Restaurant Story

Tom Sellers opened Restaurant Story in April 2013, at 26, in a former Victorian public convenience on the corner of Tooley Street and Queen Elizabeth Street. The building earned its first Michelin star within five months and its second in 2021. After a £2.5 million rebuild that closed it through 2023, it returned on 12 January 2024 as what Sellers calls Story 3.0: the ground floor reconfigured, a new upper level added, and an outdoor balcony overlooking the gardens between the restaurant and the river.

The cooking is a tasting menu shaped by memory and the British seasons, plated as a run of small, precise courses that trade on narrative as much as technique. Sellers trained under Tom Aikens, at Noma and at Per Se, and the room reflects that discipline: warm ombre walls, exposed London brick, brass sconces and rust-toned velvet seating downstairs; upstairs, an open kitchen sits behind a marble counter beneath a suspended canopy of blown-glass petals, with a live-edge oak chef's table for sixteen looking straight into the pass.

For a private event the restaurant works at three scales: the main dining room on the ground floor, the chef's table above it, and an intimate top-floor lounge for aperitifs and nightcaps. Exclusive hire takes the whole building for a lunch or dinner, Tuesday to Saturday, with the kitchen building a bespoke menu around the occasion. It is a discreet, sharply run room a short walk from Tower Bridge, better suited to a considered dinner than a loud party.