London’s Silicon Roundabout might be a little less glamorous than a whole valley made of the shiny semiconductor stuff. Perhaps it’s not as renowned for its tech startups and digital agencies as its name would suggest, either.
In fact, it could be argued that the real innovation around these parts takes place on the plate, with the streets orbiting Old Street Station arguably making up one of London’s most interesting food neighbourhoods. Here you’ll find everything from Michelin-starred tasting menus to grab-and-go bánh mì, all within a short walk of that infamous epicentre – less spaghetti junction and more a tangle of agreeable options for supper, you could posit, thinking you sounded clever. Or, that Chat GPT had entered your body…
So, whether you’re a tech worker seeking your next client lunch spot or you’re simply really lost in this perplexing corner of East London, here are our picks for the best restaurants near Old Street.
We still can’t help you navigate that bloody roundabout, though…
Nest, Old Street
Ideal for thoughtful tasting menus that celebrate British seasons…
Having taken flight from its Hackney home to an impressive Victorian building next to Shoreditch Town Hall in 2023, Nest has brought its innovative approach to seasonal British cooking to a grander stage. And with the move, it’s certainly become one of the best places to eat near Old Street Station.
The restaurant, from the same team behind Michelin-starred St. Barts in Farringdon, is run by three friends (chef Johnnie Crowe, wine expert Luke Wasserman, and general manager Toby Neill), who divide their year into distinct ‘seasons’, each celebrating a single landscape and its produce.
The current Sea & Coastline menu (running until March) showcases the bounty of Britain’s icy winter waters – think fresh Maldon oysters, hand-dived Scottish scallops, and Cornish squid – accompanied by foraged coastal herbs and seaweeds.
Come spring (come on spring, it’s time), they’ll shift focus to Rivers & Valleys, celebrating fresh river fish and wild garlic, before moving to the Highlands for a summer of celebrating Herdwick sheep and foraged herbs. The year finishes with their Game & Forest menu, rich with charcoal-cooked venison and earthy mushrooms. For a diner with Grapheme-colour synaesthesia (this diner), there’s a keen clarity of character to all of this that’s really satisfying to think about.
The dining room is built around a striking horseshoe counter, with a cocktail bar at one end flowing into an open kitchen at the other, all framing an intimate candlelit dining space and distinctive encaustic tile floor. Your menu arrives sealed in a wax-stamped envelope – you can either peek inside or let each course arrive as a surprise. The tasting menu (£90, with a shorter £70 option available midweek) represents good value for cooking of this calibre, while the matching wine flight (£65) cleverly changes with each season to reflect the menu’s geography – think coastal vineyards and briny drops during Sea & Coastline season, and Loire Valley wines when river fish takes centre stage.
Don’t miss the Nest Cellar, a snug walk-in bar beneath the restaurant serving low-intervention wines, seasonal cocktails, and clever bar snacks. It’s the perfect spot for a pre-dinner drink or a more casual evening of nibbles and natural wine.
You’ll find Nest ready to welcome you Tuesday through Saturday, with dinner service every evening and lunch available on Saturdays.
Website: nestfood.co.uk
Address: 374-378 Old St, London EC1V 9LT
The Clove Club, Old Street
Ideal for special occasion British cooking without the starch…
Housed in the imposingly handsome grade II-listed Shoreditch Town Hall (seconds along from Nest, incidentally), The Clove Club has been at the forefront of defining a new kind of modern British cooking since 2013.
What began as a supper club in a London flat – where former Manchester DJs Daniel Willis and Johnny Smith collaborated with chef Isaac McHale on ambitious menus of mackerel with nasturtium, pheasant, and goat’s milk and beetroot desserts – has evolved into one of London’s heaviest hitters, now boasting two Michelin stars and a consistent spot among the World’s 50 Best Restaurants.
McHale’s cooking shows both technical know-how and a deep understanding of British ingredients and seasonality, with dishes that are precise yet never precious. The menu delivers time and time again on pleasingly light, inventive flavour combinations – think hot smoked Wiltshire trout with almond milk and horseradish, raw Orkney scallops with hazelnut and clementine, or Aynhoe Park venison with celeriac and cacao nibs.
While the full tasting menu (£225) is of course the main event, there’s also a more accessible entry point via Clove Club’s three-course lunch menu (£95, Wednesday to Friday), which offers the same meticulous cooking in a more concise format. That lunch menu comes with a similarly concise, keenly priced wine flight, at £55.
The broader wine list aims to showcase exciting contemporary producers alongside classical vintages, with an extensive list that runs from grower Champagnes to rare Burgundies and emerging English winemakers.
Don’t let the accolades and price tag have you assuming it’s all hushed tones and bowties in here – while the food is undeniably ambitious, the atmosphere remains refreshingly relaxed, with whitewashed walls, faintly distressed wooden floors, and a buzzing open kitchen providing plenty of theatre. The Guardian even called it “a notoriously informal approach to fine dining”, which is a bit much, quite frankly. Anyway, that dining room is open Wednesday through Saturday for lunch and Monday through Saturday for dinner.
For those seeking something more casual from the McHale team, keep an eye on Bar Valette, the Clove Club’s newest venture on Kingsland Road that’s just opened. Expect a more relaxed take on Spanish and French coastal cooking, with excellent seafood, game, and an extensive sherry selection – though McHale is quick to point out they’re “not going for a star here, just good times.”
Website: thecloveclub.com
Address: Shoreditch Town Hall, 380 Old St, London EC1V 9LT
Padella, Phipp Street
Ideal for perfect pasta at prices that won’t make your eyes water…
The second outpost of London’s beloved pasta institution might not command the same queues as its Borough Market original, but that’s precisely why we love it. Indeed, Tim Siadatan and Jordan Frieda’s original ambition, of serving fresh, hand-rolled pasta at accessible prices, has translated just as well into this larger Shoreditch space, a place where the quality remains consistently high and the prices stay remarkably reasonable.
In a corner of an industrial-chic building (is there any other type of building here?) just off the bustle of Great Eastern Street, you’ll find a space that’s casual and considered. The steel counters and exposed brick walls nod to the area’s warehouse heritage, while the open kitchen provides all the theatre of watching your pasta being prepared fresh, ideal for when your date is a bore. Come summer, the outdoor courtyard becomes one of East London’s most pleasant spots for a plate of pasta in the sunshine.
The best part? These exemplary pasta dishes clock in at around £12.50 a bowl, making it one of the area’s best-value quick meals. The Padella pici cacio e pepe is genuinely iconic (a word so often overused, but here perhaps acceptable) but don’t overlook the tagliarini with slow-cooked tomato sauce for something arguably even more satisfying, the rust-tinged olive oil pooling at the sides of the bowl and crying out for a dredge-through with the house focaccia. The drinks list, created by cocktail maestros Mr Lyan Studio, is equally decent value – their house negronis and martinis both pitched at just £8. And that’s where we stop, because what sick fuck orders dessert in Padella?
The restaurant is open daily from noon until 10pm (9pm Sundays), with a break between lunch and dinner service. Download their virtual queueing app to grab a spot, then pop over to nearby Callooh Calley for a cocktail while you wait.
Website: padella.co
Address: Shoreditch, Padella, 1 Phipp St, London EC2A 4PS
Llama Inn, Great Eastern Street
Ideal for contemporary riffs on Peruvian cuisine and rooftop cocktails…
This acclaimed Brooklyn import brings James Beard-nominated chef Erik Ramirez’s take on Peruvian cuisine to a striking rooftop setting within The Hoxton Shoreditch. Though finding the entrance requires some insider knowledge – look for the yellow door on Willow Street rather than entering through the hotel – the journey up to the seventh floor rewards looking like a befuddled fool with sweeping views across the East London skyline.
The space has a neat sense of seamless transition between indoor and out, its soaring glass ceiling flooding the room with natural light. Enormous fiddle leaf figs and tropical plants create natural partitions throughout, whilst scalloped pendant lights hang like paper moons above terracotta floors. The main conservatory flows seamlessly onto a geometric-tiled terrace that becomes one of Shoreditch’s most coveted spots during warmer months.
Ramirez’s menu draws inspiration from Peru’s diverse culinary heritage while incorporating influences from his time at Eleven Madison Park. Signature dishes include an energetic scallop ceviche with yuzu kosho, dragonfruit and nori crisps, and a much-written-about interpretation of lomo saltado —a hearty sharing plate that cleverly combines stir-fried beef with spring onion pancakes, rice, and triple-cooked chips. It’s heartily priced too, at £56.
All that said, it’s in one of the most humble dishes that the most straightforward pleasure is found. The charred cabbage anticucho has followed them across the Atlantic, remaining one of their most requested dishes with its clever combination of saikyo miso and quinoa furikake. It’s just £5.
The bar programme, crafted by award-winning mixologist Natasha Bermudez, shares co-headliner status with the food here, and quite rightly; the drinks here are uniformly, reliably top-draw. Their ‘Chupetini’ (£15/£7) breathes new life into the classic martini with Japanese gin and an ‘umami bomb’ (a concentrated blend of miso, kombu and shiitake), while the ‘Llama Del Rey’ showcases Peru’s national spirit with a combination of pisco, rum, red wine, and chicha morada. Decent name, too. During ‘Sour Hour’ (Monday to Friday, 4-6pm), signature pisco sours are available for just £8.50, and a smaller, snack-focused menu is available.
The wine list focuses on small, independent growers, with a particular emphasis on South American producers and low-intervention wines though, honestly, this is a rare occasion where we stick to the cocktails for the whole evening, heartburn be damned (pack some Gaviscon).
Open Monday through Sunday for lunch and dinner, with weekend brunch services recently added. The kitchen serves until 11pm most nights, extending to midnight Thursday through Saturday, making it an excellent option for post-work dining.
Website: llamainnlondon.com
Address: 1 Willow St, London EC2A 4BH
Read: The best Peruvian restaurants in London
Bistro Freddie, Luke Street
Ideal for intimate French-British dining and wine exploration…
Behind a modest shopfront on Luke Street, this 45-cover restaurant from HAM Restaurants brings a slice of Gallic charm to Shoreditch. The whitewashed dining room, with its flickering candlelight and crisp tablecloths, sets the stage for what is one of East London’s most intimate evenings.
The kitchen, led by Alexandre Laforce Reynolds, sends out dishes that, quite simply, make you want to return. Their house sausage, a signature since opening, arrives glistening and properly emulsified, accompanied by a brown sauce made in-house that transforms this bar snack to order-several status. A starter of snails doing their best to weigh down pillowy flatbread is scattered with crispy chicken skin and swimming in tarragon butter – a dish which gets more appealing with each apposition.
The wine list at Bistro Freddie has been lovingly curated by Alex Price (who has now moved on to Plates, another restaurant in this list). Rather than defaulting to MOR choices, Price has assembled a cellar that tells stories through bottles – from flinty, reductive Chenins of the Loire Valley to the herbal, saline whites of Corsica. The by-the-glass selection rotates frequently, but might include anything from a bright Vin Exploré Côtes de Gascoigne to a more serious Domaine Thierry Fournier Champagne. Even the entry-level wines, starting at £9 a glass, have been chosen with obvious care and consideration. Or, more simply put, this is a bloody nice place to get a bit pissed.
Main courses display the kitchen’s talent for updating classics without losing their soul. Their skate wing arrives golden and imperious over a subtly spiced curry sauce, while dishes like bavette with peppercorn sauce remind you why French bistro cooking is having a big moment in London right now, beyond just the decent mark-ups. The menu changes regularly, but their pies – designed for sharing – have become a signature, with combinations like chicken, girolles and liver demonstrating Reynolds’ knack for balancing luxury with comfort.
This is a restaurant that understands the art of hospitality. The staff, dressed in those crisp white worker jackets that match the tablecloths (or, are the staff wearing tablecloths and the tablecloths actually made from jackets?), move through the space with practiced ease, as comfortable discussing the nuances of a Corsican Vermentino as they are recommending the perfect pie to share.
Open Monday through Saturday for lunch (12-3pm) and dinner (6-11pm), Bistro Freddie’s combination of accomplished cooking, serious wines, and warm hospitality has made it a local favourite. You’ll often see chefs from the neighbourhood dining in here, which is always a good sign.
Website: bistrofreddie.com
Address: Bistro Freddie, 74 Luke St, Greater, London EC2A 4PY
Daffodil Mulligan, City Road
Ideal for modern Irish hospitality with serious culinary credentials…
Named after a famous Dublin street seller’s daughter and brought to life by three Irish hospitality veterans with triple digit years of restaurant experience to their name, Daffodil Mulligan pulses with life just south of Old Street roundabout. The latest venture from the inimitable Richard Corrigan might be more casual than his other restaurants, but there’s nothing laid-back about the cooking.
The long, sunlit dining room, with its olive-green banquettes and polished concrete floors, fills with the aromatic smoke from the wood oven and grill that dominates the open kitchen. It’s always such a reassuring smell when you enter a restaurant, unless the kitchen’s caught on fire, of course. A ten-seat oyster bar adds a touch of convivial glamour, and downstairs, Gibney’s bar (an offshoot of the legendary Malahide pub) keeps the craic flowing with live music.
Head chef Stu Hesketh’s menu gives carefully sourced ingredients a confident once over. Peter Hannan’s acclaimed beef appears as a tartare anointed with oyster cream, while a sugar-pit bacon rib arrives glazed with gochujang, the fat caramelised, caught, dark and sticky.
Even seemingly simple dishes like salt-chilli chicken with mustard pickles or ember-baked bread with aioli arrive with the kind of obvious finesse that make you pause mid-conversation to appreciate them…
…What were we saying again?
Ah yes. This is cooking that laughs in the face of subtlety – every dish seems determined to show you a good time and slap you about the chops with flavour. And unsurprisingly for a Corrigan joint, there’s a keen focus on drinking here, with their signature Black Velvet (Guinness topped with Piper-Heidsieck blanc-de-blanc) setting the tone perfectly down in Gibney’s basement bar.
Open Tuesday through Saturday for lunch and dinner (closing slightly later on weekends), Corrigan and his partners Tony Gibney and John Nugent have created something that manages to be both a destination restaurant and a proper local – the kind of place where you might pop in for a quick drink and find yourself staying for dinner, all before slurring some nonsense in a neighbouring diner’s ear and getting ushered out. Like its namesake flower, it brings a welcome burst of colour and life to Old Street.
Website: daffodilmulligan.com
Address: 70-74 City Rd, London EC1Y 2BJ
Popolo, Rivington Street
Ideal for intimate Italian dining and counter culture…
At Jon Lawson’s Popolo, the best seats in the house hover over a stainless steel counter where chefs work with a quiet intensity, turning out dishes that make you forget you’re perched on a bar stool and that your back really fucking hurts. The ground floor revolves around this open kitchen, while upstairs offers a more traditional dining room, though ‘traditional’ here means bare brick walls and simple café tables rather than white tablecloths.
The menu changes frequently but maintains a steady philosophy – Italian cooking with a contemporary edge and occasional Moorish inflections. Fresh pasta, made daily in-house, might appear as delicate agnolotti stuffed with pork cheek and glossed with porcini butter, or taglierini tangled with hand-picked Dorset crab and bottarga. A dish of n’duja-spiked burrata with crispy olives and chickpeas is a welcome update on a dish that has gone so far beyond saturation point in London that it feels like we’ve all been subsumed by the stuff, suffocating to death, our final cries for help choked by stracciatella di bufala.
The wine list, like the room, is compact but thoughtfully assembled, ranging from skin-contact whites to robust Italian reds. The service is genuinely great in here, knowledgeable and welcoming, happy to explain the menu’s more esoteric ingredients or simply leave you to enjoy your risotto stained purple with Nebbiolo and studded with radicchio and gorgonzola piccante. They might even whisper tactfully in your ear that you’ve spilt the damn stuff all down yourself.
Open Tuesday through Saturday evenings only, this is food that demands to be shared, discussed, and lingered over, ideally with a good bottle of something interesting and the gentle rhythm of the kitchen as your soundtrack.
Website: popoloshoreditch.com
Address: 26 Rivington St, London EC2A 3DU
Kêu Banh Mi Deli, Old Street
Ideal for London’s finest bánh mì and a fix of Vietnamese coffee…
This bright, minimalist spot might be small, but it serves some of the best bánh mì you’ll find in London, and in a city whose bánh mì game has never felt more thriving, that’s some compliment.
As an offshoot of Vietnamese stalwart Cay Tre (which has a branch next door), the banh mi here ranges from traditional combinations of pâté and pickles – el clasico, no doubt – to more baguette-pushing numbers like mackerel braised in caramelised fish sauce or honey-glazed pork with kimchi. All are excellent.
The Cantonese roast duck bánh mì takes the familiar hoisin duck wrap far beyond standard M&S sad lunch fare, while their signature Hoi An deluxe showcases a house-made sauce that blends pork gravy, five spice, butter and fermented chilies into something truly remarkable.
Beyond the sandwiches, you’ll find excellent rice bowls topped with grilled meats and fragrant, Southern-style coconut curries. Don’t skip their Vietnamese coffee – strong, sweet, and properly made with a phin filter, it’s the perfect afternoon pick-me-up.
Website: banhmikeu.co.uk
Address: 332 Old St, London EC1V 9DR
Plates, Old Street
Ideal for innovative plant-based fine dining that stands shoulder-to-shoulder with London’s best restaurants…
Kirk Haworth’s intimate 25-cover restaurant has recently just become the UK’s first plant-based establishment to earn a Michelin star – and just a few months after opening, no less – and it’s easy to see why. The dining room, with its tactile, earthy atmosphere designed in collaboration with east London’s Design & That studio, sets the scene perfectly – think natural pigments, handcrafted details, and a striking counter that wraps around the open kitchen.
Haworth’s cooking draws on nearly two decades of experience in Michelin-starred kitchens worldwide (including The French Laundry and Restaurant Sat Bains), expertise that he’s brilliantly adapted to plant-based cuisine following his own journey with Lyme disease in 2016. The result is technically accomplished cooking that just happens to be vegan – dishes like barbecued maitake mushroom with black bean mole and kimchi showcase his ability to build layers of flavour and texture without relying on animal products.
The seven-course tasting menu (£75) changes with the seasons, though certain standouts, like their house-laminated sourdough with whipped cashew butter, have become signatures. Their raw cacao gateau with sour cherry and coconut blossom ice cream provides a fittingly sophisticated finale. The wine list shows similar thoughtfulness, focusing on low-intervention producers and biodynamic estates.
Come summer, an additional 14 seats on the outdoor terrace provide a rare peaceful spot just off the fr-energy of Old Street. While securing a table requires planning ahead (they’re currently booked well into 2025), this is quite simply London’s best plant-based restaurant, though the chef would prefer Plates not to be judged solely on those terms. Quite right, too.
Website: plates-london.com
Address: 320 Old St, London EC1V 9DR
Since you’re in the area, here’s where to eat near near Shoreditch High Street station and Liverpool Street station, too.
