If You're Not Ordering The Pancakes At This West Hampstead Brunch, You're Doing It All Wrong

Bobby Fitzpatrick's bottomless brunch ★★★★☆

By Lydia Manch Last edited 75 months ago
If You're Not Ordering The Pancakes At This West Hampstead Brunch, You're Doing It All Wrong Bobby Fitzpatrick's bottomless brunch 4
The pancake stack at Bobby Fitzpatrick: stickily splendid. Photo by Lydia Manch

Devotees of prawn cocktail and a spot of shag pile might do better at Bobby Fitzpatrick in the evenings, with the downstairs bar open, and the broader cocktail menu on offer. The seventies theme at the West Hampstead bar feels a bit token during the daytime — though that's not necessarily a bad thing. The weekend brunch menu is along more generic but less controversial diner-food lines, serving up deep dish pizzas, triple-stack pancakes, and a choice of three bottomless cocktails. Not a Babycham in sight.

They're already out of one of the three cocktails when we get there just after midday, dashing our Slushy Banana Daiquiri dreams. But begrudging admiration for the people of West Hampstead, who apparently roll up to brunch at 10am and get on it hard enough to drain the daiquiri reserves by the time we're levering ourselves out of bed.

The rum punch we swap it for instead is on the syrupy side of fruity and we don't actually make it past the first. But the brunch menu's beautifully carb-heavy, and we still eat like we've got a bottomless cocktail to soak up.

Our salami-topped deep dish pizza isn't that deep-of-dish: floppier than you want from a Chicago-style, a bit breadier than you want from a thin crust. But the pancakes. They're showstoppers. There's sweet and savoury on offer, with toppings from the inescapable brunch avo on a potato base to things at the sweeter end of the spectrum. We share a triple-stack of fluffy buttermilk rounds, interleaved with bacon, banana and pecans and heavy with maple syrup. Generously stacked, but so moreish we seriously consider doing it all over again straight after. Sticky, splendid, maple-scented. You can keep the cocktails. It's the pancakes we wish were bottomless.

Bobby Fitzpatrick, 273 West End Lane, NW6 1QS.

Last Updated 31 December 2017