The Best Restaurants & Bars In Chinatown | Partner Content
Fiendishly well-located, seconds from Theatreland and within strolling distance of both Covent Garden and Carnaby Street, Chinatown is rarely – if ever – a bad move. There’s the food, obviously – and if you’re hunting down the best of it, you’re in the right place – but there are also some excellent bars hidden among the dumplings and roast duck, from secret cocktail spots to retro Korean pochas. Here are the finest places to both get a feast and raise a glass in Chinatown:
RESTAURANTS
The Palomar is a wildly popular, high-energy Soho institution that borders Chinatown, with an open kitchen and counter seating that puts you right in the middle of the action. The food is Eastern Mediterranean – punchy, generous, unfussy – and the sharing plates somehow disappear faster than the Negroni you were saving for afters. A strong start or end to any night out in the area.
Details: 34 Rupert St, W1D 6DN | Making a booking at Palomar
Speedboat Bar is a raucous, tongue-blisteringly hot Thai spot from lauded chef Luke Farrell, the Thai food wizard behind The people behind Plaza Khao Gaeng. The menu is full of Chinese-inspired recipes from Bangkok’s own Chinatown, resulting in hard-to-find dishes like crispy pork with green ash melon and beef tongue & tendon curry. And it’s all excellent, thanks in large part to the fact he grows his own Thai ingredients in specially-controlled jungle-like greenhouses in, er, Dorset. On top of all this, there are party-starting drinks like Calamansi-spiked slushie beers and snakeblood negronis, plus a pool table upstairs for late-night gatherings.
Details: 30 Rupert St, W1D 6DL | Making a booking at Speedboat Bar
The name doesn’t lie. If you’re after xiao long bao in Chinatown, this is the spot that delivers them fast, fresh, and steaming to your table by the bamboo-basketload. It’s an unfussy, buzzy place with a huge menu, but the soup dumplings are the clear highlight – made on site and with just enough broth inside to scald your tongue if you’re careless. A rite of passage, basically.
Details: 15-16 Gerrard St, W1D 6JE | No booking – just turn up
Roast duck. That’s the headline, the subheading, and the footnote. Four Seasons is the sort of Chinatown restaurant people will wax on about for hours, solely because of its signature dish – lacquered, sticky, rich with five spice. The service is brisk, the decor’s unchanged since 1995, and none of that matters, because you’re here for the duck. And maybe the crispy pork belly, while you’re there. And perhaps the ginger lamb too.
Details: 12 Gerrard St, W1D 5PR | Make a booking at Four Seasons
When JinLi opened its Sichuan BBQ skewer offshoot across the road from its main site, it was doing more than expanding – it was quietly fuelling half of Chinatown’s late-night snacking. The original is a more classical Sichuan affair, heavy on spice, heat, and bold flavour – mapo tofu, boiled fish in chilli oil, spicy wontons. Bring friends. And tissues.
Details: 4 Leicester St, WC2H 7BL | Making a booking at JinLi
YiQi is Chinatown’s new flag-bearer for pan-Asian cooking – pulling off a kaleidoscope of South-East Asian influences with surprising finesse. Dishes range from king oyster mushroom & kumquat salad to Iberico pork with red bean curd, plus a slick take on Hong Kong’s ‘Typhoon Shelter’ recipes using pig trotter. Opened in early 2024, it’s also one of the area’s smartest-looking spots – all rattan chairs, turquoise banquettes and neatly panelled walls.
Details: 14 Lisle St, WC2H 7BE| No booking – just turn up
For just over a decade, chef Ellen Chew’s Rasa Sayang has been feeding the masses with hearty Peranakan dishes, drawing on Malaysian and Singaporean cuisine. Best as a speedy lunch spot (service is not quite leisurely enough for dinner), all the classics are here and in good order: beef rendang, laksas, chilli crab and mooli cakes. Finish up with a cup of kopi – a Singaporean breakfast staple of coffee and condensed milk.
Details: 5 Macclesfield St, W1D 6AY | Making a booking at Rasa Sayang
Yes, it’s called Kung Fu Burger. And yes, these burgers do indeed pack a punch – they’re made with a sourdough Chinese-style bun, which is packed with fillings from shredded pork belly, to chicken, or vegetables. And it works.
Details: 104 Shaftesbury Avenue, W1D 5EQ | No booking – just turn up
BARS
Bar Lina
London’s most elegant micro-chain of delis-slash-restaurants, Lina Stores has been supplying top-quality Italian produce since 1944, and its Brewer Street – its very first site – continues to go from strength to strength. Head past the salumi and formaggi counter, and the shelves stocked with fresh pasta sauces, and venture downstairs, where you’ll that find a cocktail bar every bit as perfectly-judged as the delicatessen. It’s a beautiful hideaway, intimate and low-lit – and as well as being gorgeous to look at, it serves as a superb showcase for Lina Stores’ famously high quality ingredients. Exotic cocktail components like coffee butter and prickly pear syrup are made in-house, and ingredients like Bepi Tosolini’s wild strawberry aperitivo, and nocino (an unripe walnut liqueur) have been sourced from Italy. A slice of la dolce vita in Brewer Street.
Details: 18 Brewer St, London W1F 0SG | Making a booking at Bar Lina
SOMA
Rik Campbell and Will Bowlby, the pair behind Kriket, scored an instant six runs when they opened Soma. Located just next door to Kriket’s Soho outpost, Soma takes Campbell and Bowlby’s East-meets-West philosophy and applies it to a dramatic subterranean cocktail bar – with highly pleasing results. The menu is genuinely original, offering a margarita made with chaat masala and an Old Fashioned made with jaggery and coconut, and the bar itself – nine metres long and made of steel – is a spectacular piece of theatre in its own right. Dark, mysterious, a little bit seductive – it’s got ‘ideal Chinatown date location’ written all over it, frankly.
Details: 14 Denman St, London W1D 7HJ | Making a booking at SOMA
Bar Américain at Brasserie Zédel
Death, taxes, and a rock solid night out at Brasserie Zédel – these are life’s certainties. The restaurant is of course one of London’s grandest and largest dining rooms, yet also one of its most egalitarian, offering an infamously good-value prix fixe menu which has fed untold millions over the years. And then, next door within the same underground complex, there’s Bar Américain. Every bit as faultlessly-delivered as the restaurant itself (and, lest we forget the cabaret bar that’s adjacent), Bar Américain is a faultless environment in which to sip an an immaculately-made classic cocktail, and revel in the sense of being in Paris in the 1930s. London’s lucky to have it.
Details: 22 Sherwood St, London W1F 7ED | Making a booking at Bar Américain at Brasserie Zédel
Hongdae Pocha
And now for something completely different – unless you happen to be in a retro-style Korean ‘pocha’ in Chinatown, in which case, ‘and now for some information about the place you are by sheer chance currently sat in’. Either way; Hongdae Pocha is a buzzy, irreverent recreation of Korean bar of the 70s and 80s – the music is pumping, the steel-roofed booths are covered in twinkling lights, and there’s high quality fried chicken on the menu. Few bars actively encourage graffiti, but at Hongdae Pocha that’s all part of the experience – you’ll find a pen clipped to your menu. The cocktails are good fun, there’s lots of Korean beer to experiment with and, this being a Korean experience, there’s soju aplenty, too.
Details: 26 Romilly St, London W1D 5AJ | Making a booking at Hongdae Pocha
The Blue Posts
Are there approximately 17 pubs in London called The Blue Posts? Yes! Is this the best one? Almost certainly! Tucked away in the corner of Rupert Street, with The Mulwray, a fabulous hidden wine bar, above, and a Michelin-starred restaurant, Evelyn’s Table, below, The Blue Posts is a narrow pub that just seems to have ‘it’. It’s always bustling, there’s always a good atmosphere, and a pint there always seems like the correct decision. Maybe it’s something in its bones – the building housing the Blue Posts has been home to a pub since 1739, so it makes sense that, as chaotic as it can be to navigate your drinks safely back to your mates, everything about the place just feels right.
Details: 28 Rupert St, London W1D 6DJ | Making a booking at The Blue Posts
Opium
Did someone say ‘secret bar in Gerrard Street located through a numberless Jade door’? If so, they were almost certainly talking about Opium, which is among London’s worst kept secrets – because it’s such a reliably fun night out, and word gets around. The interiors are opulent – think old-world 1920s Chinoiserie – the drinks are creative and served with expertise and panache, and there are two floors of fun (which include the Apothecary Bar, a tea room, and the Bartender’s Table), plus a dim sum menu. Great pre-theatre, post-theatre, or, frankly, instead-of-theatre.
Details: 15-16 Gerrard St, London W1D 6JE | Making a booking at Opium
Archive & Myth
Not enough myths begin with ‘Head past Magic Mike Live’, but this one assuredly does. Archive & Myth, below the Hippodrome Casino, is a self-described ‘timeless chamber filled with mystery and intrigue’ which requires a passcode to enter (which is comprised of strange symbols and changes daily) – but enter into the spirit of it all and you’ll find yourself in a surprisingly accomplished cocktail bar courtesy of big-hitting drinks maven Jack Sotti. Cocktails are creative and stylishly-delivered, and are offer offered ‘minor’ or ‘major’ (that is – half size or full size, which is a nice twist). And if it helps sway your decision, the bar was recently declared one of the UK’s top 50 cocktail bars – and that’s no myth.
Details: Cranbourn St, London WC2H 7JH | Making a booking at Archive & Myth
Experimental Cocktail Club
The ECC is – stop us if you’ve heard this before – a secret cocktail bar located in Gerrard Street, but behind a black door, not a Jade one. And here the comparisons with Opium fall away, because the ECC is very much its own thing – it has an art deco, speakeasy feel, and in a way that feels genuinely pleasant and escapist, as opposed the whiff of steampunk-immersive-theatre that can befall places attempting this approach. That’s because it’s a properly grown-up bar, the counterpart to its revered Parisian older sibling, and launched by many of the same team. The drinks – as the name suggests – are indeed weird and wonderful, though classics are available too, and the service is smooth and assured. Having been here since 2010, it seems fair to declare this particular experiment a success.
Details: 13a Gerrard St, London W1D 5PS | Making a booking at Experimental Cocktail Club
Drinks sorted, now for the food. Check out our guide to the best restaurants in Soho
