle moved, it was skilfully concealed. Good luck getting any useful feedback out of The Telegraph, though.
The room is so tight and the kitchen so close you could hear the chefs’ shrugs. A smell of garlic butter fills the space so completely it borders on the theatrical, almost comically deliberate, as though someone were pumping it into the room – though more likely it’s simply simmering away like some Gallic diffuser on one of the cosy kitchen’s few stovetops.
Sage green walls are hung with framed vintage French advertising posters: Ruinart, Joseph Perrier, a Dubonnet print with a couple in straw hats displaying a certain insouciance. The wooden tables are pleasingly solid, reassuringly permanent, each one engraved with the restaurant’s motif: a rabbit clutching a baguette, rendered in an old etching style that every diner seems compelled to run their fingers over. It’s not real, guys; you can’t pet it. Fortunately, the staff do not emerge in berets and marinières for the benefit of Sitwell.
There is seating on the terrace too, and on a warm March evening it was heaving inside and out with folk just clocked off for the weekend enjoying a Picon-spiked pilsner and plates of Westcombe saucisson. Some of the other restaurants in Wapping Wharf don’t quite manage to feel like proper restaurants. The shipping container format has a tendency to make a room feel boxy – BOX-E next door has made a virtue of the name, of course – a bit soulless, a bit greenhousy. Lapin seems to have studied those deficiencies and addressed them, ironing out the kinks of each into a smoothly run, cohesive bistro space that makes use of every last inch.
The staff walk sideways like crabs between tables, shimmying through the tightest of spaces, and they know what you’ve ordered by heart, anticipating which wine you might want next before you’ve finished the glass in front of you. Sitwell isn’t throwing a strop about his Tardieu-Laurent Viognier being the wrong temperature, I don’t think; it’s pretty noisy in here though. A restaurant operating within the tightest of margins, then, in every possible way.
It’s a credit to the kitchen how opulent the food feels with all of these constraints. We started with gougères of Old Winchester and blue cheese, warm, yielding and funky. At the next table (a decent distance between us and them, somehow, in this tiny room), someone was cooing over their bone marrow and marmite onions: “I must get the recipe for this.” Tip: add a fuck ton of butter.
Sadly, there was no foie gras d’oie, but we were getting our fill of Geese later at the Prospect Building, so not to worry. We split a salt fish brandade with café de Paris and baguette, and a hand-dived Orkney scallop with agretti, celeriac and garlic butter. The brandade was ferociously hot, the kind of temperature that strips the mucous membrane off the roof of your mouth and makes you understand why the French invented the trou normand.
Which, incidentally, Lapin offers: a quince sorbet doused in three-year Somerset cider brandy. I should have ordered one right there to help restore some balance to the microbiome of my palate. I’d like to say I’m enough of a maverick to call for entremets between starter and mains, but I couldn’t possibly; William was watching, notepad in hand. You know what? This self-referential stuff doesn’t sit well. Let’s crack on…
For mains, a sole meunière with blood orange and capers, and blushing wild venison with roast beetroot, griotte cherry and port jus. Both excellent, both substantial, the sole in a wonderfully perfumed, viscous butter sauce singing with the more floral elements of blood orange and sharpened by good quality capers. Duck fat frites on the side and as good as they sound, and a castelfranco salad where each frill of pink leaf looked like nymphoplasty, chicory in there too, with pickled shallots. The people at the next table were still cooing, like their record was skipping.
The kitchen makes canny use of the same ingredients across multiple courses. Castelfranco appeared with the venison and again in the side salad. Blood orange ran through the sole, that same side salad, a posset on the prix fixe menu, and adorned our eclair. Wild garlic was cropping up all over the shop. This is partly seasonal instinct and partly practical: in a restaurant with clearly limited storage space, running the same ingredients through different preparations ensures everything is fresh and turning over fast. It never feels repetitive. It just emphasises immediacy and seasonality.
To finish, the eclair du jour, today rhubarb and custard with the sparkle of stem ginger, was a lovely, substantial thing topped unconventionally with torched Italian meringue and proving that Lapin is no slave to dogma. I snuck in that quince sorbet too, which was so boozy, so throbbing with raw brandy, that the edges started blurring. I like it when that happens.
Wine is all French and listed by character rather than region: ‘Textural, Buttery & Complex’ in one section, ‘Fruit-Driven, Floral, Balanced’ in another. There is a Carole’s Pick section, named for restaurant manager Carole Petitbois. We drank a Les Grands Terroirs Viré-Clessé Chardonnay and a Feu Follet Domaine Stoeffler skin-contact blend of Pinot Gris, Muscat and Riesling, both suggested by our server and perfectly judged for the mood. Every wine on the list is available by the glass, which is the sort of detail that turns a good wine list into a generous one.
It’s one designed to welcome, not intimidate, and that spirit of accessibility runs through the whole offering at Lapin. The prix fixe doesn’t banish you to a 5:30pm Tuesday – it offers three courses for £29 every service, with a £25 wine pairing available on top, making a full and generous meal for just over £50. It’s laughably good value. Availability is limited daily, naturally. On our visit the menu featured white bean soup with wild garlic pistou, butter roast chicken over pearl barley, and a blood orange posset. That is a serious amount of food and thought for the money.
That thoughtfulness goes further with the blackboard of cheese. Where some places offer a slab of stilton and a glass of port and call it a night, Lapin pairs comté with a 2014 vin jaune from Domaine Villet, Ogleshield with Condrieu from Domaine Tardieu, Solstice with a Chablis premier cru from Domaine Defaix. That level of thought on a cheese board, in a shipping container, tells you a lot. And hey, here comes a gorgeous, brooding chocolate truffle just to hammer home the point about the place overdelivering.
O’Regan wrote in that Bristol Sauce piece that what restaurants want from critics is not praise but understanding: “Not praise. Not even protection. Just to be understood on our own terms.”
Well, I’m certainly happy to praise it; Lapin is a thoroughly enjoyable restaurant. Can’t offer protection, as I’m as useful in a fight as a sunken soufflé. But understanding? They make that part easy. Lapin is small but perfectly formed: a Francophile restaurant run by people who care enormously about pitch-perfect hospitality and who have figured out how to make a shipping container feel like a dining room with a heartbeat and soul. The rabbit didn’t bring my baguette to the table. But everything else arrived exactly as it should.
