Six new set menus, from £19 to both sketch rooms
From a £19 lunch to Mayfair's most famous dining rooms
Six new set menus have just landed on All Set, and between them they cover an unusual amount of ground. Both dining rooms at a Mayfair landmark, Cantonese home cooking beside Somerset House, a Fitzrovia hotel room, a Dalston ocakbaşı and a bento lunch in Shoreditch.
Prices start at £19 and stop at £45, which makes this a list you can read two ways: the Tuesday lunch you book on the day, and the dinner you plan a week out. Here are all six.
01 · sketch: The Glade
Mayfair
Two courses £36 or three £40 in the enchanted forest room, seven days a week.
The Glade is the woodland room: painted trees, low light, the quietest corner of the building. Lunch runs every day from midday to 3pm, two courses for £36 or three for £40, chosen from six starters, five mains and five desserts, with bread and salted butter included. A recent menu went from a melon and watermelon salad to lemon sole meunière. It is a sample menu that moves with the season, so take the dishes as a guide and the price as the fixed part.
02 · sketch: The Gallery
Mayfair
Three courses for £45 in the pink room, Sunday to Friday from 5.30pm.
The Gallery is the pink one, walls papered in framed drawings, mustard velvet banquettes underneath. The set is new: three courses for £45 with two choices at each, Sunday to Friday from 5.30pm until close. The same three courses come with a half bottle of wine for £60, or a half bottle of prestige cuvée champagne for £125. The format stays put and the dishes change through the year.
03 · Poon's at Somerset House
Somerset House
Two courses for £22 on weekdays, or a £29 family-style pre-theatre until 6.30pm.
Cantonese home cooking in a warm open-kitchen room a minute from the Strand. The Express Set Lunch is £22 for two courses, Tuesday to Friday from midday to 2.30pm: Magic Soup or san choy bao to start, then a bowl, whether that is the wonton noodle bowl, the Lisle Street zha jiang, or the bowl of the day, which on Fridays is duck and pickled snow vegetable vermicelli. House pickles come to the table. Later on there is a £29 pre-theatre until 6.30pm, served family-style: three dishes, a house soup and steamed jasmine rice.
04 · Oscar
Fitzrovia
Two courses £22 or three £28, every evening between 5pm and 7pm.
The restaurant and bar of a Charlotte Street hotel, a bright room hung with Bloomsbury Group art and the pattern-on-pattern interiors the address is known for. The pre-theatre set is £22 for two courses or £28 for three, and unusually it runs seven days a week rather than the usual weekday window. The menu is rewritten with the season. Three minutes from Goodge Street, seven from the Tottenham Court Road theatres.
05 · Mangal 2
Dalston
Two courses for £25, Thursday and Friday lunch only.
A Dalston ocakbaşı institution that became a modern Turkish kitchen without ever turning the charcoal off. The lunch set is two courses for £25, midday to 2.45pm, and only on Thursdays and Fridays: sourdough pide and smoked humus first, then half a poussin off the grill with pilav. Two days a week is worth planning around, and it books up as though everyone already knows that.
06 · UBA
Shoreditch
A £19 bento lunch, four dishes in one box, Tuesday to Thursday.
Pan-Asian cooking on Great Eastern Street, inside a Shoreditch hotel. The £19 lunch set is four dishes that arrive together in a bento box rather than in courses, picking a meat, fish or vegetarian line: Korean fried chicken, rock shrimp tempura and vegetable gyoza are among them. Tuesday to Thursday, midday to 3pm. The cheapest of the six, and the fastest.
All six are live in the app now, with the full menus and a direct booking link on each. The two sketch rooms and the Mangal 2 lunch are the ones to book ahead for.