Dining Out: The Best Date Spots in London

Where to eat and drink with someone you fancy.

It will not surprise you to know that I love going to restaurants on dates. 

This is partly just because going to restaurants is my number one favourite way to spend my time, but also because I think you glean so much from it. You get to see what the other person likes and what they don’t like, whether they’re fussy, whether they’re squeamish, what they like to drink. 

You can assess how they look in a dark room behind a tealight, and whether the way they look behind the tealight compels you to touch their hand or their face. How do their clothes fall on them when they are sitting back in a chair, holding a wine glass? Do they order or do they want you to do it? Sitting across from someone in a restaurant – a place that is designed to satisfy you in some way – is a great position from which to ask these questions.

Even if you’ve been with someone for a while, restaurants are still great places for dates. What I love the most about restaurants is the fact that they represent fantasy and embodiment in the here and now all at the same time (I wrote a little bit about this in my last review, in fact). Taking the person you’re dating out of the context of your normal lives together and into a new place – specifically somewhere where you can smoulder at them as you watch them eat with their hands and get reminded all over again of why you had a weird, longing feeling in your stomach the first time you saw them laughing at something their friend said – is always a fun, stimulating experience, usually even more so than meeting someone for the first, second, third or fourth time. 

Regardless of where it comes in the relationship, anyway, I always feel so excited by the idea of going on a date to a restaurant, and love to recommend date spots to people when they ask. So I figured that for my first Dining Out recommendations list, this would be a great place to start. What you have below is a list of 12 excellent date restaurants in London, from the expected to the slightly less so (basically what I’m saying is that Quality Wines is in here but so is like, Falafel and Shawarma). They’re all probably in Zones 1-3, so if your Hinge date or whatever lives in Camberwell and you’re all the way in Stoke Newington, they won’t be too much of a nightmare to get home from. 

Also, in the spirit of making these paid posts feel different to the weekly reviews, I thought that it might be a good opportunity for you to also hear from some other writers who are a) not me and b) much smarter than me. As such, I am very grateful to my friends Elise Bell, Hannah Burke, Monica Heisey, Tom Howells, Angela Hui, Lucas Oakeley and Tom Usher for their lovely contributions, which I’ve included alongside some of my own thoughts below. Also if you take someone to any of these restaurants and you get a snog, you owe me a pint.