Frog by Adam Handling (Review) - Covent Garden, London
Our Rating: ★★★ | ££££ (£130pp for lunch) - Polished, playful Michelin-starred cooking in a dining room built around the kitchen. The lunch menu is a brilliant treat and seriously good value for this level of dining (How we rate restaurants)
Covent Garden is London's theatreland, so it feels fitting that one of its best restaurants is set up like a stage. At Frog by Adam Handling, almost every seat in the dining room is angled towards the open kitchen, and the show runs all through service. We came for the lunch tasting menu and left completely stuffed.
Frog is the flagship of Scottish chef Adam Handling MBE. Born in Dundee in 1988, he started out as the first ever apprentice chef at Gleneagles, reached the final of MasterChef: The Professionals in 2013, and opened his first restaurant, The Frog, in Spitalfields in 2016. This Covent Garden site, just across the road from The Savoy, followed in September 2017. It won a Michelin star in 2022 and has held it every year since, with 2026 marking its fifth year running. Along the way, Adam was crowned Great British Menu Champion of Champions and received his MBE in the 2024 New Year Honours.
Frog sits at the heart of what is now the Adam Handling Collection: Eve Bar in the basement below, The Loch & The Tyne in Old Windsor, The Tartan Fox and Ugly Butterfly in Cornwall (Ugly Butterfly picked up its own star this year), a chocolate shop around the corner on Maiden Lane, and, as of this summer, his own caviar brand, Ahrelia.
Running Frog day to day is Proprietor Cleverson Cordeiro, a Brazilian chef who spent seven years at Maze and has been part of Frog since before it opened its doors.
The philosophy is what the team call sustainable British luxury. The restaurant describes itself as "90% British and 10% what Britain can't do just yet", and the kitchen works closely with farmers, fishermen and growers, and even forages for some of its own ingredients. Very little goes to waste: trimmings and by-products from the kitchen find their way into cocktails at Eve Bar downstairs.
The room itself is beautiful. Think dusky pink velvet chairs, round white tables, marble walls and a huge cascade of dried flowers wrapped around a deep green pillar in the middle of the room. The layout puts the kitchen front and centre, and we never tire of watching a brigade in full flow, plating dish after dish with total calm. The front of house team matched that energy: passionate, attentive and genuinely excited to talk about the food, without a hint of stuffiness.
A quick note on the menus: In the evening, Frog serves a 13-course experience menu at £199 per person. At lunch, there's a shorter tasting menu, billed as "A taste of Frog", at £100 per person, with two optional supplements: a lobster course and a cheese course. Don't let "shorter" fool you. We've rarely left a lunch this full.
What We Ate
We went for the lunch tasting menu and added both supplements, sharing one portion of each between the two of us. Our standout dishes are marked in bold with an asterisk (*).
Cheese and pickle choux
Beef & tuna tartare
Parker House bread & butter*
Lobster wagyu, Ahrelia caviar
Cod, haricot beans, whey sauce*
Venison, caramelised celery, bone marrow
Eastwood, Bakewell*
Chocolate, milk, malted toffee
Final sweets
Before the menu even began, a little welcome arrived: four golden Cheese and pickle choux lined up along a rippled white stand, each choux pastry bun stuffed with cheese and crowned with a thin, translucent slice of pickle. It's Britain's favourite sandwich pairing given the fine-dining treatment, and a neat introduction to a kitchen that loves taking familiar British flavours and dressing them up.
The Beef & tuna tartare arrived beneath a little tumble of purple flowers, sitting in a pool of golden dressing on a beautiful blue-splashed plate. It was a clean, elegant opener, but the thing we're still talking about is what came alongside it: crisp crackers made with beef fat. Savoury, rich and dangerously moreish, they were gone almost as soon as they landed.
Bread and butter has been a Frog signature for years (early visitors still rave about Adam's chicken butter), and the Parker House bread & butter showed exactly why. The milk bread was soft, smooth and pillowy, with a burnished, glossy crust. The butter, though, was the real showstopper. A smoked butter is piped into the shape of a rose, and when you cut into it you find chicken liver parfait hidden underneath. It's a very clever bit of presentation, and it tasted incredible, the smoky butter and rich parfait spread together over warm bread. (More on Parker House rolls at the bottom.)
The Lobster wagyu, Ahrelia caviar is one of the two supplements, and another long-standing signature. The lobster was cooked perfectly, sweet and just set, and topped with a crumb made from wagyu beef fat, which gave every mouthful a deep, savoury richness. It's essentially a very refined surf and turf. Sharing one portion between two was the right call for us: enough to really taste it, and it left a bit of room for what was coming.
The Cod, haricot beans, and whey sauce was the dish of the meal. The cod was cooked perfectly: melting, silky and smooth. It sat in a light, frothy whey sauce, and underneath it all was a layer of haricot beans. Light and comforting at the same time, it's exactly the kind of dish that makes a tasting menu worth it. (More on whey at the bottom.)
The Venison, caramelised celery, bone marrow was our least favourite course, though only by comparison. The venison was beautifully pink and well sauced, and everything on the plate was clearly top quality, but it was the most familiar dish of the afternoon. After the creativity of the courses before it, it felt like the menu was taking a breather.
We weren't sure about the Eastwood, Bakewell cheese course on paper, as melted Brie-style cheese over a Bakewell sounded like it could be heavy going. It wasn't. The cheese was draped over a slice of Bakewell (with what we think was cherry), finished with truffle honey, and the whole thing was far lighter than we expected: creamy, fruity, nutty and just sweet enough. If you're deciding between the two supplements, this is the one we'd tell you not to skip. (More on Bakewell’s at the bottom.)
Dessert was Chocolate, milk, malted toffee, a glossy chocolate dome sitting on layers of crisp biscuit and ganache, with a milky sauce poured around it. Rich, deep and full of that comforting malty flavour. I couldn't quite finish mine, which meant Alice, our resident dessert lover, happily mopped up the rest of it.
And then, just as we thought we were done, out came the Final sweets: a wooden box filled with jewel-coloured chocolate bonbons, which we were invited to pick from. A lovely way to finish, and a nod to Adam's chocolate shop just around the corner.
Overall thoughts
We loved it. The cooking is refined and precise, but it doesn’t skimp on the quantity. The room is gorgeous, and the service was outstanding from start to finish. You can feel the passion of the team, both in the kitchen and on the floor.
It's also brilliant value for Michelin-starred dining. £100 for lunch at this level is hard to beat in central London, and if you have an Amex Platinum card, Frog is one of the restaurants that qualifies for the card's UK dining credit, which effectively covers the cost of one lunch menu (more in the details below).
A few honest notes. The venison didn't hit the same highs as the rest of the menu, and the supplements add up quickly, so if you're watching the bill, the cheese course is the one we'd prioritise. And come hungry. The lunch menu left us completely stuffed, and we genuinely can't work out how anyone fits in the full 13-course experience menu in the evening.
For a birthday, an anniversary or just a well-earned treat, Frog is well worth making a special trip for. We'll be back, and next time we'll be heading downstairs to Eve Bar for a drink afterwards.
Details
Website: www.frogbyadamhandling.com
Instagram: @frogbyah
Email: info@frogbyadamhandling.com
Phone: 020 7199 8370
Opening Hours: Lunch: Tuesday to Saturday, seatings from 12 pm to 1 pm | Dinner: Monday to Wednesday, 5 pm to 9.30 pm; Thursday to Saturday, 5 pm to 10 pm | Closed Sundays
Booking: Reserve through OpenTable via the link on their website.
Menus: Lunch tasting menu £100 per person, with optional supplements for the lobster (£40) and cheese course (£15). Matching wines at lunch are £60, or £120 for the premium pairing. The evening experience menu is £199 per person. Menus change regularly.
Amex Platinum dining credit: Platinum Cardmembers get up to £100 back every six months when dining at participating UK restaurants, and Frog is on the list. Enrol for the offer in your Amex app first, book directly with the restaurant and pay with your Platinum card. Participating restaurants can change, so check the current list before you book.
Eve Bar: Adam's cocktail bar sits directly below the restaurant, with a focus on cocktails, Champagne and caviar, and is well worth a pre or post lunch drink.
Private dining: The Library, Frog's private dining room, seats up to 12.
Getting there: Covent Garden and Charing Cross stations are both a short walk away.
Map
34-35 Southampton Street, Covent Garden, London WC2E 7HG
Menu
The Nerdy Bits
Parker House rolls
The bread at Frog is a Parker House roll, and it has a surprisingly grand backstory. These soft, buttery milk bread rolls were invented in the 1870s at the Parker House Hotel in Boston, the same hotel that gave the world the Boston cream pie (it still operates today as the Omni Parker House). Classic Parker House rolls are made by flattening a ball of enriched dough and folding it over on itself, which gives them their signature hinged shape. The legend goes that a pastry cook, rattled after an argument in the kitchen, threw a batch of unfinished rolls into the oven, and the dented, folded result became a hit. Recipes started showing up in American cookbooks in the 1880s, and they've been a staple of the US dinner table, especially at Thanksgiving, ever since. Frog's version takes that soft, sweet, milky dough and turns it into a centrepiece.
Whey
Whey is the liquid left behind when milk is curdled and the solid curds are strained away, most often when making cheese (it's the "whey" in Little Miss Muffet's curds and whey). For a long time it was treated as a waste product, but it's packed with flavour: gently tangy, slightly sweet and full of milk proteins and sugars, which is why chefs now reduce it into sauces like the one served with our cod. Using it fits Frog's waste-not philosophy perfectly. Whey has a long history in Nordic kitchens too. In Norway, it's cooked down until its sugars caramelise to make brunost, the sweet brown cheese you'll find sliced over waffles and bread all over the country (we ate plenty of it while working our way through the best bakeries in Oslo). In Iceland, fermented whey was traditionally used to preserve food through the long winters.
Bakewell: pudding or tart?
Bakewell is a small market town in the Peak District in Derbyshire, and it's famous for two different bakes that are constantly confused. The original is the Bakewell pudding: a pastry case lined with jam and filled with a rich egg and almond custard. The popular story says it was created by accident around 1820, when the landlady of the White Horse Inn, a Mrs Greaves, left instructions for a jam tart and her cook got them muddled, spreading the egg and almond mixture over the jam instead of mixing it into the pastry. The Bakewell tart, the one most of us grew up with, came later, in the early 20th century: shortcrust pastry, a layer of jam, an almond sponge and, in its most famous form, white icing with a glacé cherry on top. Several shops in Bakewell still sell puddings made to recipes they each claim are the original, so it's well worth a visit if you're ever in the Peak District.
Ahrelia caviar
The caviar on our lobster came from Adam Handling's own brand, Ahrelia, which he launched in 2026. The idea behind it is simple: make caviar more affordable so people can enjoy it generously rather than in tiny, nervous spoonfuls. The range spans seven varieties, from Royal Baerii and Oscietra through to Beluga and Kaluga, plus trout roe, with the sturgeon matured for anywhere from six years (Baerii) up to twenty (Beluga). Caviar has long been part of Frog's story, so it feels like a natural next step.
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