When visiting a place on business, you don’t always get to spend half a day on lunch. Luckily, restaurants know this and serve a business lunch. In central London, one restaurant has specialized in providing high-quality meals to people with “less time”.  Not only do they cater for business people, but this restaurant is also a fantastic choice when planning to see a show in one of London’s many theatres. Which restaurant it is? It is chef Anthony Demetre’s restaurant called Wild Honey St James.

The restaurant is located in the Sofitel Hotel, a stone’s throw from Picadilly Circus. This square in turn is within spitting distance of many theatres, but also Buckingham Palace and Trafalgar Square. To summarize, the location is perfect, making it within reach of everything and at the same time in a quiet area. There is s subtle plate indicating that on the side the restaurant is located, where it also has its own entrance. Just push yourself through the revolving door under the yellow flag.

Upon entry, the first thing you’re likely to notice is the beautiful high ceilings as well as the vibrant paintings on the wall. Whether the paintings are nice is for everyone to decide for their own, but we liked them. What we particularly liked was the bar area, located across from the door. This was quite large with a substantial alcohol supply. The nice thing about this bar is that it kind of reminded us of a theatre entrance, which is fitting for the area of london and the target audience (people going to the theatre). Right around the corner from the door, we found the reception area, where the staff welcomed us and took (and stored) our coats. After that, we were escorted to our table, which was just a (half) level up.  Here a table was set, with one chair and a seat on a large plush couch.

Having read some reviews of the restaurant, we were expecting a rather formal service from the restaurant staff (which isn’t really our thing). The lady serving our table was all but formal: She eas great fun, joking and seemingly enjoying her work. What a relief from what we were expecting. The sommelier handed us the menu and asked if we were interested in an aperitif. Champagne it was and then we studied the menu. This isn’t such a big job, as they serve a set menu with a limited a-la-carte menu. Selecting the set menu doesn’t mean that we were done choosing. For each course, guests have a choice of three dishes.

What we noticed was that lot of the dishes are featuring local (i.e. UK) produce, therefor so were some of ours. Choice for today was a salad of (winter) tomatoes for starter, which we were told are grown not too far from the restaurant. A wonderful combination of firmer green tomatoes with soft red/purple ones. Cornish mackerel for main course, whereby the fish was combined with some nice potatoes that somehow were a bit creamy…. Loved it! Lastly, blood orange for dessert, a wonderful combo of zesty orange with a creamy sort of cheesecake. Looking at each of the dishes, they may not look too exciting, but appearances can be deceiving. When dishes were served, we were given a short explanation of the dishes and they seemed to contain only a limited number of ingredients. Nevertheless, each dish was packed with flavor and all dishes were absolutely delicious. Being a chocoholic, I noticed a chocolate dish on the a la carte menu. Naturally, I enquired if the dessert from the set menu can be swapped with this chocolate dessert. Strangely, this was possible only if paying for the full dessert on top of the full set menu price. Where the menu and the a la carte dessert are both really not that expensive, a bit more flexibility here would have been appreciated.

Altogether, we spent about GBP 80 (approx. EUR 90-100) per person on this lunch, which includes champagne and other drinks. Is it worth it? That can only be answered by a solid “YES”. It is a great restaurant and we would recommend it to anyone. What did really help for our visit was the lady serving us. Where good service may be part of the expectation when going to a Michelin starred restaurant, this lady really completed the ‘dining’ experience at this restaurant…