Riding House Cafe - London, Fitzrovia (Review)
Our Rating: ★★★ | ££££ (£25pp) - A buzzy Fitzrovia all-day spot with a few genuine brunch highlights. Worth a pop-in if you're nearby or catching up with a friend, though the food alone wouldn't have us crossing town (How we rate restaurants)
Riding House Cafe turned 15 this year, and to mark it they invited us in for a Sunday brunch built around some of the group's greatest hits. Four of us went along, and it made for a very pleasant afternoon in Fitzrovia.
If you don't know it, Riding House Cafe is something of a London institution. The original opened back in 2011 on Great Titchfield Street, the work of restaurateur Adam White (the man behind The Garrison and Village East in Bermondsey before it). The idea was a New York style all-day spot with the warmth of a private members' club but none of the exclusivity, and it landed at exactly the right moment, helping to shape the brunch culture that now feels standard across the city. Fifteen years on there are sister sites in Bloomsbury and Victoria, and the original still pulls weekend queues out onto the pavement.
To celebrate the anniversary, executive chef Henry Omereye put together a summer menu that brings back dishes from across the group's history alongside a few new seasonal plates. We came on a Sunday, so the roasts were on offer too, but brunch was what we were here for.
The room is a big part of the appeal. It's spacious and handsome, all exposed concrete softened by plush velvet banquettes, globe lights, antique glass cabinets and the odd bit of taxidermy, with a long marble-topped bar anchoring everything and plenty of different nooks to settle into. Our service was warm and switched-on from start to finish.
One quick, upfront note on how we came to be here. Riding House hosted us as guests for this anniversary brunch. There's no affiliate relationship and no strings attached, and they see this review at the same time you do. As always, the thoughts below are entirely our own, good and bad.
What we ate
Drinks
House Mary
Bloody Great Mary (delicious!)
Food
CBA sandwich (soft-shell crab tempura, smoked streaky Dingley Dell bacon, avocado, black garlic ponzu aioli, brioche)
Hot-smoked salmon royale (poached eggs, burnt lemon hollandaise, bottarga, muffin)
Malted deep dish pancakes (berries, clotted cream, maple syrup) and (smoked streaky Dingley Dell bacon, blueberry compote, sour cream, maple syrup)
Chips with sesame salt
Dessert
Sticky toffee doughnuts
Pancake Sundae (off menu)
CBA sandwich: The pick of the meal, and the one dish we'd tell you to order without hesitation. It's well thought out: soft-shell crab in a light tempura, smoked streaky Dingley Dell bacon, avocado and a black garlic ponzu aioli, all stacked into brioche. Everything was cooked well, but it was that aioli that pulled everything together.
Hot-smoked salmon royale: This dish didn't quite land. On paper, it is very much our sort of thing: hot-smoked salmon, poached eggs, a burnt lemon hollandaise and a scattering of bottarga over a muffin. A winning combo. However, the salmon was cooked just fine, but the muffin underneath tasted a little stale rather than freshly toasted, which took the shine off the whole plate. And having just got back from Sardinia, where bottarga is one of our favourite things to eat, we were excited to see it listed on a menu in the UK, only for so little of it to make it on the plate that it barely registered. A standard version of a dish we had hoped would sing. (More on bottarga at the bottom, because it deserves better billing than it got.)
Malted deep dish pancakes: Pancakes, but not as you know them. Riding House's malted deep dish pancakes are crisp on the outside and thick, dense and almost cake-like in the middle, closer to a baked pudding than a stack of fluffy American pancakes. Go in knowing what they are. They're good and seriously filling given the sheer size of them.
We tried one sweet (berries, clotted cream and maple syrup) and one savoury (smoked streaky Dingley Dell bacon, blueberry compote, sour cream and maple syrup). Both were enjoyable, but these are a commitment. One shared between two is plenty.
Chips with sesame salt. Very good chips due to that seasoning! Crisp, golden and dusted in a sesame salt seasoning we couldn't stop picking at. A simple thing done really well.
Just fyi, There were a lot more chips, but we had munched them all before taking this picture
The House Mary
Sticky toffee doughnuts: Excellent. They arrived hot and freshly fried, rolled in sugar, with a rich toffee sauce to dunk them in. Exactly what you want from a plate of doughnuts.
Pancake Sundae The hit of the whole meal. This is a limited-edition, off-menu number the kitchen has put together in collaboration with Ice Cream Union: pancake pieces layered up with malted pancake ice cream, fresh berries, maple syrup and clotted cream. It's indulgent and refreshing all at once, and the clever part is how well the pancake holds up, keeping its texture intact through the sundae rather than collapsing into mush, with that malted pancake ice cream tying the whole thing neatly back to the deep dish pancakes themselves. It's only around for a limited time, so if you spot it, order it.
Overall thoughts
So, our honest verdict. There's plenty to like here. A handful of dishes; that CBA sandwich was the top savoury dish among them, plus the sweet options of doughnuts and the Secret Sundae. Even the humble chips, we'd happily order again, and the room and the service make for a genuinely lovely meal out. But purely on the food, we're not sure it would pull us back across London when we've got better brunches on our list to try out.
Where Riding House really earns its place is location and occasion. Fitzrovia is a lovely, central pocket of town, and if you're visiting London and want somewhere handsome and easy for brunch, or you just need a good-looking spot to catch up with a friend, this fits the bill nicely. Order the CBA sandwich, get the chips and the doughnuts, and you'll have a great time.
Come purely as a food pilgrimage, though, and you might leave a touch underwhelmed.
Details
Website: www.riding.house
Instagram: @ridinghousecafe
Address: 43 to 51 Great Titchfield Street, London W1W 7PQ
Nearest tube: Oxford Circus or Goodge Street
Opening Hours: Open daily for breakfast, lunch and dinner, with brunch served at weekends (times shift seasonally, so do check when you book)
Booking: Reserve through their website (or walk in and queue, as many do at weekends). Weekend brunch is busy, so book ahead if you can.
Sister sites: Riding House Bloomsbury and Riding House Victoria
Good to know: Dog-friendly in designated areas, and a nut-free kitchen. There's a private downstairs room, The Stables, seating up to 14.
The Nerdy Bits
Since bottarga turned up, let's give it the attention it deserves. Bottarga is cured fish roe: the roe sac is salted, pressed and air-dried for a few months until it firms into an amber slab you can grate or shave. It's often called the caviar of Sardinia, and while versions exist right across the Mediterranean, from Greece (where it's avgotaracho) to Sicily, the Sardinian bottarga di muggine, made from grey mullet roe around the lagoons of Cabras, is the one people prize most. There's also a darker, punchier bottarga di tonno made from tuna.
The name comes from the Arabic butarikh, meaning salted fish roe, and the technique is an ancient one, likely Phoenician in origin. The flavour is intensely savoury and briny, all umami and sea air, which is why just a little, grated over pasta with garlic, oil and chilli, or shaved onto buttered toast, can be transformative. It's one of our favourite ingredients full stop, which is exactly why we wanted more of it here. If you share the obsession, you'll know we're suckers for cured Mediterranean seafood in general (see our love letter to the baccalà on Bermondsey Street).
What we expected when reading bottarga on the menu - Sardinia 2026
You'll also spot Dingley Dell bacon running right through the Riding House menu, and it's worth knowing why. Dingley Dell is a family-run, third-generation pork farm on the East Suffolk coast, started by brothers Mark and Paul Hayward back in 1999. Their pigs are outdoor-bred and reared slowly on a high-welfare setup, and they run a distinctive Red Duroc breeding programme aimed at more marbling, which tends to mean bacon and sausages with proper depth of flavour. It's the kind of sourcing detail that lifts a fry-up, and it showed in the smoked streaky bacon tucked into that CBA sandwich.
One last note for the curious: the "CBA" in that sandwich stands for crab, bacon and avocado, and the crab in question is soft-shell crab. Soft-shell is not a species but a moment in time. It's a crab (usually blue crab) caught just after it has moulted its hard outer shell and before the new one hardens, which means the whole thing, shell and all, can be eaten. Battered in a light tempura and fried, it turns wonderfully crisp, which is what gives that sandwich its texture.
Map
43 to 51 Great Titchfield Street, London W1W 7PQ
