Written by RuinMyTrip Editorial from published research and official sources, not from a personal trip. It is not a traveler review and is never counted in the community rating. How we research.
restaurant · London
Bring Your Own Wine for Thirty-Two Pounds Corkage
Review of St John
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Share your experienceSt John serves lunch Monday to Sunday from 12.00pm to 3pm, a bar menu from 3pm to 5pm, and supper from 5.30pm, and it charges 32 pounds corkage for a bottle you bring yourself, 42 for sparkling or dessert wine and 84 for a magnum of champagne. The restaurant opened in 1994 and effectively invented what the world now calls modern British cooking: bone marrow and parsley salad, offal treated as a first-class ingredient, and a whiteboard menu rewritten twice a day. Everything is spare, whitewashed and deliberately unglamorous. The menus do not go online until 11.00am for lunch and 5.00pm for supper, because they are written that morning. That is not a marketing conceit, it is the reason the food is good.
What was great
A restaurant that changed British cooking and still cooks the same way. Roast bone marrow and parsley salad, which is the single most influential plate of food in modern Britain. Corkage, which almost nowhere at this level offers.
What nearly ruined the trip
The room is bright, white and loud, which people either love or find punishing. The menu is genuinely offal-heavy and does not apologise. Smithfield is dead quiet at night, so the walk to and from it is bleak.
Value for money
★★★★☆ Good valueSafety
★★★★★ Felt safeMore from London
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