With more and more London restaurants banking on earlier reservations, Carys Sharkey asks whether after hours dining is a relic of London’s past
Is late-night dining in London dying at the hands of tee-totalling park runners, or is it having a resurgence driven by their collective hospitality nemesis? The diagnosis is polarised and necessarily hesitant. A wave of articles declaring Londoners prefer to dine at 5pm, and evidenced by restaurants shifting forward their reservation hours, were answered by a counter-wave hailing the return of late-night dining. This too was proved by other restaurants pushing their reservations backwards.
Data from OpenTable reveals a steep rise in 6pm reservations, up 11 per cent in London and six per cent across the UK compared with the same period last year.
Earlier this year, restaurant grandee and bon vivant Jeremy King let out the exasperated e-mailed cry “What the heck has happened to London?”. So as puritans and hedonists play tug-of-war with a tablecloth, where does that really leave the capital and is there anywhere good to eat after 11pm?
For London restaurants, securing a late-night licence is as rare as a ticket to Willy Wonka’s chocolate factory
The idea that London restaurants are barren culinary wastelands after 10pm is a misnomer. You can still slurp steaming bowls of noodles and gelatinous dim sum until 2am in Chinatown; eat charred meat and grilled offal on Edgware Road and Green Lanes as Thursday slips into Friday; eat cannolis in Soho’s Bar Italia until the early hours; and queue for bagels slick with mustard and salt beef 24-hours a day on Brick Lane.
But these are the exceptions rather than the rule, and the years when Soho restaurants used to be packed well until midnight now feel like a relic of the past.
Xiaoxiao Wang, founder of Beer and Noodle, which this year opened a second location in Soho and serves food until 4am, recalls how different dining in the capital once was: “London’s night scene used to be much busier. I recall Soho and Chinatown buzzing even on weekdays during my student days. With very strict licensing regulations now in place, operators like us find it incredibly difficult to accommodate the demand for late-night social activities.”
“While Noodle and Beer Chinatown is permitted to open until 4am, our licence only allows us to sell alcohol until midnight. In contrast, in other cosmopolitan cities like Tokyo and Shanghai, I could order an alcoholic drink with food at most places much later,” he adds.
A tendency to separate church and state – or drinking and dining – is also deeply ingrained in the way Brits socialise. A friend who recently moved to Madrid came back to London this summer and was horrified when the pub closed the garden at 10pm. Torn between wanting to eat and carry on sloshing down pints, the night ground to a halt. Across Spain you can eat tapas and drink way into the night; in Seoul it’s difficult to sit down for a drink without eating, regardless of your appetite. But in the UK, the choice is more often between going to the pub and filling up on liquid and a couple of crisps, or committing to an evening at a restaurant. So much of what we consider late-night food is what is eaten after the fact, the grease-flecked second phase of the night on uneasy legs.
But as restaurants push back last reservations, like Mountain’s 10.30pm sitting, or extend service hours, restaurateurs are hoping that the need to compartmentalise evenings into dining and boozing may start to loosen – especially if they can obtain that all too elusive late alcohol licence.
“Securing a late-night licence is a rare opportunity. We were fortunate that our current Chinatown premises already had one in place, and we competed with many other operators for the site. We felt like we won the golden ticket to Willy Wonka’s chocolate factory,” Wang says.
But are later opening hours and new openings like Beer and Noodle enough to shock Soho, and indeed other parts of London, into an upright position, chopsticks in hand?
Bob Bob Ricard’s chief operating officer, Tomas Minkley, links the capital’s late-night malaise to a culture inherently set apart from our European neighbours.
“What London does lack, particularly in the years since our return from Covid, is the embrace of a more European lifestyle, or the vibrant late-night culture so characteristic of New York or Tokyo where dining and drinking well into the evening is both celebrated and expected.”
Minkley goes on to argue that “It is not that London is short of venues or opportunities for entertainment; rather, the prevailing pace of life in the capital remains heavily work-focused, weighed down by its many hassles and demands, leaving less space for a slower pace of life and enjoyment.” It raises the question: do Londoners even want to live in a 24-hour city anyway?
Bob Bob Ricard’s City restaurant, in all its caviar-accented epicureanism and 9.30pm reservation times, takes aim at such drudgery in the work-focused epicentre of London. The City is also home to two of London’s rare 24-hour restaurants: Polo Bar and The Duck and Waffle, where late-night dining slides into breakfast. But aside from the bleary eyed travellers and City boys the night left behind, not many people are heading to these Liverpool Street spots beyond the gimmick.
“London’s night scene is great, but I honestly feel it’s a bit behind other major cities,” Wang says. And despite the dozen or so restaurants pushing back on the setting sun, it’s hard to disagree.
The average dining time at London restaurants is 6.12pm. In Madrid, it’s 9.20pm. So even as summers get warmer, it’s unlikely that London will ever be able to truly compete with the late dining culture so embedded in other cities. As a sober Gen Z tightens its collective belt – both literally and metaphorically – the old guard faces a monumental task to drive, let alone sustain, a vibrant after hours restaurant scene.
London will continue to wear its 24-hour label like an ill-fitting coat, but good food can always be found, you just need to know where to look.
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