Decent Restaurants Near V&A Museum
 

Hello all. My wife and I have a long layover in London coming up and were planning to head to the V&A to check out a couple of exhibits. We don't spend much time in that neighborhood but wanted to see if there is anywhere recommendable for a nice lunch in the area. Thoughts? Maybe the Hawksmoor?

The Hawksmmor Knightsbridge would work

also try http://www.bibendum.co.uk/index.html

If you like beef, by all means and if it is as good as the Seven Dials location where we'll be eating tomorrow night, and have used before, all the better.

Petrus.

https://www.gordonramsayrestaurants.com/petrus/

Also Bibendum. Bit further away, Galvin at Windows.

http://www.galvinatwindows.com/

Dinner is not too far away at the Mandarin Oriental...

try the cabman's shelter in Thurloe Place - they'll do you a bacon butty and a nice cup of tea

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cabmen's_Shelter_Fund ;)

When? Places like Petrus (and probably and Hawksmoor and Galvin) book up well in advance

(I tried about 3 weeks ago to book either lunch or dinner at Petrus w/ a couple of days flexibility in late December -- not on either holiday and there was no availability)

Dukey - just pulled the trigger for huscub and I to be in London over American Thanksgiving. Will appreciate any field intelligence you can provide!
Thinking about booking to see Lorna Luft at The Crazy Coqs one night - yes, how cliche, but, eh...

Availability for restaurants such as Petrus is always going to be tough around Christmas and New Year which late December is. However if you want to go in the next week or so, it should be fine, unless the weekend.

Look on opentable.co.uk - great site for finding restaurants, recent reviews and for booking.

Bibendum is great, and a beautiful restaurant. Or the Oyster bar on the ground floor of the same building if you don't have much time.
La Brasserie in the same area has been there forever; I haven't been for a while, but it still seems to be going strong. This is also true for Daphne's; it has been popular for ages.

Seamus; I love the Crazy Coqs. Haven't seen Lorna Luft there, but we've had several great evenings.

It's a cafe rather than a restaurant, but you could eat in the V and A itself. The surroundings are beautiful

Seamus, I am not sure what kind of "intelligence" you're really looking for but glad you are going to be in London.

We have never been disappointed with any of the many dramatic production opportunities we've experienced over the years and yesterday's "Jane Eyre" production at the National was no exception. Admittedly "different" staging and as I watched this thing I again realized just how badly we have treated some children over the years. And the whole "class" and "marrying beneath" thing...dreary. BUT, great presentation with imagination and probably cheaper than New York.

We will be in town again next Summer after a week and a half finally doing the dales and moors adventure. Anyway, good theatre, fun and if interested wild nightlife, food better than ever, and what's not to like?

MissPrism beat me to it. No need to go anywhere else, the V&A has perfectly acceptable although not fancy food, and the rooms you eat in (unless you are very unlucky) are a sight in themselves.

Our favorite Is ORSINI'S right across the st from the museum.Excellent Italian and Mrs Orsini bakes all the desserts herself. Good wines too open breakfast,lunch and dinner,

Even if you don't eat there it's worth visiting the Refreshment Rooms (cafe) that several people have recommended at the V&A. The series of three alcoves/rooms are beautifully decorated. The green, gothic revival influenced tiled room was designed by William Morris with stained glass painted by Edward Burne Jones and Phillip Webb.

All three rooms are beautiful and apparently were situated right at the entrance to the museum when it was built. There's a fascinating history of the designs here.
http://www.vam.ac.uk/content/article...rupted-vision/

For me the Cast Courts and the Refreshment Rooms really give you a sense for the Nineteenth century experience of the museum.

Thanks for all the feedback. Bibendum and The Hawksmoor may be options. Petrus is great, I'm sure, but I suspect that it is just a bit involved for the time we have.

It is also good to hear positive comments on the cafe at the museum, as we may not have the time or inclination to bother with anything else.

<i>When?</i>

We will be in London the second Saturday in November, but only for a few hours. Our flight from Boston lands a bit before 9 am and we catch a flight to Jo'burg in the evening. My wife is itching to see the shoe exhibit at the V&A, so we are going to head into town for a few hours during the layover, assuming everything goes to plan.

Oh -- I saw Shoes on the August Bank Holiday. Enjoyed it more than I thought I might, not gobsmacking like the McQueen but really quite good.

On your tight schedule -- the cafe in the V&A might be your best bet.

You're planning to eat around Museumopolis on a Sunday lunchtime outside school holidays. And Remembrance Sunday at that, when central London gets unwonted Sunday crowds anyway, and the Remembrance services pack the V&A's two neighbouring mainstream Christian megachurches. Its Mormon neighbour to the north also seems to get lots of people pouring out around Sunday lunchtime as well.

This isn't necessarily a decision you're going to be able to control: crowds in the local eateries (including the Benugo operations inside the V&A) can be formidable at the museums' peak visiting time.

It MIGHT (or, depending on the unpredictability of mass behaviour, might not) be handiest to head to the pedestrianised southernmost 100 yards of Exhibition Road, just SW of the V&A's main entrance on Cromwell Rd.

There's a cluster of excellent high-grade, low cost, places you can choose between on the basis of the shortness of their queues. Casa Brindisa (Spanish) and Comptoir Libanais are part of the new generation of tightly controlled, generally excellent, mini chains. Pain Quotidien sort of is too, if you can put up with French bakery muck: most of its customers are French - but what do they know?.

Oriental Canteen is a proper, translocated, Chinatown dive - now colonised by the local French, who recognise the kind of tatty, always reliable, neighbourhood bistro (daily specials handwritten on the back of any scraps of paper to hand) they've destroyed at home. There's half a dozen other nearby cuisines: Daquise for example has oscillated for 70 years between being endearing because it's Polish, crap because it's Polish, and good because it's modern Polish: it now seems OK because, in spite of being Polish, most of its customers are French.

Tombo, just to the side in Thurloe Place, serves what's in effect all-day Japanese afternoon tea with lots of allegedly nutritionally correct savouries. It might be just the kind of snacky thing you really need in between two intercontinental flights.

If you're not museumed out, the V&A's current Fabric of India exhibition is well worth viewing - and blissfully crowd-free. Captions reflect the current (historically sloppy) Anglophobe orthodoxy and commercial innumeracy of gullible academics: but India has a lengthy history of weaving, knitting and dyeing - and the show draws heavily on the V&A's archive: probably the world's best collection of what India produced before the American Civil War revolutionised what was till then an entirely craft industry.

The show goes downhill after 1870, though it might offer a view of modern India rarely seen outside.

Stadium???