London took brunch seriously long before it became a cultural shorthand for a specific kind of weekend.
The city has a full English that predates the American brunch concept by centuries, a Viennese café tradition imported through the grand European rooms of Piccadilly, an Australian-inflected wave of all-day dining that transformed the city’s morning habits, and in the past decade, a global food scene that has made London weekend brunch one of the most diverse and consistently excellent morning dining landscapes in Europe.
This guide covers the best brunch in London across every register: the grand institution, the neighbourhood favourite, the sky-high splurge, the unhurried Australian café, and the places where the menu is interesting enough to make the alarm feel worthwhile.
Key Takeaways
- London’s brunch scene spans everything from art deco grand cafés and 40th-floor sky restaurants to neighbourhood Australian spots and globally-inspired all-day menus.
- The best brunch restaurants in London book out weeks in advance at weekends – always reserve ahead, particularly for Duck & Waffle, The Wolseley, and Jikoni.
- Bottomless brunch is widely available across the city, with the Daisy Green Collection and Sexy Fish among the most popular. Not included here are the purely bottomless-driven venues; quality of food, not volume of prosecco, is the organising principle.
- Granger & Co, Dishoom, and the Daisy Green Collection are the three most geographically widespread groups, between them covering most London neighbourhoods.
- Several of London’s best brunches are free to walk into on a weekday; the same venues require reservations on weekends.
The Grand Rooms
The Wolseley
The Wolseley on Piccadilly is the most complete brunch institution in London. It’s a grand European café in a building originally designed as a Wolseley car showroom in 1921, transformed into the restaurant that has defined a particular kind of London morning since it opened in 2003.
The room is magnificent: marble floors, vaulted ceilings, gilded columns, and the hum of a room full of people who have come specifically to be in this room. The menu covers the full range of a classic European brasserie breakfast – eggs Benedict, eggs Florentine, kedgeree, smoked salmon and scrambled eggs, a full English, pastries from the in-house bakery – all executed with the consistency and care of a kitchen that has been doing this for over two decades.
The Wolseley is the best answer to the question of where to take someone to brunch who is visiting London for the first time and deserves to understand what the city can be at its most classic.
Reservations essential at weekends.
Credit: Visit London
Duck & Waffle
On the 40th floor of the Heron Tower at Bishopsgate, Duck & Waffle is London’s most spectacular brunch venue in the purely visual sense. Imagine floor-to-ceiling windows, a 360-degree view of the London skyline, and the specific quality of morning light from this height that makes every city view look like a painting.
The menu is as ambitious as the setting. The signature Duck & Waffle – crispy confit duck leg on a Belgian waffle with fried duck egg and mustard maple syrup – is one of London’s most celebrated brunch dishes. The Full Elvis waffles, the overnight oats brûlée, the baked beans on a cheese scone, the caramelised banana waffle with hazelnut chocolate spread: the range reflects a kitchen that genuinely enjoys the format rather than simply executing it.
Weekend brunch operates on Saturday and Sunday only. Reservations are essential and fill weeks in advance; the panoramic view is effectively irreplaceable in this city.
Credit: Duck & Waffle London
Sketch – The Gallery
The Gallery at Sketch in Mayfair is among the most photographed dining rooms in London. It’s a fully pink room designed by India Mahdavi, where the brunch menu of weekend eggs, pastries, and champagne is as much about the setting as the food.
Weekend brunch at Sketch is not a budget option, and it is not designed to be. It is a full sensory experience where the food, the room, and the particular quality of being somewhere this deliberately beautiful all contribute to an occasion. For a birthday brunch, a celebratory morning, or simply a visit to one of the most extraordinary dining rooms in Europe, The Gallery at Sketch earns its reputation entirely.
Credit: Thatsup
Australian All-Day
Granger & Co
Bill Granger’s London restaurants have become the definitive expression of Australian all-day dining in the UK and have five locations across Chelsea, Notting Hill, King’s Cross, Clerkenwell, and Marylebone, each with the same sunny, generous, easy-going character and the same excellent brunch menu.
The ricotta hotcakes – thick, cloud-like, served with banana, honeycomb butter, and yoghurt – have developed a London cult following that persists across decades and multiple imitations. The sweetcorn fritters, the avocado toast, the granola bowls, and the classic eggs Benedict are all consistently excellent. The coffee is good. The rooms are light-filled and warm.
Granger & Co is the London brunch institution most beloved by London residents for everyday use. It’s the natural first choice when the question is simply where to eat well on a Saturday morning.
Credit: Hungry Onion
Daisy Green Collection
The Daisy Green Collection, which includes Daisy Green in Marylebone, Scarlett Green in Soho, Timmy Green in Victoria, and sites in Paddington, Barbican, and Broadgate, brings a colourful, uplifting Australian café sensibility to London neighbourhood dining across the widest geographic range of any brunch group in the city.
The Dirty Daisy, with its crispy tater tots with chorizo and chipotle sauce, is the dish most associated with the brand and draws enough of its own following to function as a destination menu item. The sweetcorn fritters with smashed avocado are the classic. The charcoal sourdough avocado toast is a permanent fixture. The bottomless brunch offer, available across most locations, is one of the better versions in the city – the food quality remains high regardless of whether prosecco is unlimited.
Credit: A1 Retail Magazine
Sunday in Brooklyn
Sunday in Brooklyn, imported from New York via Notting Hill and Marylebone, specialises in the American brunch register that London has been slowly absorbing – hazelnut maple praline brown butter pancakes, steak and eggs, cheddar scramble, shakshuka, and executes it at a quality level that makes it worth the specific journey.
The Notting Hill location is the original and the most atmospheric, suited to a post-walk-through-the-Portobello-Market morning. The Marylebone location is the more central option. Both have queues at weekends; both are worth it.
Credit: Time Out
Neighbourhood Favourites
Dishoom – All Locations
Dishoom’s brunch is served until noon on weekends and is one of London’s most genuinely distinctive morning offerings: the Bombay café breakfast tradition applied with precision and warmth to a format that most Londoners now consider simply excellent brunch without needing to categorise it further.
The bacon naan roll is the signature: two rashers of smoked streaky bacon, cream cheese, tomato-chilli jam, and chilli butter in a warm naan that has been cited by more London food writers than it would be possible to count as one of the city’s finest single dishes. Alongside it: a full Indian-inspired breakfast menu, chai, and a room with the atmosphere of a 1930s Bombay café.
All six London locations – Covent Garden, Shoreditch, King’s Cross, Carnaby, Kensington, and Canary Wharf – operate with a queue-outside-or-book-a-non-peak-slot model. The queue is worth joining. The booking is the smarter option.
Credit: Dishoom
Jikoni
Ravinder Bhogal’s Jikoni in Marylebone is one of London’s most quietly extraordinary restaurants. It’s a kitchen built around the intersection of British, East African, and Asian cooking traditions, brought together with warmth and considerable skill in a room decorated with block-printed fabrics and colourful linens.
The brunch menu is an exploration: prawn toast, scotch eggs, Punjabi scrambled eggs, masala French toast, shakshuka with feta and chermoula. The Michelin Guide has taken note; the regulars had already built their weekend routines around it. Jikoni is the brunch destination for anyone who wants genuinely interesting cooking rather than the standard eggs-and-avocado register.
Reservations are recommended.
Credit: The Good Food Guide
Chet’s
Chet’s in White City is the brunch address for anyone who wants heat, intensity, and the specific pleasures of Thai-inspired food at ten in the morning – a full-flavoured menu built around the cooking of chef Andy Oliver that challenges the assumption that brunch needs to be gentle.
The banana blossom laab, the nam jim wings, the coconut-poached eggs with lemongrass, and the khao tom rice porridge all appear on a menu that is simultaneously exciting and comfortable in the way that very good cooking always is. Chet’s is also open for brunch on weekdays, which makes it one of the more practical options for visitors with time outside the weekend rush.
Credit: The Hoxton
Caravan
Caravan, with locations at King’s Cross, Exmouth Market, Bankside, and Fitzrovia, has built its reputation on excellent coffee and a globally-inspired all-day menu that treats brunch as simply the morning expression of an international food philosophy.
The corn fritters, the grain bowls, the shakshuka, and the egg dishes all reflect a kitchen that approaches morning cooking with as much care as its dinner service. The King’s Cross location, inside the Granary Building facing Granary Square, is the most architecturally striking of the four – the combination of the industrial conversion and the coal-fired plates makes for a brunch that feels appropriately urban.
Credit: Caravan
London-Specific Experiences
Permit Room Portobello
Dishoom’s all-day café in Notting Hill – Permit Room on Portobello Road – serves the Dishoom brunch tradition in a more casual, walk-in format all week rather than just weekends.
The setting is warm and characterful, and the all-day café format makes it the most accessible of the Dishoom family for visitors who want the food without queuing outside. The bacon naan and the chai are both present; the energy is slightly more neighbourhood and slightly less theatrical than the main Dishoom sites.
Credit: The Caterer
The Breakfast Club
The Breakfast Club operates at several London locations – Soho, Spitalfields, London Bridge, Battersea, Hackney, and others – and has been feeding weekend London for nearly two decades with a menu of American-diner-inspired breakfast and brunch that has developed genuine institutional standing.
The queues outside the Soho location are among the longest in London’s brunch world and reflect the sustained quality of a restaurant that has not let consistency slip across twenty years of operation. The pancake stack, the French toast, and the all-day breakfast are the dishes most associated with The Breakfast Club’s identity. For visitors who want a genuinely classic London brunch with the energy of a well-loved local institution, this is a consistent answer.
Credit: Uber Eats
Ottolenghi
Yotam Ottolenghi’s original café on Upper Street in Islington is the closest London gets to the Middle Eastern brunch tradition at its most beautiful: a counter of colourful salads, pastries, and prepared dishes changed daily, served in a space where the food is the décor.
Brunch at Ottolenghi is not a formal sitting. It is a visit to a counter, a conversation about what is available, a selection of things that look extraordinary, and a table near the window. The shakshuka, the baked eggs, the pastries, and the seasonal vegetable dishes all reflect a kitchen that has been setting the standard for this style of cooking in London for over twenty years.
Credit: Melting Butter
Aram at Somerset House
Syrian café Aram at Somerset House serves brunch every day of the week in one of London’s most beautiful courtyard settings. It’s a café inside an 18th-century neoclassical building overlooking the Thames, with a menu built around Syrian and Levantine flavours that range from the familiar to the genuinely distinctive.
The shakshuka, the halloumi dishes, the Middle Eastern pastries, and the za’atar eggs all reflect cooking with roots considerably deeper than the fashionable Levantine dining trend. Aram is a brunch that genuinely justifies the Somerset House detour on its own terms.
Credit: Aram by Imad
Where the Pancakes Are
Where the Pancakes Are – in Bermondsey and Liverpool Street – does exactly what it says.
The pancake menu spans savoury and sweet across several pages of creative combinations, salted caramel and banana, smoked salmon and cream cheese, triple cheese and truffle, bacon and maple, and the commitment to the pancake as a vehicle for genuinely good cooking has built a devoted following that queues for the privilege.
For anyone whose ideal brunch is a very good pancake in multiple forms, Where the Pancakes Are is the definitive London answer.
Credit: Where The Pancakes Are
Daisy Green – Bottomless Brunch
For a group brunch in London that combines quality food with the bottomless format, the Daisy Green Collection locations consistently perform well above the category average. The food remains the point rather than the prosecco, and the Australian vibrancy of the spaces makes a long Saturday morning genuinely enjoyable rather than merely functional.
The Marylebone and Paddington locations are the most consistently recommended for group bookings. The Scarlett Green at Soho is the best single-occasion option for atmosphere.
Credit: The Infatuation
Practical Notes
Book ahead. The most popular brunch restaurants in London – The Wolseley, Duck & Waffle, Jikoni, Sketch, Dishoom – fill their weekend tables weeks in advance. Booking on the day for Saturday or Sunday is largely not possible at these venues.
Weekday brunch is an option. Several excellent brunch restaurants in London – Granger & Co, Dishoom, Chet’s, Aram, The Breakfast Club – serve brunch on weekdays, either as a permanent all-day menu or specifically at weekday breakfast times. This is the most practical option for visitors whose schedules are flexible.
The queuing culture is real. Dishoom’s no-reservation policy for smaller groups and The Breakfast Club’s walk-in model mean queues of thirty to sixty minutes at peak weekend times. The Dishoom queue typically has chai brought out to those waiting; the wait is generally agreed to be worthwhile.
Conclusion
London brunch ranges from one of the finest grand café experiences in Europe to a pancake restaurant in Bermondsey that has built a cult following on a single-item menu executed with genuine brilliance.
The common thread is that London takes the morning meal seriously – not as a social occasion that happens to involve food, but as a culinary format worth genuine attention. The venues on this list reflect that seriousness, each in its own way.
To explore London’s extraordinary food culture, neighbourhoods, and experiences as part of a curated private visit, discover our private London tours.
FAQ
Where to go in London for brunch?
Best London brunch spots include Dishoom (Indian-inspired), The Breakfast Club (classic), Granger & Co (Australian), Caravan (globally-influenced), and Ottolenghi (Mediterranean). Try Duck & Waffle, Sketch, Chiltern Firehouse, or Borough Market stalls. Popular areas include Shoreditch, Notting Hill, Soho, and South Bank for diverse brunch options and atmospheres.
Where is the best place to have a brunch in London with a view?
Duck & Waffle (24/7, 40th floor Heron Tower) offers spectacular city views. Sky Garden provides free panoramic vistas with restaurants. OXO Tower Restaurant overlooks the Thames. Aqua Shard on the 31st floor serves brunch with cityscape views. Gaucho Tower Bridge offers river views. Coppa Club’s igloos at Tower Bridge provide unique Thames-side brunch experiences.
What is the most beautiful cafe in London?
Sketch in Mayfair is London’s most beautiful cafe, featuring a pink velvet Gallery room, artistic interiors, and Instagram-famous egg-shaped toilets. EL&N cafes offer floral pink aesthetics. Peggy Porschen in Belgravia features pastel exterior perfection. Palm Court at The Ritz provides elegant afternoon tea settings. Attendant (Victorian toilets conversion) offers unique historic charm.
Where is the best place to have breakfast in London?
Best London breakfast spots include Dishoom (bacon naan rolls), The Wolseley (grand European cafe), Granger & Co (ricotta hotcakes), Caravan (inventive menu), and Duck & Waffle (24-hour availability). Try Regency Cafe (traditional English), Morito (Spanish), or the vendors at Borough Market. Shoreditch, Soho, and Notting Hill offer excellent breakfast choices.
