‘A long lunch in London is what we’re good at’: bistro above a pub wins UK restaurant of the year

If you’re someone who consults social media to find the best spots for a weeknight dinner reservation, you’d be forgiven for thinking that having a viral social media account or influencer chef at the stove is the only way to run a successful restaurant these days.

However, the operators of the newly-crowned top UK restaurant are not just unbothered about competing in the algorithm olympics, they’re actively seeking out ways to be more analogue – even considering only take bookings by phone.

Henry Harris, 62, and Dave Strauss, 61, co-own Bouchon Racine, a restaurant above a pub in Farringdon, London. The bijou space has become a hit since it opened in 2023 and is one of the most coveted tables to secure in the capital.

Strauss said: “The goal is eventually to never take online bookings, and it’s just all done over the phone because I do all the bookings between 9am and 11, or you text me, and it’s just a lovely organic way to do it.” He said he had been having issues with people block booking four tables in a week and just turning up to the one they fancied, “and that jammed up all those tables”.

Harris and Strauss were shocked to win the National Restaurant Awards’ UK restaurant of the year prize this week: “No! We thought we’d be lucky to be in the top 20,” said Strauss. The judges said: “The downstairs pub, Three Compasses, remains just that, a boozer for the after-work crowd, while the upstairs restaurant feels like a secret dining room that whisks you away from London to the back streets of France. You might never want to leave.”

Harris, who has worked in Michelin-starred kitchens, had a French restaurant in Knightsbridge with a cult following, also called Racine, which was open from 2002 to 2015, before helming a pub group. Strauss spent a decade as operations director at the premium restaurant group Goodman and then operated the Rockfish restaurants in Devon and Cornwall.

Now, they have set up shop in what used to be a Thai restaurant above the pub. The cosy room is painted a very pale red, and bottles of amber armagnac and other digestifs – at various stages of emptiness – line the room, making it feel like you’ve stumbled into the fag-end of a party. On a bright morning in June, sunbeams hit the liquid in the bottles and cast golden shadows on the walls.

“We raided our savings and we had to take on four investors who were all enthusiastic industry friends that helped us get it over the line,” he said. Strauss interjected: “Literally everything we opened with was donated by friends.”

“The only things that we bought were teaspoons, wine glasses, water glasses, a stove in the kitchen, a dishwasher; pretty much everything else was donated,” said Harris, adding that the chairs were donated, and the tables were left behind by the Thai restaurant. Strauss added: “It was all mismatched, because we just didn’t have the money to buy stuff.”

Today’s menu, which is being squeakily scrawled on a chalkboard as we talk, includes calf brains and tête de veau (a slow-cooked calf’s head), alongside more crowd-pleasing dishes such as oysters, steak-frites and pork chops. On the pudding menu is Harris’s famous creme caramel served with a prune, and a cherry and almond tart.

“We change the menu daily depending on my ideas, what I see, what produce our suppliers have to offer,” Harris said, “But there are some things that are always on the menu; steak and chips, creme caramel, rabbit with mustard, and the chicken liver pate which is my mother’s recipe and has been part of my life for the last 50 years.”

The move to phone-only bookings is just one example of how restauranteurs are reasserting a desire to run a business on their own terms rather than bowing to the demands of culinary consumer culture.

Chef Hugh Corcoran did a similar thing at the Yellow Bittern in King’s Cross, in move that – along with other old-school demands such as insisting on cash payments – proved divisive among London diners.

Harris, too, is unafraid to set out some house rules for his patrons. He has now banned people bringing in their own birthday cake. He recounted one occasion where a young man brought in a cake for his girlfriend. “It was a kind of sub-£5 Marks and Spencer’s cake with probably a walnut in the middle, a coffee cake. It had been bashed around and didn’t look pristine, and I wanted to go up to the table and just say to her, you need an upgrade. This is what he wants to serve you. Upgrade your boyfriend.”

He said he finds it irritating when people bring in their own desserts: “I am sort of at the point now that if people phone up and say can they bring a cake, we go ‘no’.”

Strauss added that the menu is a “very personal thing” for Harris: “It’s a menu full of things that he would want to eat that he wants other people to eat. If you went to Henry’s house for dinner, you wouldn’t bring a cake, and you wouldn’t do it to anyone else.”

Another old-fashioned tradition they are reviving is the long workers’ lunch, which died a death during Covid and the subsequent work-from-home years.

“Especially the financial places now have called everybody literally back in every day,” said Strauss, “We do a leisurely lunch, we do a seating at 2.30pm where the kitchen is happy to cook all afternoon, a long three-hour lunch, which has become more and more popular.”

In Strauss’s opinion “lunch is always going to be better than dinner. A long lunch in London, and then you’ve got pubs to go to afterwards, is what we’re good at. Where else can you sit at 4pm and just be surrounded by 30 other people who are drinking wine and having lunch, and that’s our goal, you know.”

Many restaurateurs are complaining that rising tax and food inflation are eating away at their margins. Strauss said: “The irony is that although we’re much busier we were than we were when we started we probably make the same amount of profit. Everything’s just got chipped away, so you can see why people in the industry are upset, you should make more money if you’re twice as busy.”

One thing the government could do to help, Harris said, is smooth trade with the EU: “My poultry and lentils come from France, my tomatoes all come from Italy, cucumbers, the best summer vegetables at this time of year are from Italy. Brexit has made it harder. It’s slowed things down. It’s created far more food waste when lorries get stuck at customs checks.”