St. JOHN

St. JOHN opened in a former bacon smokehouse on St John Street in October 1994, when Fergus Henderson and Trevor Gulliver took on a then-neglected corner of Smithfield. The nose-to-tail cooking Henderson set out here, and later wrote down in his 1999 book of the same name, has quietly shaped modern British kitchens ever since. The dining room keeps to that plainness: whitewashed walls, bentwood chairs, white cloths and tall windows, above a ground-floor bar with a following of its own.

Two spaces are given over to private events. The first-floor Private Dining Room seats up to 16 for lunch, dinner or a meeting, and is also used for shoots and filming. For a larger gathering the whole restaurant and bar can be taken exclusively, seating up to 110 or holding 150 for a standing reception; when dinner is cleared the bar area opens up as a dance floor.