Where to go in Camden

66 places in Camden, each one on the Guide on merit.

Belsize Park

• Cinder

  European

  A small Belsize Village room run by a chef who puts nearly everything over flame. Two AA rosettes.

Bloomsbury

• Fortitude Bakehouse

  Bakery

  Slow, wild-yeast bakes down a cobbled mews: beignets, morning buns, a chermoula sausage roll.

• Grant Museum of Zoology

  Museum

  London's last zoological museum, a free pocket cabinet of skeletons and the notorious jar of moles.

• The Coral Room

  Cocktail bar

  A grand salon bar inside The Bloomsbury Hotel, designed by Swedish architect Martin Brudnizk. Deep rouge walls, chandeliers, and Art Deco styling create a country house atmosphere in central London. Expensive cocktails and nibbles, but the setting delivers serious sophistication.

Camden

• Green Note

  Live music venue

  A 50-seat candlelit room behind a curtain in Camden, folk and roots music every night, a vegetarian kitchen and bar. You sit an arm's length from the act.

Camden Town

• The Black Cap

  A Camden High Street pub that has operated since 1751 and became a landmark gay venue in the 1960s, reopened in March 2026 after an eleven-year closure and a £2 million refurbishment. Now billed as the "Palladium of Drag", it celebrates its history as home to Lily Savage, Regina Fong and Mrs Shufflewick with a first-floor performance space named Lily's Bar, featuring banquette seating, a marble-top bar and brass fixtures. For anyone who wants drag cabaret in a space that honours queer performance history.

• Wandering Grapes

  Wine bar

  Convivial, more neighbourhood pour than Camden tourist trap, with bottles that punch above the postcode.

Chalk Farm

• Barfly

  Live music venue & pub

  A 200-capacity Camden room that has caught bands on the way up since the nineties, relaunched in 2026 under its historic Barfly name.

Coal Drops Yard

• Earl of East

  Candle-making studio

  Candle-making workshops from the cult fragrance brand: blend a scent, pour your own soy candle, take the jar home. Lighter than a full class, and a lovely way to spend an afternoon.

Finchley Road

• Camden Art Centre

  Contemporary art centre

  Free contemporary art in a calm NW3 setting, with a café, a garden and a good bookshop.

• Lanka

  Asian

  A tiny Japanese-French patisserie in north-west London, elegant rather than scene-y.

Fitzrovia

• 64 Goodge Street

  European

  A neoclassical French bistro in an old Fitzrovia travel agents, where snails arrive blended into bacon and garlic bon bons.

• Akoko

  African

  A Michelin-starred tasting menu that runs West African cooking through French and Spanish technique. Special-occasion food, served without any stiffness.

• Attendant Coffee Roasters

  Victorian-loo coffee bar

  A gentlemen's lavatory from the 1890s, shut for fifty years, now a coffee bar where you drink your flat white at a row of Doulton porcelain urinals. The tiles are original.

• Bar Kinky

  Georgian cocktail den

  A basement cocktail den under Kinkally on Charlotte Street, where the Narnia mixes chacha with sagan dalya tea.

• BOYS BOYS BOYS Gallery Café

  Queer photo gallery & café

  A queer art café, gallery and bookshop. Somewhere to do the LGBTQ+ scene in daylight, away from nightlife.

• Broken Eggs

  European

  A Valencian brother and sister who decided Fitzrovia needed a whole restaurant devoted to the humble potato tortilla, and were right.

• Chishuru

  African

  London's first Black female Michelin chef cooks West African food that is bold, precise and full of warmth. Small plates made for sharing, in a room that hums.

• Cometa

  Caribbean & Latin

  New-wave Mexican seafood in Carousel's old Charlotte Street wine room: British fish, Mexican flavours, low-key chic.

• DAMU

  Spa

  A multi-sensory spa ritual at The Mandrake of float, mud caves, sound and light. The kind of wellness splurge you plan an evening around.

• Elsa

  European

  Alsatian comfort food and low-intervention wine from a Berlin couple on Charlotte Street. Small and bright, with a Bib Gourmand and none of the noise that usually comes with one.

• Hinaga

  Asian

  London's first proper kakigori, shaved cloud-soft to order and kept under a tenner. The queue makes sense.

• Khao-So-I

  Asian

  Northern Thai cooking from a kitchen that started in Chiang Mai. The khao soi is built on house-pressed coconut milk and a blend of 32 spices, and arrives on a tray with everything you need to adjust it. Forty seats around an open kitchen and a grill.

• Kinkally

  European

  Contemporary Georgian dumplings and small plates in a room with serious drama.

• Koba

  Asian

  A Fitzrovia Korean room that reinvented itself in September 2025, twenty years after it first sold London on the tableside grill. The barbecue now arrives already cooked from the kitchen, and the grills wait downstairs for anyone who wants to do the work themselves.

• Lokal

  Middle Eastern

  A warm, unhurried Fitzrovia room from the Fred's Bakery team, cooking modern versions of Turkey's regional dishes.

• Luso

  European

  Leo Carreira's wood-fired Portuguese cooking on Charlotte Street.

• Mareida

  Caribbean & Latin

  London's first proper Chilean dining room, coastal cooking with real ambition.

• Miel Bakery

  Bakery & workshop space

  A Warren Street patisserie that doubles as a workshop space. Book in for the Japanese-leaning classes: sake and French pastry pairing, fruit daifuku, furoshiki wrapping, even candle-making.

• Motorino

  European restaurant

  British-Italian restaurant in Fitzrovia from Stevie Parle and Luke Aherne, the chef who won Lita a Michelin star in under a year. The 150-cover dining room has a curved, colourful interior and a menu that includes focaccia, grilled sardines, and pappardelle. Drinks come from Kevin Armstrong of Satan's Whiskers.

• Murder Inc

  Cocktail bar

  A basement off Tottenham Court Road done out as a gangster-noir dive, with a ceiling papered in matchbooks and beer mats. From the Cocktail Trading Company team.

• Noizé

  European

  A warm, low-key French room off Goodge Street from Pied à Terre's former manager. Bottles start at £30 and you can bring your own for £20 corkage, so the wine gets serious without the bill following.

• Qima Café

  Middle Eastern

  Some of the rarest coffee in the world, traced right back to the Yemeni hillside it grew on. A serious cup for people who care where it came from.

• Regent Street Cinema

  Cinema

  Britain's oldest cinema, lovingly restored inside the University of Westminster, on the spot where the Lumière brothers first showed moving pictures in this country. Intimate, vintage, and cheap for the classics.

• Reverend J W Simpson

  Speakeasy

  A basement flat turned cocktail bar, with the old tiles and wall coverings still in place.

• The Remedy

  European

  Exposed brick, candlelight and a wine list that changes faster than your mind.

• The Royal Cocktail Exchange

  Cocktail bar

  A light room upstairs, a dark one below, and the people who know how to fill both your glasses.

• Tiny Wine Bar & Shop

  Wine bar & shop

  Properly small, properly warm, and the natural list punches well above the square footage.

• YOPO

  Caribbean & Latin

  Argentine, Chilean and Peruvian small plates in the theatrically bohemian Mandrake hotel, a hidden, sultry room that reads as a proper date. Style and substance both.

Gospel Oak

• Parliament Hill Lido

  Lido

  A steel art-deco lido on the edge of Hampstead Heath, open year round. Wide deck for summer sunbathing, bracing cold swims in winter, a cheap and good café either way. A different beast to the wild ponds nearby.

Hampstead

• 28 Church Row

  Wine bar

  A wine-led basement on Hampstead's smartest Georgian row, all wooden beams and a teal panelled bar. Croquetas, charcuterie and a specials board built around meat from the butcher up the road.

• Burgh House & Hampstead Museum

  Historic house & museum

  A Grade I Queen Anne house tucked in the Hampstead lanes, free to wander, with a small local-history museum, recitals, and a garden cafe that locals guard.

• Freud Museum

  Museum

  Freud's last home in leafy Hampstead, his study and the famous couch kept as he left them in 1939. There's a film-prop couch in another room that you can lie on.

• Hampstead Heath Bathing Ponds

  Bathing ponds

  Spring-fed swimming on the Heath: the Mixed Pond by Parliament Hill is the way in, lifeguarded, green, and colder than you expect even in August. A London ritual with fiercely loyal regulars.

• Hampstead Jazz Club

  Jazz club

  A proper basement jazz room under a Hampstead pub, no airs, just players. The kind of night that justifies the hill.

• Hill Garden and Pergola

  Garden

  A 300-metre Edwardian pergola on the western edge of Hampstead Heath, draped in wisteria and rambling roses, half-ruined and overgrown in the best way. Free, and best in April.

• Jin Kichi

  Asian

  A tiny, cult Japanese above Hampstead High Street, flames at the yakitori counter and secretive two-person booths. Book; the room is small and timed.

Highgate

• Highgate Cemetery

  Victorian cemetery

  Victorian funerary drama on a wooded hill: ivy-clad angels, the Egyptian Avenue, the Circle of Lebanon. Take the guided West-side tour; it sells out weeks ahead.

• OmVed Gardens

  Garden

  A community garden hidden down an alleyway off Highgate High Street, operating since 2017 with a focus on food education and diverting food waste. Built by landscape architect Paul Gazerwitz and Smerin Architects on post-industrial land, it hosts courses, dinners and supper clubs using produce from its kitchen garden. Currently only open for events, with entry via ticketed courses and dinners or a free summer art show.

• The Bull & Last

  European

  A few steps from Hampstead Heath and the food long ago outgrew the gastropub label. Game, sharing cuts, a proper wine list, a Scotch egg people travel for.

• The Red Lion & Sun

  European

  A Georgian coaching inn in Highgate Village with log fires, two gardens and a menu rewritten daily. Third best gastropub in Britain in 2026, and it still feels like a country pub on the Northern line.

• Turning Earth

  Ceramics studio

  Open-access ceramics in a large, light Highgate studio. Throw a pot, take a class, lose an afternoon. The making, not the buying.

Holborn

• Kitchen Theory Chef's Table

  European

  A gastrophysics tasting menu with real scientific backbone, not a themed gimmick.

• Novelty Automation

  Handmade arcade

  Tim Hunkin's handmade arcade of satirical machines, from Money Laundering to a Small Hadron Collider.

• The Hunterian Museum

  Museum

  Centuries of surgical and anatomical specimens in glass, fascinating and not for weak stomachs.

Kentish Town

• Belly

  Asian

  A candlelit Filipino-French bistro from the Maginhawa group: grilled cuts, French technique, Filipino flavour bombs.

• Kossoffs

  European

  Four generations of bread, resurrected on Kentish Town Road by a great-grandson who knows exactly what he is doing.

• The North London Sauna Village by Lowlu

  Sauna

  Five Finnish saunas between 75 and 95 degrees, and six plunge pools between 3 and 15. Sessions are £10 off-peak and £15.50 at peak, seven days a week from seven in the morning. Sami Rintala designed it, and the site holds forty.

• The Parakeet

  European

  A handsome pub with restaurant-level cooking from ex-Brat chefs. Fire-cooked and protein-forward, with atmosphere for dinner or a clever low-effort date.

King's Cross

• Bar Rioja

  Rioja wine bar

  The only bar in Britain pouring nothing but Rioja: 28 seats off a Victorian courtyard, about fifty wines picked by blind-tasting 220, every one available by the glass. A specialist room that is warm rather than worthy.

• Botanical Boys

  Terrarium workshop

  Two self-taught plant obsessives who sit you down with moss, soil and tweezers until a sealed glass jar becomes a tiny rainforest.

Primrose Hill

• 130 Primrose

  European

  Home Kitchen relaunched with Monica Galetti at the helm, a Mediterranean menu run as a social enterprise employing people with experience of homelessness.

• Primrose Hill Books

  Bookshop

  A small, beautifully curated independent on Regent's Park Road, the kind of shop where one shelf has clearly earned its place over another. Easy to lose an hour in. Pair it with a walk up the hill behind it.

Tufnell Park

• Authentique Épicerie & Bar

  Wine & cheese bar

  French épicerie-wine-bar energy without the cosplay: bottles, cheese, low-intervention leaning. Useful for a date or a catch-up.

West Hampstead

• Moss & Maple

  European

  Kosher fine dining with real ambition, from a chef who clearly wants the stars.

• ONE75

  Cocktail bar

  A neighbourhood cocktail bar with a summer garden you forget is on West End Lane. Stay late for the basement.