Bermondsey is, without doubt, one of London's best neighbourhoods for foodies. Yes, I'm biased: I've lived in the area since 2012 (it was one of the reasons I moved here). It's home to Maltby Street Market, which draws huge crowds every weekend, and Spa Terminus, where you can hop between the railway arches, tasting and shopping for everything from kimchi to comté. There's a reason why it earned the nickname 'London's larder'. But if you're looking for a restaurant, bar or coffee shop, look no further than Bermondsey Street. And if you're looking for a guide to the best places to eat on Bermondsey Street, read on! (Scroll to the end for a handy map.) 

The past two years have been among the most challenging for hospitality businesses, including specialty coffee shops, in London, and around the world. Keeping a specialty coffee shop in business in London is difficult even in normal times, let alone during a global pandemic, which has felt like a game of snakes and ladders with constant changes of rules, snap lockdowns and general uncertainty. Unfortunately, some coffee shops have had to close permanently (please come back, Black Swan Yard!), but it's been encouraging to see how many new — and often exciting — cafes have opened in London in the past couple of years. 

UPDATE: Lantern Coffee has now closed permanently.

While working from home during the past year and a bit, I have sought solace in my lunch-break strolls around Bermondsey and Borough, often stopping for food or coffee. Bermondsey has an abundance of specialty coffee shops (I have an updated neighbourhood guide in the works; there's always my south-east London guide in the meantime), and two roasters — Monmouth and Watch House — are based here (Pact too, although you can't normally visit). One of my regular lunchtime haunts was Black Swan Yard, but upsettingly, it was recently shut down by the landlord with almost no notice. I hope they'll be back but in the meantime, I found myself on Mill Street, down by the Thames, where I happened upon Lantern Coffee.

UPDATE: Unfortunately, Black Swan Yard is now closed permanently.

Most of my Caffeine Chronicles reviews are about speciality coffee shops I've discovered recently. Not so with Black Swan Yard Coffee, which is one of the closest coffee shops to my home and one that I've visited even more frequently while working from home during lockdown. Somehow, though, writing about the Bermondsey coffee spot has always eluded me, even as it's changed and adapted over the months and years, so I thought it was high time for a post.

Things could be much worse, but I've had a tough few months, with work busier than ever — I work for a scientific journal so it's been non-stop COVID-19 research. And unfortunately, all of the six holidays that I had booked this year happened to fall during times when London and its UK were under more restrictive COVID-19 measures. My last hope of getting a proper break was the two weeks I had booked in November, initially to go to Thailand, then I thought I might manage Italy, before eventually booking  a last-minute trip to Athens, with a family trip to Devon as a back-up. My 'plan C' was to use my annual leave to visit lots of coffee shops and restaurants in London — I really feel for everyone working in the hospitality industry at the moment, and want to continue to show my support. And then, of course, the 'not-a-lockdown' second lockdown put paid even to that.

Update (4 Nov 2020): When I visited this restaurant during its soft launch, it retained its original name, The Dairy, but it has since been renamed Bermondsey Larder. I've updated this post accordingly, but some of it photos reflect its original name.

Like many people, I was a fan of Robin and Sarah Gill's The Dairy in Clapham, but I didn't make it over there often enough, which filled me with huge regret when it closed permanently this summer. But to my pleasure, it has now reopened in a new location in Bermondsey. I'd actually been running past its new home, inside the attractive new Bermonds Locke aparthotel on Tower Bridge Road, while it was being created and jumped at the chance to take advantage of its soft launch.

Shad Thames, a historic Bermondsey street one block from the Thames and just east of Tower Bridge, is on my regular running route and I often walk through on my way to or from the river. Earlier this year, I'd spotted a new Italian restaurant in the Cardamom Building — which used to house a branch of Watch House until it moved a few doors down — but kept forgetting to look it up when I got home. By the time I found Legare online, London had gone into lockdown.

I've long been a regular at the WatchHouse coffee shops, the first two of which opened in my neighbourhood on Bermondsey Street and Shad Thames. And what with one thing and another, I've been spending even more time than usual in Bermondsey over the past few months. While the Bermondsey Street WatchHouse — based in the former watch house of St Mary Magdalen churchyard — has been closed for a refurb, I spied a new member of the family in the works, located at the top of Maltby Street, near the titular market.

Antico, the Italian restaurant at the southern end of Bermondsey Street, was a neighbourhood favourite and although I was a more frequent customer at 214, the gin bar in the basement, I was sad to hear that the restaurant had closed. But rising like a phoenix from the, er, flour, its successor Flour & Grape soon filled the carb-heavy void. With a simple menu focusing on pasta and Italian wine, as its name suggests, fans of Borough Market's Padella will find a lot to like at Flour & Grape. Better still, you can book — a particularly important feature on a cold Tuesday evening in late December.


I met a friend for an early supper at Flour & Grape the week before Christmas. Bookings are only for an hour and a half, even at dinnertime, but we had a lot to catch up on and although the restaurant was busy, it wasn't full, and the kind staff gave no indication of wanting to hurry us along. As I'm less interested in the 'grape' part of this restaurant (Flour & Juniper would be my first choice), I ordered the Bermondsey G&T (when in Bermondsey...), with my favourite Jensen's gin and Bermondsey Tonic Water (a reasonably priced £6), while my friend went for one of the other cocktails, a spritz (£6.50).


We then devoured the food menu, which consists of a variety of small plates (priced from £2 for olives to £7 for the salumi plate) and eight different pastas (£7–10). We decided we would share three starters and two pastas, and then order a third pasta if we were still hungry. Had we skipped the starters or been hungrier, we would definitely have gone for three pastas — and don't get me wrong, our plates probably would have been cleared in any case.


To start, we shared the burrata, salumi and the baby gem salad, all of which were tasty and came in generous portions. The burrata was particularly creamy and although 'baby gem salad' sounds a bit boring, this one came with a tart dressing and plenty of parmesan.



Then came the main event. We went for the bucatini cacio e pepe, which, like at Flour & Grape's competitor, was the standout dish for me. Oodles of pepper, copious cheese and perfectly al dente pasta. A close second was the rich, flavoursome beef short-rib ragu, served with pappardelle. I thought the two pastas made a perfect pair. Our third choice (or mine, at least) would have been the roasted pork shoulder tortelloni — one for next time!




We did, however, find room for a scoop of hazelnut gelato each, which we enjoyed greatly. The special gelato of the day was tiramisù, but I generally prefer to keep my coffee and sweet treats separate.


Although it was a busy night at Flour & Grape, the service was excellent and there was a lively atmosphere in the restaurant. The Bermondsey Street Italian is dead. Long-live the Bermondsey Street Italian!


Flour & Grape. 214 Bermondsey St, SE1 3TQ (Tube: London Bridge or Bermondsey). Website. Twitter. Instagram.

As I have to fit my travel plans around a full-time job, I often get to spend only three or four days in any one city, and I spend a lot of time researching and planning the perfect trip. My agenda usually includes a few key sights and/or museums and some fun places to eat, drink and, especially, caffeinate. I’ve produced various ‘three days in…’ or ‘four days in…’ city guides, but it’s been a while since I compiled a guide to my favourite places in my own city, London.


This post highlights my top picks for what to do, eat and drink, and where to find good coffee in London; I've been working on this for a couple of months so I hope you enjoy reading it and find it useful. Scroll to the end for a map of each place I've featured. With much help from my talented friend Cindy (thank you, Cindy!), I've also produced a handy one-page PDF version of this guide, which you can download and print here: http://bit.ly/bex-london-long-weekend

I've been eagerly awaiting the arrival of Pique-Nique, a restaurant specialising in rotisserie chicken from Bresse in Eastern France, for almost a year. The sister restaurant of the excellent Casse-Croûte on Bermondsey Street, Pique-Nique is located just around the corner in the historic, mock-Tudor shelter in Tanner Street Park. I signed up to their mailing list some time ago, but a little thing I like to call the day job prevented me from securing a table during their sold-out soft launch over the weekend. Luckily, my brother and his wife scored a table for the three of us on Monday night with a 50% discount on food.


As we walked to the restaurant, the heavens opened but we didn't mind much because the park offers excellent dog-spotting opportunities. The restaurant itself is small, elegant and very much in keeping with the original design. It's just as lovely inside with about 30 or 40 covers spread across small, marble-topped tables, bar stools and a larger, farmhouse-style table, which would be great for groups. The interiors are gorgeous, and the space is bright and beautifully designed.



Like at Casse-Croûte, the menu is brief, with three starters (all at £8.50 or £9.50) and three mains (£18.50–£22.50) on offer. The entrecôte sounded great, but where was the celebrated chicken? We then realised we had skimmed over the Menu Autour du Poulet de Bresse (£38), which directed us to the board above the bar for further details. Our waitress explained what this entailed, but I'll admit that I wasn't paying as much attention as I perhaps should have done. The take-homes were that there were five chicken courses followed by a pudding. This seemed a tad indulgent for a Monday night but we decided to go for it (and with the special menu, everyone in the party has to opt in, presumably to prevent the non-poulet-consumers feeling too hard-done-by).


The drinks menu focused on wine, of course, and my brother and sister-in-law enjoyed a couple of different well-priced reds, but I went for a Jinzu G&T (£8), which was lovely and citrusy.


Then the food began to arrive. Courses one and two were, thankfully, small: chicken liver pâté, served with freshly baked bread, and a chicken croquette with onion jam. I've never liked pâté, but I figured that this was the perfect time to try it. Although I could have done with some more bread — we shared one small baguette between the three of us — it was creamy, rich and delicious. The croquette — bone-in — was also very tasty.


The next course was more challenging for me, my decade of vegetarianism coming back to haunt me. A consommé with asparagus came served with a skewer of offal: the comb, gizzard, heart and sweetbreads. The comb wasn't really my thing, but the others were incredibly flavoursome, even if I did have to work up the courage to try them.


Next up was the chicken breast served with the creamiest, most gorgeous mashed potato I've ever had (it usually comes with morel mushrooms, but they catered to my mushroom misgivings and served mine sans morille), followed by chicken thighs with a green salad. I thought the breast and thighs were both excellent, although my brother was a little less impressed with the thighs, which weren't quite so juicy and tender.



None of us had room for a pudding but it was hard to resist the call of the chocolate moelleux, which my sister and I both had, and which was incredibly rich, oozed with molten chocolate and came served with hazelnut ice cream. My brother's blueberry soufflé also got the thumbs up.


Even without a soft-launch discount, the autour du poulet menu is good value, given the quality of the food and the experience. We felt that it was a bit of a shame there wasn't a simple roast-chicken-and-mash option on the menu — because some nights require comfort food rather than six-course meals — but I'd like to go back to try the steak and the breakfast menu. And I'm sure this won't be my last adventure all around the chicken in six courses, either, especially as the park is only ten minutes' walk from my home.



Pique-Nique. Tanner Street Park, London, SE1 3LD (Tube: London Bridge). Website. Twitter. Instagram.