Best London tasting menus under £100, 2026

A proper tasting menu in London used to mean £180 a head minimum, with a wine pairing that took the bill past £300, and you walked out feeling slightly fleeced. There is now a properly serious set of restaurants doing technical tasting menus under £100 — and in some cases under £80 — and they are a better dinner than half the £200 rooms.

Eight rooms below. None is a tourist trap. All have menus that change with the season and a kitchen team I would back against any chain Michelin-starred place in town.

I keep a separate eye on one-night chef takeovers and supper clubs, which the London events page on Rifio is genuinely good for — the kind of thing the magazines write up next month after it has been and gone.

1. Akoko (Fitzrovia)

£85 for the tasting menu, optional pairing for £55. Akoko is the most technically ambitious cooking on this list — West African ingredients, modern technique, a calm dining room with proper service. The room is small, the menu is set, the cheese course is the cheese course.

Book six to eight weeks out. Counter seats by the open kitchen are the move.

2. Trinity (Clapham)

Adam Byatt has been running Trinity in Clapham for over fifteen years and the tasting menu has been quietly one of the best in London the whole time. £85 for six courses. Modern British, a kitchen that knows exactly what it is doing, a wine list with proper £45 bottles.

Trinity is genuinely under-rated because it is in Clapham. Get over it, get on the Northern Line.

3. Salon (Brixton)

Above Brixton Market, run by Nicholas Balfe. £75 for a weekly-changing tasting menu. The best £75 in south London by some margin — the kitchen leans natural-wine bistro but the technique is properly tight.

Walk-in at the bar at 6:30pm if you do not have a booking.

4. The Five Fields (Chelsea)

Tucked behind Sloane Square, garden-produce-led, the £95 menu is a proper Chelsea experience for under a ton. Service is old-school in the best way. Save it for a parents' visit or an actual occasion.

5. Lyle's (Shoreditch)

James Lowe's set menu — four courses, £75, the British seasonal restaurant the rest of the country imitates. Lyle's used to be £55 and the rise to £75 was justified — the cooking has not stopped getting better.

Book a month out, or walk in at the bar.

6. Davies and Brook (Mayfair)

The lunch tasting at £95 is the trick. Mayfair experience, dining room you would not normally afford, three courses with snacks and proper service, walk out fed and not robbed. Skip the dinner menu, it is twice the price.

7. Cycene (Shoreditch)

Inside Blue Mountain School on Shoreditch's Redchurch Street. £95, modern, restrained cooking, the room is properly designed. The cheese course is the test order — they take cheese seriously here.

8. Sushi Atelier (Fitzrovia)

The lunch omakase at £85 is the proper one. Eight pieces of nigiri, three small dishes, a soup. Sat at the counter, watching the chef work. Not strictly a "tasting menu" in the British sense but technically the same thing — set, sequential, chef-led.

What to avoid

The £75 "tasting menu" pop-ups that are seven beige plates and a churro. Anything advertised on Time Out as "London's hottest new tasting menu" — they are usually fine, fine is not what £75 should buy. The hotel restaurants in Knightsbridge that have a £95 set menu and a £18 cocktail markup, you are not winning there.

For one-off chef collabs, supper clubs and tasting menu pop-ups, the London this-week page on Rifio is the live list. They genuinely catch the small one-night things before everyone else.