Pity the dads of Britain who, if the retail trade is to be believed, really do deserve our pity each Father’s Day, worthy of nothing more from their offspring than a box of craft beer to be received with a careworn shrug as if family life was the punchline of a faintly depressing sitcom.
Alternatively, bypass all of that commercialised nonsense and treat your dad to a slap-up meal in a top London restaurant. Below we’ve selected 15 dad-friendly restaurants and bars, whether your pa is daddy cool or more of an old-fashioned father figure. And as it is unacceptable for any child over the age of 25 not to offer to pay for lunch, we haven’t gone crazy with the prices, which means your dad is in for a pleasant surprise if he sneakily manages to intercept the waiter bringing the bill.
As Father’s Day always falls on a Sunday (June 18 this year), our guide to the best roast lunches in London might be helpful here. Otherwise, read on for the best places to share a Father’s Day gift you and your dad actually want: spending time together over a meal neither of you has cooked.
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Combine two things that London does best — pubs and curry houses — under one roof at this smashing gastropub on a pretty Islington street corner. The south Indian food comes courtesy of executive chef Prince Durairaj: fleshy lamb chops, whopping grilled tiger prawns and best-in-class onion bhaji, all brilliantly shareable. Beers include Bermondsey-brewed Partizan Lemongrass Saison and there are spice-friendly wines and well-mixed cocktails, too. The light-filled interior, with its scrubbed-up woods and dark green walls, is a cut above most Islington pubs or there are benches outside to soak up the sun.
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Footing the bill for Father’s Day? Then you may be grateful that Dukes will only ever serve two of its famously lethal martinis to ensure customers can make it out of this plushly appointed hotel bar, where drinks prepared on a trolley tableside by star bartender Alessandro Palazzi will make any dad feel like James Bond. Soak up the booze afterwards with a toddle downstairs to the hotel’s GBR dining room, where great British ingredients are put to good use in the likes of slow-cooked Cumbrian lamb neck and a quartet of steaks from the grill.
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Even the most restaurant-averse dad will have heard of The Ivy and while the profusion of out-of-town brasseries may have dimmed the celebrity glow of the original, the charming staff still know how to make a meal here feel like a tremendous treat, not least for dads susceptible to a dollop of mid-Nineties nostalgia. All the Ivy classics are present and very much correct — duck and watermelon salad, shepherd’s pie, iced white chocolate berries — prices won’t break the bank (though keep an eye on the wine) and the West End location couldn’t be a more central rendezvous.
Phoenix Palace
Not the place, perhaps, to bring a hard-of-hearing elderly pa, but if a family Father’s Day means big tables are required and there will be young kids in tow then this traditional Cantonese near Marylebone station will fit the bill. The largest tables seat 14, any screaming kids will be lost in the high level of hubbub and the patient staff cope admirably when an escaped toddler swerves into their path. Dim sum is done very well here, there are all the high-street classics one could possibly wish for, plus more unusual chef’s specials — though you may need to ask the staff to share that menu.
London’s oldest restaurant, opened in 1798 and visited by everyone from Charles Dickens to Charlie Chaplin, is far too good to be left to the tourists. Grouse, oysters, pies and Belted Galloway beef are what the place is famous for, much of it brought down from the restaurant’s estate in Teesdale, while there’s Billy Bunter appeal by the bucketload in the likes of steak and kidney pudding and syrup sponge with custard. The upstairs bar is an insider secret to know about, smartly tricked out in the same scarlet velvet as the dining room.
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One for wine lovers and indeed any bon viveur, this new Battersea Rise wine bar is named after a red grape native to the Jura region of France and leads with a low-intervention list of mainly French bottles from small producers. The short small-plates menu, though, is just as much of an attraction, touting a snappy line-up of the likes of lamb and anchovy crumpet, barbecue hogget and smoked cod’s roe; simply order the whole lot when you sit down and there’ll be more time for conversation. The dinky 34-cover dining room feels both intimate and informal.
Benjamin McMahon
Show your dad how barbecues are really done at this Shoreditch pub conversion, where an open grill takes up one wall of the open kitchen and chefs can be observed busying themselves over the flames. What ends up on the bare wooden tables is British ingredients cooked with Basque country technique: whole turbot sandwiched in a cage is the signature dish but the beef sirloin and rib are top shouts, too. The room’s former life as a strip club is worth knowing should conversation begin to flag; the far corner table is where the pole dancing once took place.
Brasserie Zédel and Bar American
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Possibly as much fun as one can have in Soho and still have change from a £50 note, Brasserie Zédel may not be quite the bargain it was when it first opened, but it still delivers glamour on a budget, with a three-course set for £19.75 (£27.95 with un verre du vin), plats du jour for £19.95 (tarragon roasted chicken on a Sunday) and, if budget isn’t an issue, plenty of ooh-la-la-la oomph in the à la carte likes of roast pavé of halibut. Spend any saved pennies on cocktails in neighbouring Bar Américan, almost as much of an attraction as the cavernous belle époque-style dining room.
Nacho Rivera
Relive childhood memories of being taken out for lunch with your parents at Jacuzzi, the newish Kensington restaurant from Big Mamma which comes on as the ninth birthday party of your dreams, complete with a Sicilian-styled mezzanine with a retractable roof up top and, down below, glitter-ball disco loos in the basement. This time around, though, you’re probably the one scribbling in the air for the bill, so better, perhaps, to steer dads towards sub-£20 pizzas and pastas — Margherita or a lamb ragu — than a Fiorentina T-bone for £45, and do remember to keep the sparkling lambrusco topped up. Don’t want to head out west? Big Mamma’s latest spot, Carlotta in Marylebone, probably does the group’s best food.
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If your tastes extend to Hawksmoor but your bank balance doesn’t, then it’s worth knowing that London’s chop specialist also does a nice line in unfashionable steak cuts for low prices: £14 for Denver steak, £16 for rump fillet, supplied by the restaurant’s own Cornish herd and dry-aged for 55 days. The approach to quality extends to the rest of a menu that takes in pork and lamb chops, a dreamy double cheeseburger and a fabulous white chocolate cheesecake, as well as wines served on tap and a Sunday cocktail trolley. This newer and larger Covent Garden restaurant is easier to get into than the Soho original, and more parent-friendly, too.
Chez Bruce: The Wandsworth restaurant was crowned London’s favourite
A general view of Chez Bruce restaurant in London’s Wandsworth Common, Tuesday August 30, 2005. The restaurant has usurped celebrity hangout The Ivy as London’s favourite restaurant according to Harden’s London Restaurant Guide. See PA story CONSUMER Res
The perfect local whether one is 18 or 80, Chez Bruce is perhaps the only restaurant in south London that has destination status across the capital. It’s the kind of place where even a midweek lunch feels like cause for celebration, which means that it’s guaranteed to make Father’s Day feel like a special occasion even if your dad’s default mood is grumpy old man. A menu dripping with richness is designed for people who really enjoy eating — think pork pot-au-feu with ham hock dumpling — the set price (£67.50 for three courses on a Sunday) means you can budget in advance, while the award-winning wine list has a reputation as one of the best in the UK.
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Pretty much any decent gastropub fits the bill for a dad-friendly meal but The Bull and Last is a contender for the perfect London Sunday, when lunch or dinner follows a walk across Hampstead Heath admiring the capital’s skyline, or a dip in Highgate Ponds for the brave. A meal here will more than fill in any spent calories: buttermilk fried chicken to start; rib of beef with all the trimmings; sticky banana pudding. And if dad is coming from out of town (or needs to snooze it all off), there are six bedrooms upstairs.
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Few things are likely to get many dads’ pulses racing faster (in the short term, at least) than steak, red wine and whisky with, perhaps, a cigar on a terrace, all of which can be sampled in whatever order one wishes at this restaurant more proudly Scottish than an SNP convention. Dunkeld smoked salmon, pickled Orkney herrings, Dumfriesshire haggis and Scottish steaks are typical of the north of the border ingredients. Note that Sunday is a three-course jazz brunch that finishes at 4pm; no bad thing, perhaps, when nothing is more likely to bring on a case of seeing double than a wall of tartan.
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There are two lines of thought for a meal with the parents. The first is to keep things firmly in ma and pa’s comfort zone, which is where most of the restaurants above lie. The other is to show off a knowledge of cool London by booking somewhere that demonstrates one is very much in tune with the foodie zeitgeist — which is where Speedboat Bar comes in. The Chinatown newcomer channels both Bangkok’s Thai-Chinese restaurants and the speedboat racing along the city’s canals, a concept that translates as some ferociously hot chilli-spiked stir-fries, cooling whisky sodas and more mopping of sweaty brows than when you pranged your dad’s bumper.
London Bridge Chicken House
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Still in need of inspiration? A general rule of thumb is that everyone whatever their age loves Nando’s, but a more useful nugget of information is that this slowly expanding mini-chain serves London’s best piri-piri chicken. Crowd-pleasing tapas of grilled chorizo, salt-cod fritters and garlic prawns precede the main event (and only main) of charcoal-grilled, piri-piri seasoned chicken. There are now four Casa do Frangos in the capital but the London Bridge original, housed in an airy warehouse conversion, is the nicest, with a cocktail bar to linger in afterwards.