Best British Gastropubs

The Place:

The Anchor & Hope, near Waterloo Station, is an early and much-loved example of the London gastropub.

The Menu: Straightforward English cooking, gutsy and without pretension. Rabbit is braised with tomato and anchovy. Briny-sweet potted shrimps on crusty toast. The only thing wrong with the place is that they sometimes run out of dishes quickly and cross them off the daily menu, so go early to avoid heartache.

The Place:

An old Clerkenwell pub that′s been given a face-lift by the folks at the boutique hotel Malmaison, a few doors away.

The Story: For a century the place served Smithfield meat purveyors their early morning pints and full English breakfasts. Times changed; business slumped. The old Victorian tile façade and woody insides were slated to be gutted so the place could reopen as a curry shop. Malmaison management stepped in and saved it by fixing up the bar, creating a proper menu of British classics (fish-and-chips, pies, a carving trolley) and adding six modern bedrooms upstairs with big copper bathtubs and artful black-and-white photos of the surrounding market.

The Place:

A small, charming pub where chef Tom Kerridge has earned a Michelin star. Visitors can stay in one of four cottages.

The Classics: Kerridge’s menu relies on seasonal ingredients and changes often, but there is one constant: roast beef and pork on Sundays.

The Place:

A gently lit gastropub in Fulham with a serious menu of game and classic English dishes.

The Critic’s Choice: Jay Rayner is the food critic for the London Observer and author of The Man Who Ate the World and other works. He discussed the state of British cooking over a Harwood Arms dinner of Scotch eggs, boiled salt-beef and Yorkshire curd tart. "There's almost the creation of a British identity," Rayner said of the current interest in traditional British cuisine. "Is it an invented form of England? I wonder if it matters. Sure you could eat Scotch eggs in pubs before, but they have never been as good as the ones we had here."

The Place:

The Hinds Head Inn, in bucolic Bray, is the place you see when you close your eyes and picture the words: Traditional. Village. Pub.

The Menu: The Scotch Egg here is the authentic item—just somehow better. It′s made with a quail egg, wrapped in spicy sausage, and fried to an exquisite runny-crispness. And at Hinds Head, under Head Chef Kevin Love, oxtail stands in for beef in the classic steak-and-kidney pie, with pastry made from traditional suet.

The Place:

Wood floors and stone walls impart a warm, familiar feeling. The pub has rooms to rent in a little yellow house across the street.

The Comfort Food: The menu, of course, is predicated on local ingredients; the fish pie, Grasmere farm sausages, and sticky toffee pudding are all as stabilizing and comforting as the warm bath waiting in your room.

The Place:

A seaside spot near Whitstable, with sheep grazing outside the windows.

The Ideas: Pork scratchings are the most traditional, most basic of English pub snacks: fried pork skin and melted fat. But these are elevated scratchings. Crispy, salty, slightly sticky-they elegantly sum up what the outer bits of the animal have to offer. “The idea is it′s a pub snack that we′ve taken to the ultimate,” says chef Stephen Harris. The milk-fed lamb comes in one pale pink chop, with a hunk of crisped shoulder confit. Underneath, pale wilted cabbage, tiny cubes of zucchini. And broad beans, electric green and peeled. The lamb has a deep, salty mellowness that’s hard to place. “The grasses they feed on were seabed not long ago,” says Stephen′s brother Phil.

The Place:

The Star Inn has rooms to let and a flashy modern dining room with a Michelin-starred chef, but there′s also a cozy pub room that feels like it was carved out of the trunk of an old tree. Here is everything you’d want in a picture-book old-country pub. Low beamed ceilings, indulgent smiling barmaids, a fire, sketches of cricket players and judges on the wall, and good comforting food all day.

When in Yorkshire: For Sunday lunch, nothing else but Yorkshire pudding, served with roast beef cut as thick as a Penguin paperback.

The Place:

Nigel Hayworth’s Three Fishes is a giant, bustling, family-friendly country pub.

The Provenance: The long menu of regional dishes and locally sourced ingredients includes a map of “Regional Food Heroes,” so you can find the lamb purveyor or the cauliflower farmer. Lancashire hot pot is a classic, steadying dish of potatoes and lamb.

The Place:

Housed in a whitewashed old smokehouse near London's Smithfield meat market, St. John is not a true gastropub. But owner Fergus Henderson, who opened this establishment in 1994, is a canonized figure on the revitalized British restaurant scene.

The Story: Vegetarians need not read further. The philosophy concerns meat and nothing but meat. Every part of the animals is utilized, from bone marrow to chitterlings to calf’s liver. The spirit of his “nose to tail” approach—respectful of place and seasons, rigorously unfussy, unapologetically British—hovers over many of the best pub kitchens. The restaurant’s baking operations were so successful that they moved into a private space: First to Spitalfields in 2003, now St. John Bread and Wine, and later to Druid Street in Bermondsey.