Dining Out: Five Places For a Birthday Meal In London

From brunch to fancy lunch to a 1AM burger via pasta in a paper bag.

It is my birthday next week! And as a 30-year-old child, I still really enjoy Having a Birthday. This is because birthdays are a great excuse to eat good.

Even as a kid my favourite parties to go to were the ones at the Wacky Warehouse (I never know whether this was just a Midlands thing, so if it was: Wacky Warehouses were ‘soft play’ type facilities attached to pubs, where half-cut parents could leave their feral children to attack each other in the ball pit and get friction burns on the slide while they drank pints next door). This was partly because I liked the play area, but mostly because I LOVED the eating bit of the party, which followed the actual Wacky experience.

After the allotted beating-each-other-up-with-foam-weapons time, all the kids at the party would go into the adjoining pub (we used to be a country), sit at a big table and be served either a pizza or a burger or chicken nuggets (you’d choose what you wanted ahead of time as if it were a wedding), with ice cream for pudding. There was something about this whole rigmarole that I loved – the occasion of it, picking my meal ahead of time by ticking the option off on the paper invitation and handing it back to the party haver at school – and of course that has stuck with me, because I still bloody love a big bday dins.

Anyway, because I’m feeling festive, and as a self-appointed expert in such matters, in the spirit of Having a Birthday, here are some places in London that I think make particularly good birthday occasion spots. Refer back to it if you too plan on having a birthday at any point this year. None of these are as good as the Wacky Warehouse at the Three Horseshoes in Hall Green (closed now but alive in my heart), I have to tell you, but some come close.

IF YOU’D LIKE TO BE HAVE A LATE-ISH ONE WITH THE OPTION TO ORDER A BURGER AT 1AM

Go to Bloodsports

Bloodsports is a new sports-and-horror-movie-themed bar in Covent Garden (weird combo I know but stay with me), and it is that rarest of things: open until 2AM every day of the week. It’s also that even rarer of things: a place where you can order buffalo chicken tendies in central London at one in the morning, which is something I actually find myself wanting to do every now and then without any clue at all where to go.

I think Bloodsports would be great for a loose birthday with a big group. It’s a good laugh, brand spanking new, absolutely massive and caters for most tastes. If you’re into sports, you can watch pretty much whichever match or fight or race you wish, there’s pool, there’s a photobooth, there’s a margarita fishbowl (there are also lageritas, which I love), and the food is by MeatLiquor, so you can also feel assured that you’re going to get a pretty solid burger or basket of wings or whatever (I still think the Dead Hippie is probably one of the most reliable burgers in the city). Also I went recently and tried both the Long Island Iced Coffee and the frozen margs, and heartily recommend both. Thumbs up for an easy, fun night out, which is ideally what you want from a birthday.