This Restaurant Has Been Keeping Soho Decadent For Centuries

Kettner's Sunday lunch ★★★★☆

By Lydia Manch Last edited 56 months ago

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This Restaurant Has Been Keeping Soho Decadent For Centuries Kettner's Sunday lunch 4

Kettner's Townhouse wouldn't do anything so gauche as coming back with a bang. Instead the Soho institution is back with an elegant, velvet-clad swish — reopening its doors this year after being acquired and revamped by Soho House.

The decor is a mix of eras, the common thread being a glossy but welcoming splendour, everything upholstered in textures you want to touch or polished to a high shine, nearly every flat surface either bearing or dangling a beautiful lamp of some kind.

Sunday lunch at Kettner's is on fittingly grand lines: a three course set menu, heavy with silver napkin rings, Art Deco-echoing glassware and grade II-listed glamour. To compound that Ritz-circa-1920s feel, main courses are served up from ornate trolleys in the centre of the room, long tranches of Beef Wellington resting patiently under silver cloches.  

This is what Sundays were made for 👌🏼 #KettnersTownhouse

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The Wellington's statuesque enough — a heroic slab, vividly pink and cased in an earthily mushroomy layer. Vegetables are buttery-soft, mash is buttery-smooth. The pastry sucks up phenomenal amounts of gravy and keeps getting better for it. But it's the dishes bookending it that really remind us we're dining in the no-decadence-spared footsteps of Churchill and Wilde. Plates of canapés pile up around us, each of them intense, small bites of parmesan-and-paprika-dusted pastry, or oniony rich tart. Starters of sea bream, clementine and basil are slippery, sweet and sharp. And dessert — a scoop of grapefruit sorbet, fizzing gently in a coupe of Ruinart champagne — is thoroughly louche and improbably elegant at the same time. Not unlike Kettner's itself.

The Sunday lunch menu at Kettner's Townhouse is £30 for 3 courses. Kettner's Townhouse, 29 Romilly Street, W1D 5HP.

Last Updated 12 July 2019