Set menus for the NFL London games, from £21 to £52
Steak, ceviche and a Soho lunch, from one course at £21 in Spitalfields to a Power Lunch by Tower Bridge
A weekend of American football in London comes with a particular kind of eating: three nights in town, three meals a day out, a list somebody else wrote. Steak is the reflex, and London answers it well. The set menus below, for the crowd in for the NFL London Games, sit at lunch or before the evening rush, which is when a visitor is actually free.
Taken together, these set menus answer a big appetite two ways. The steakhouses put a fixed price on the same beef they are known for, from Longhorn cooked over fire in Spitalfields to wagyu under triple-height ceilings by Tower Bridge. The rest are what a long weekend of red meat starts to need: ceviche ordered for the whole table, and a Soho lunch rewritten every Tuesday.
01 | Hawksmoor Spitalfields
Spitalfields
one to three courses £21 to £30, Wed to Sat, Wed to Thu 12pm to 5.45pm, Fri to Sat 12pm to 5pm | two or three courses £26 to £30, Mon to Tue, 5pm to 5.45pm
Hawksmoor Spitalfields was the first of them, on Commercial Street, and the beef is still the argument: British, hand-butchered, hung for 35 days. When it opened in 2006 every steak came from one herd of Longhorn cattle in North Yorkshire, a native breed the kitchen says grows slowly and gives rich, savoury, deeply beefy steaks. The big cuts come over fire and land sizzling in a cast iron pan, with roasted bone marrow and slow cooked onions that have been on the menu since day one. Bookings cap at seven, which matters if the group is a group.
02 | Gordon Ramsay Bar & Grill
Mayfair
two or three courses £29 to £32, Mon to Fri, Until 6pm
The Mayfair option keeps going all day. Gordon Ramsay Bar & Grill runs from rare breed cuts to burgers on Grosvenor Square, with large sharing cuts in between, and the weekday set is two or three courses of seasonal cooking that stops at six.
03 | Cooper's Cut
Tower Bridge
two or three courses £45 to £52, Mon to Sat, 12pm to 2pm
The name belongs to the architect behind the Port of London Authority building, which Cooper's Cut now occupies at Ten Trinity Square. Luxury London found soaring triple-height ceilings, a menu running through wagyu fillet, ribeye, sirloin, striploin and flat iron, and cooking it called classic and sophisticated. The Power Lunch is choice-based and sits in a two hour window in the middle of the day, which is the City's own rhythm.
04 | STK Strand
Strand
three courses £40, Sun to Fri, Evening service
A dining room inside ME London, marbled wagyu and a New York Strip on the menu, DJ-led late nights on the same bill: STK Strand calls itself Covent Garden's high-energy steakhouse. Steak Night runs three courses, with flat iron, salmon or mushroom linguini among the mains, which covers whoever has had enough beef by day three.
05 | Rita's
Soho
two or three courses £27 to £32, Tue to Sat, 12pm to 2.30pm
Rita's has been independent in Soho since 2012, cooking modern American against British and European produce: sustainably raised meat, line-caught fish, organic produce from farms around London and the pick of Europe's markets. The set lunch is rewritten every Tuesday, so a second visit in the same month is a different meal. A cover charge and service charge are added to the set menu price.
06 | Crudo Covent Garden
Covent Garden
six courses £46, Mon to Sun, All day | five courses £35, Mon to Sun, Until 6pm & after 9pm
Both sets here are ordered by the whole table. Crudo Covent Garden runs ceviche, tiradito and Latin American small plates on Monmouth Street, family style, minimum two guests. The Covent Garden directory says this Seven Dials site carries a wider menu than its other London sites, with beef empanadas, scallop aguachile and beetroot ceviche among the plates.
October puts a lot of people in restaurants in a city they do not know, working from someone else's recommendations. A fixed price is a decent way to hand that decision over for an hour. Every London lunch set menu holds the rest, and Set menu guides by area and occasion sorts them by where you are staying.