In this guide
London has plenty of restaurants with a nice view and a good designer. This is not a guide to those. Everything here is somewhere the premises are genuinely strange — a tent, a boat, a lavatory, a bank vault, a courthouse nobody repaired.
The test we applied: a rooftop with a good view is not unusual in London, because London has hundreds. A restaurant in a yurt is.
Two kinds of unusual, and they are not the same evening
Most guides to this subject refuse to say which places are worth eating in. The split is obvious once you look at it, so here it is stated plainly.
The room is the point and the food is incidental. Feng Shang Princess, The Crosse Keys, Hamilton Hall, Sketch’s Gallery and Darwin Brasserie. Go for the pagoda, the banking hall, the ballroom, the installation and the glass dome. Do not go hungry expecting to be impressed.
Genuinely good restaurants that happen to be in a strange room. Rochelle Canteen, Sessions Arts Club, Coal Office, Campania & Jones, Hunan, The Cheese Barge, Barge East, Planque, Kinz and Ye Olde Cheshire Cheese. Every one of these would be worth a table in an ordinary room. The room is a bonus.
In between, and honestly so: The Yurt Café, The Attendant, Redemption Roasters, The Captain Kidd, Bob Bob Ricard, SUSHISAMBA and Duck & Waffle. Good food, but you are still paying something for the story.
💡 The Short Version: The Yurt Café is a working café inside a Mongolian yurt. Feng Shang Princess is a floating pagoda on the canal. The Attendant is a Victorian public lavatory with the urinals as the counter. Rochelle Canteen has no sign and a buzzer. Redemption Roasters trains its baristas inside prisons. And The Crosse Keys is a Wetherspoons in a 1913 banking hall.
📘 How we choose these (editorial note). No paid placements. These are drawn from a wide spread of sources rather than any single list - the food and travel press, the big listings sites, independent blogs and specialists, video, and what Londoners recommend themselves - and cross-referenced against each other. The bar is that the building or the proposition is strange, not that the design is good — which is why Aqua Shard, the OXO Tower and several rooftops were considered and left off. A view is a view.
Where they are
Map of the unusual restaurants in London
Loading the interactive map…
| If you are near… | Where to eat |
|---|---|
| Soho & Mayfair | Bob Bob Ricard, Sketch |
| Fitzrovia | The Attendant |
| The City | Ye Olde Cheshire Cheese, Duck & Waffle, Darwin Brasserie, SUSHISAMBA, The Crosse Keys |
| Shoreditch & Hackney | Rochelle Canteen, Barge East, Campania & Jones, Planque |
| King’s Cross & Clerkenwell | Coal Office, Sessions Arts Club |
| Paddington & Regent’s Park | The Cheese Barge, Feng Shang Princess |
| Wapping & Limehouse | The Captain Kidd, The Yurt Café |
| Elsewhere | Kinz (Notting Hill), Hunan (Pimlico Road), Redemption Roasters (Bloomsbury), The Ledger Building (Canary Wharf) |
Price guide: £ under £15 · ££ £15–£35 · £££ £40–£70 · ££££ £80+.
Not buildings at all
The Yurt Café, Limehouse
£ · St Katharine’s Precinct, 2 Butcher Row, E14 8DS
A working café inside an actual Mongolian yurt, in the grounds of a Limehouse charity that has held the site since 1950. It opened in 2016 and runs as a social enterprise, with profits going to the Royal Foundation of St Katharine’s community work. Daytime it does a full English, focaccias and Mission Coffee Works espresso under a felt roof. In the warmer months it turns into a pizza kitchen in the evenings: marinara £9, the Yurterita £11, a capricciosa £13, the meaty one £14, with saffron and nduja arancini at £6, tiramisù at £6.50 and gelato at £2.50 a scoop. Thursdays have live music from the outdoor stage.
Evening service runs 5–8pm, but the website and the printed menu disagree on which days — the café page says Monday to Saturday, the summer menu says Thursday to Saturday. Ring before making the trip. Food this cheap and this decent is not what the room leads you to expect.
⚠️ Not to be confused with St Katharine Docks by Tower Bridge. This is St Katharine’s Precinct, a mile and a half east.
Feng Shang Princess, Regent’s Park
Price not published · Cumberland Basin, Prince Albert Road, NW1 7SS
A three-tiered Chinese pagoda, painted red and hung with lanterns, moored at Cumberland Basin on the Regent’s Canal, ten minutes’ walk from London Zoo. It was hand-built in the 1980s as the first floating restaurant of its kind in London, and the boat is the entire reason to book. What the kitchen actually cooks is harder to establish: the restaurant publishes no menu and no prices anywhere on its website. The menus page returns a 404, the online ordering link is dead, and the homepage has carried a “new menu coming soon” line for months. Third-party listings show crispy aromatic duck rolls and wasabi king prawns. The restaurant will not confirm any of it before you sit down.
There is no lunch service Monday to Friday — Mon–Thu 6–11pm, Fri 6pm–midnight, Sat noon–midnight, Sun noon–11pm. Food orders between 5pm and 7pm are 20% off. Reviews of the cooking are mixed and we would rather say so.
The Cheese Barge, Paddington
£££ · Paddington Basin, Sheldon Square, W2 6DL
A 96-foot double-decker barge moored at Paddington Basin, from the Cheese Bar group, and one of the entries here where the food is the argument rather than the setting. British and Irish cheese is cooked rather than merely arranged on a board: Quickes curried cheese curds fried and dressed with chilli honey, a whole baked Baron Bigod with Coombeshead sourdough, garlic-roasted new potatoes and Ampleforth chutney, Blue Sky Dairy halloumi with romesco and oregano, and a clotted cream panna cotta at the end. The lower deck is a proper dining room; the roof terrace is uncovered.
Open Mon–Sat noon–9pm and Sun noon–7.15pm, and the restaurant publishes no prices on its own site. Parties of up to six book online, seven or more have to email. The roof terrace runs April to October and cannot be reserved at all.
Barge East, Hackney Wick
£££ · Sweetwater Mooring, 98 White Post Lane
A 125-year-old Dutch barge sailed over from the Netherlands and permanently moored on the River Lea, with a garden alongside and the Olympic Park skyline behind it. The kitchen, under Kayla Dimmick, holds two AA Rosettes and cooks a seasonal British menu of snacks and small and large plates, a good deal of it grown in the restaurant’s own gardens. There is a Sunday roast served aboard, a Saturday bottomless lunch, burgers and small plates in the riverside garden, and a converted milk float on site selling gelato, coffee and buns.
The barge itself only opens four days a week: Thursday and Friday from 4pm, Saturday and Sunday from noon. The gardens and terrace run daily from noon to 10pm — so turning up midweek gets you the site but not the boat, which is the thing you came for.
A hundred-year-old Dutch barge dragged from Holland and moored on the Lea. The garden alongside it does most of the covers in summer. Photo: Ewan-M, CC BY-SA 4.0.
Buildings that used to be something else
The Attendant, Fitzrovia
£ · 27A Foley Street, W1W 6DY
Built inside a Victorian public convenience of about 1890, mothballed in the 1960s and left dormant for more than fifty years before a two-year restoration. The original Doulton & Co porcelain urinals are the counter you sit at, fitted out with green seating chosen to match the surviving Victorian floor tiles. This is the site that started the company, which now roasts its own beans and runs five London cafés. Espresso from a seasonal house blend, single-origin filters through V60 or AeroPress, and a home-style breakfast, brunch and lunch menu, on unhomogenised organic milk.
Nowhere in the group takes bookings — every site is first come, first served, and this one is very small. The current website publishes no opening hours at all; the group’s older site listed 8am to 3pm on weekdays and 9am to 3pm at weekends. Dogs are welcome.
Rochelle Canteen, Shoreditch
£££ · 16 Playground Gardens, E2 7FA
Hidden behind a wall in a former school bike shed with no signage at all — you ring a buzzer marked ‘canteen’ and walk through a gate into what looks like a playground. Inside is a plain white room opening onto a walled garden, and Margot Henderson’s daily-changing classic and modern European cooking, which is the real reason to bother finding it. A recent summer menu ran smoked cod’s roe and radishes at £10, cured trout with fennel, kohlrabi and dill at £14, whole mackerel with rainbow chard and sorrel mayonnaise at £27, and onglet with watercress and pickled walnut at £29, with new potatoes or hispi at £6 alongside.
Lunch is daily, noon to 2.45pm; supper is Wednesday to Saturday only, 5.30 to 7.30pm, and everyone is out by 10pm. The room is wheelchair accessible. The hardest restaurant in London to find on purpose, and worth the trouble.
Sessions Arts Club, Clerkenwell
££££ · 4th floor, 24 Clerkenwell Green, EC1R 0NA
Not just a former courthouse — the old judges’ dining room inside Sessions House, which opened in 1782 as the largest courthouse in the country and stayed in use until 1920. The Grade II* room has been left deliberately unrestored: peeling plaster, enormous windows, no attempt to tidy any of it, sixty seats and three terraces off the side. The kitchen serves sharing plates — smoked eel with beetroot and chervil, guinea fowl rillette with mustard, celeriac with apple and brown shrimp, and a carnaroli risotto under shaved black truffle are the register.
The house guidance is three savoury plates a head, which is how a menu of small numbers becomes a large bill: one dated review put three courses and modest wine at about £95 a head. Lunch Tuesday to Saturday, Sunday lunch to 4.30pm, dinner Monday to Saturday. No lunch on Monday, no dinner on Sunday.
Coal Office, King’s Cross
££££ · 2 Bagley Walk, N1C 4PQ
Assaf Granit’s kitchen in the converted coal office at Coal Drops Yard, spread over three floors of Tom Dixon’s building with the studio’s fittings throughout and the kitchen open to the room. The cooking is Middle Eastern and Mediterranean and the menu is written in transliterated Hebrew and Arabic: kubalah, a Yemeni brioche, at £7.50; bomba, crispy parmesan croquettes with roasted shushka pepper, at £5 each; Machneyuda’s OG, a polenta with mushrooms, truffle and parmesan, at £15.50; grilled octopus with rice ta’adig and harissa emulsion at £47; and Peak District ex-dairy ribeye at £14.50 per 100g.
A discretionary 13.5% service charge is added, and the last dinner sitting is early — 20:00 on Monday, 20:45 Tuesday and Wednesday, 21:00 Thursday to Saturday. Tuesday lunch stops at 13:30, an hour before the rest of the week.
Campania & Jones, Bethnal Green
£££ · 23 Ezra Street, E2 7RH
Campanian cooking in a converted dairy on Ezra Street, a cobbled lane off Columbia Road, in a small room with a courtyard beside it. Pasta is made by hand every day and sold in the shop to take home along with the ragù. The menu stays properly southern: pappardelle with cheek ragù at £19, scialatielli allo scoglio at £19, ravioli di zucca delica at £21, San Pietro all’acqua pazza at £23, gnudi in sage butter at £10, and a tagliata di manzo for two at £58.
The lunch offer is the best value anywhere in this guide: one course with a glass of wine £14, two courses £20. Closed Monday. Tuesday to Friday it serves noon to 3.30pm and again from 6pm; Saturday runs to 5pm and reopens; Sunday is lunch only.
Kinz, Notting Hill
£££ · 50 Notting Hill Gate, W11 3JD
A 1930s Lloyds Bank designed by Sir Edward Maufe, converted into a Lebanese brasserie that opened on 1 June 2026. The main dining room is triple height and seats around 130, and the original bank vault is now the wine room, with small dining spaces built inside it. The cooking is home-style rather than the usual mezze-house list: manā’eesh in the morning, moujadara, mouneh pickles and rosewater desserts, and on Sundays molokhiye — jute mallow leaves slow-cooked with chicken, served with rice, crisped pitta and a sharp onion-and-vinegar mignonette, which the kitchen offers as the Lebanese answer to a Sunday roast.
Open Sunday to Thursday noon to 11pm, Friday and Saturday to midnight — and no food prices are published on the website. Only the drinks list is downloadable, so ring if the bill matters.
The Captain Kidd, Wapping
££ · 108 Wapping High Street, E1W 2NE
A converted warehouse laid out like a ship’s hull, on the river at Wapping and named for the pirate hanged a few yards away at Execution Dock. It is a Samuel Smith’s house, so every beer is brewed in Tadcaster and the cask Old Brewery Bitter comes from oak casks in the cellar. The food is pub cooking done seriously: hand-battered cod with mushy peas at £19.95, Kentish hop sausage and mash at £16.95, Whitby Bay whole-tail scampi at £16.95, an 8oz ribeye and chips at £30.95, and bar snacks including Korean fried chicken at £8.50 and crispy squid at £9.25.
The kitchen shuts between 3pm and 5pm on weekdays and stops entirely at 6pm on Sunday, which catches people out — the bar runs to 11pm either way.
Extraordinary rooms, ordinary prices
The Crosse Keys, City of London
£ · 9 Gracechurch Street, EC3V 0DR
The former HSBC headquarters, opened in 1913 — marble columns, a glass-domed ceiling and a banking hall long enough to lose people in. It is a Wetherspoons, and the mismatch is the whole appeal: a chain-priced pint of Abbot or London Pride under a ceiling built to impress bond traders. The food is the standard national menu — the burgers, the curry club, fish and chips, breakfast from opening — and nobody should travel for it. Come for the room, order the cheapest thing you fancy, and look up.
Under-18s are only permitted on the premises between 8am and 9pm, which rules it out as a late family stop. Open 8am to 11pm Monday to Thursday, to midnight on Friday, 8.30am Saturday and 9.30am Sunday. Step-free access. Wetherspoon publishes no prices online — they are in the app.
Hamilton Hall, Liverpool Street
£ · Liverpool Street station, street-level concourse, EC2M 7PY
The former ballroom of the Great Eastern Hotel, Grade II listed, with the gilding, mirrors and plasterwork intact and a Wetherspoons bar installed underneath it. It is named after Lord Claud Hamilton, chairman of the Great Eastern Railway company that built the station overhead. The trade is entirely commuters, and the menu is the same one every branch serves: breakfasts, burgers, curries, pizzas. The ceiling is the reason to walk in, and the beer is the reason to stay for twenty minutes.
It opens at 7am on weekdays, earlier than anything else in this guide, and closes at 11.30pm. Prices sit in the Wetherspoon app rather than on the website. Come for the ballroom; eat properly somewhere else afterwards.
Ye Olde Cheshire Cheese, City of London
££ · 145 Fleet Street, EC4A 2BP
A warren of dark panelled rooms and cellars down an alley off Fleet Street, rebuilt in 1667 immediately after the Great Fire. It is a Samuel Smith’s house and it still trades as a chop house, which is the part most visitors miss: Ye Olde Steak & Kidney Pudding is the signature dish, and around it sit devilled kidneys on toast at £10.25, Cheshire Cheese rarebit with chilli jam at £9.50, a Barnsley lamb chop at £21.50, a pork tomahawk at £28 and an 8oz ribeye at £32.50 off the grill.
The pub states plainly that it is totally inaccessible for wheelchairs, and the cellar rooms are reached by narrow, uneven stairs. Open Monday to Saturday noon to 11pm and Sunday noon to 10.30pm.
Unusual propositions rather than unusual rooms
Redemption Roasters, Bloomsbury
£ · 84b Lamb’s Conduit Street, WC1N 3LR
A coffee chain built around reducing reoffending. It runs barista academies inside HMP High Down, HMP Wandsworth, HMP Downview and HMP Wormwood Scrubs, trains prison leavers at a community academy in its King’s Cross headquarters, and then employs them across eleven London shops. Bloomsbury on Lamb’s Conduit Street was the first site and is still the best of them: espresso and batch filter, cakes, pastries and sandwiches, with seating outside, inside and downstairs.
The prison-roasting line everyone repeats is now out of date. Since December 2025 the company has roasted all its social-impact coffee at a new Wembley roastery rather than behind a wall; the training is the part that still happens inside. Open 7am to 5pm on weekdays and 8am to 5pm at weekends.
Bob Bob Ricard, Soho
££££ · 1–3 Upper James Street, W1F 9DF
Booth-only, art deco throughout, designed by David Collins in imitation of the Orient Express, with a Press for Champagne button at every table. It works, and the restaurant claims to pour more champagne than anywhere else in Britain. The cooking is British and French and entirely unembarrassed: beef Wellington, chicken Kyiv, fresh caviar and oysters, plus an all-day Diner Deluxe menu built on the golden age of rail travel. There is now a second site in the Leadenhall Building.
Guests under 15 are not admitted, reservations are taken for full meals only — at least two courses including a main — and the last entry is 22:00 despite a midnight close. The largest booth seats eight; parties of nine to eighteen go to the private room. Bringing your own cake costs £10 a head.
Sketch, Mayfair
££££ · 9 Conduit Street, W1S 2XG
Afternoon tea inside an art installation, in a building running five rooms that do five different things. The Gallery is no longer pink. India Mahdavi’s 2014 candyfloss room, hung with David Shrigley drawings, was redesigned in 2022 into a sunshine-yellow and copper-gold space carrying thirteen site-specific Yinka Shonibare works. The egg-shaped lavatory pods survive and are still the most photographed loos in London. The tea itself is finger sandwiches, scones and a run of French pastries, and it is fine rather than remarkable.
Afternoon tea is from £85 a head, £55 for children up to 15, served in the Gallery Monday to Thursday noon to 4pm and Friday to Sunday 11am to 4.30pm. The Lecture Room & Library upstairs is the serious restaurant and only opens for lunch on Friday and Saturday.
Planque, Haggerston
£££ · under the railway arches, Haggerston
A 60-seat restaurant built around a members’ wine cellar you can drink from, under the Haggerston arches. The list runs to rare bottles matured downstairs alongside current releases, and the food genuinely follows the bottle rather than the other way round: French-leaning small plates meant for sharing, with the desserts drawing the most praise — one reviewer singled out a sheep’s curd and plum plate as the best thing on the table. Members can drink from their own stored cases; nobody else may bring wine in.
The licence means you cannot come only for a drink — alcohol has to be ordered with food. Dinner Tuesday to Saturday from 6pm, lunch on Saturday only, when a set menu is £45 a head. Groups of seven or more take a £75 menu. Cancel inside 24 hours and it is £50 a head.
Hunan, Pimlico
££££ · 51 Pimlico Road, SW1W 8NE
There is no à la carte. You say what you dislike and small dishes keep arriving until the kitchen stops — the “Leave-it-to-Us” tasting menu, twelve courses at lunch and at least eighteen at dinner, drawing on Taiwan, Hunan and Sichuan. The address is Pimlico Road but the restaurant sits in Belgravia, among showrooms and galleries, and it has been in the same small, plain room since 1982. Jay Rayner called the prawn toast the best he has ever tasted, which is the detail people repeat.
Lunch is £69.80 a head; the dinner price is quoted at two different figures on their own site — £128.80 on the homepage and £119.80 in the FAQ — so confirm it when you book. Closed Sunday. Arrive by 1pm or by 9pm. Corkage is £60 a bottle.
High up
Included only where the room does something a view alone does not.
Darwin Brasserie, City of London
£££ · Level 36, Sky Garden, 20 Fenchurch Street
On Level 36 inside the Sky Garden’s glass dome at the top of the Walkie Talkie, which means you eat surrounded by planting rather than only by glass — the reason it is here when most rooftops are not. The cooking is straightforward British brasserie and makes no claim beyond that: a British beef burger, battered fish and chips, a full Sunday roast, breakfast from 8.30am, and a Saturday brunch with a bottomless prosecco upgrade.
A restaurant booking includes Sky Garden access, so you do not need a separate ticket — which is the practical argument for eating here at all. There is airport-style security on the way in, so arrive no more than 30 minutes early. The restaurant is cashless, and a window table costs £10–£15 extra a head.
SUSHISAMBA, City of London
££££ · 38th and 39th floors, 110 Bishopsgate
Japanese, Brazilian and Peruvian cooking across the 38th and 39th floors of Heron Tower, reached by two glass lifts that climb the outside of the building. The kitchen works from an open robata grill and sends out small sharing plates: tempura and sushi, Brazilian churrasco and moqueca, Peruvian anticuchos and seviche. The dining room has floor-to-ceiling glass and an open bamboo ceiling under a suspended grid of lights.
The orange tree on the west terrace is a sculpture, not a living tree — worth knowing before you go looking for it. The terraces are open-air and the restaurant claims them as the highest outdoor dining in Europe, which is the real draw. The food is good and priced as though the height were an ingredient.
Duck & Waffle, City of London
££££ · 40th floor, Heron Tower, 110 Bishopsgate
Forty floors up in Heron Tower, above SUSHISAMBA in the same building, and open around the clock — the only place in London where you can watch the sun come up over the City with a plate in front of you. The signature is the dish it is named after: duck and waffle at £26, a confit Gressingham duck leg on a waffle with a fried duck egg and mustard maple syrup. The English breakfast is £19.50, the crème brûlée French toast the same, and there is a three-course Sunday roast from 11.30am.
It is genuinely 24 hours, and it takes no cash whatsoever. Bookings open two months ahead, a discretionary 15% service charge is added, and the dress code rules out tracksuits, denim shorts and flip-flops.
What to know
- Several of these are small and take no bookings. Rochelle Canteen fills weeks ahead, and The Attendant runs first come, first served across every one of its sites.
- The Yurt Café’s yurt is at the end of its life. The charity is running an £80,000 appeal for a replacement, closing 30 September 2026, and had raised roughly a third of it by late August. The café is open and the appeal is about the structure rather than the business, but check before making a special trip for it.
- Feng Shang Princess publishes no menu and no prices at all. Go for the pagoda, not the cooking, and expect not to know what dinner costs until the bill arrives.
- Redemption Roasters no longer roasts inside prisons. Since December 2025 the roasting has been done at a Wembley site; the barista training is what still happens in HMP High Down, Wandsworth, Downview and Wormwood Scrubs.
- Three entries have hard rules on who gets in. Bob Bob Ricard admits nobody under 15, The Crosse Keys allows under-18s only between 8am and 9pm, and Ye Olde Cheshire Cheese says outright that it is totally inaccessible for wheelchairs.
- Duck & Waffle and Darwin Brasserie are both cashless, and Duck & Waffle is the only genuinely 24-hour room on the list.
- The Wetherspoons pubs publish no prices online. They live in the Wetherspoon app, which is also how you order at the table.
Continue planning your London trip
- 🏛️ Historic Pubs and Dining Rooms in London
- 💷 Cheap Eats in London
- 🍽️ Eat in London: Restaurants, Food Markets & Quick Food Hub
- 🫖 The Best Afternoon Tea in London
- 🎨 Shoreditch Area Guide
- 🏙️ City of London Area Guide
Common questions
What is the most unusual restaurant in London?
The Yurt Café in Limehouse is a working café inside an actual Mongolian yurt, run as a social enterprise by a charity that has been on the site since 1950. The Feng Shang Princess is a three-tiered Chinese pagoda moored on the Regent's Canal, and The Attendant in Fitzrovia is built inside a restored Victorian public lavatory.
Which London restaurants are on boats?
The Cheese Barge is a 96-foot double-decker barge at Paddington Basin, Barge East is a 125-year-old Dutch barge sailed over from the Netherlands and moored on the River Lea, and the Feng Shang Princess is a floating pagoda on the Regent's Canal near Regent's Park.
Are unusual restaurants in London expensive?
Not necessarily. The Yurt Café, The Attendant and three Wetherspoons in extraordinary buildings all come in under £15. At the other end, Sketch, Bob Bob Ricard and Sessions Arts Club are £80 and up.
Which restaurant is hardest to find?
Rochelle Canteen in Shoreditch. It is hidden behind a wall in a former school bike shed, with no sign — you ring a buzzer marked 'canteen' and walk through a gate into what looks like a playground.
What is the Press for Champagne button?
Bob Bob Ricard in Soho has a button at every booth marked Press for Champagne. It works, a bottle arrives, and it launched a thousand imitations.
