Bouchon Racine

Pierre Koffmann, who held three Michelin stars in this city, says of Henry Harris: "Henry may not be French, but what he's doing is fantastic. And, let's be honest, there aren't a lot of French chefs around now."

Why go

Harris ran Racine in Knightsbridge from 2002 until it closed in early 2015, and when he came back to a stove in November 2022 he brought the head chef with him. Chris Handley held the same job at the original (Andy Hayler). That is why a room three and a half years old cooks like one that has been there for decades, which is the exact thing Trevor Gulliver noticed when he named it. The site is the old function room upstairs at The Three Compasses on Cowcross Street, a pub Harris owns with his partner Dave Strauss, with a glass-roofed veranda at the front and blackboards instead of a printed menu (Hot Dinners). The board changes constantly, so what follows is what tends to be on it rather than a fixed list.

Order this / avoid

• Order: the rabbit with Alsace bacon in mustard sauce, which came over from Racine. Steak tartare. Tete de veau with sauce ravigote if offal is your territory. Aiguillette for two with bearnaise. Then the creme caramel, and order it when you sit down: Hot Dinners arrived the day after a Times review and it had already gone.
• Avoid: arriving without a table. Harden's reporters put it flatly: "it's almost impossible to get a table" (Harden's). And know what the kitchen is: one reporter warns "you have to like offal to get the best of their offer."

What locals & experts say

• Pierre Koffmann, in Conde Nast Traveller's Where the Chefs Eat: "Bouchon Racine is not easy to get into because it's small and very, very popular, but it's so worth it if you can go. It's a classic bouchon that feels as though it's been there forever, even though it is relatively new." ref
• Trevor Gulliver, co-founder of St. John, in the same series: "you should feel pangs of hunger because this is a bouchon as it should be." ref
• Tim Siadatan, of Padella and Trullo, asked for his top three places to eat in London: "The River Cafe, St. John, Bouchon Racine." ref
• Anna Sulan Masing, Time Out, five stars, months after it opened: "The word 'restaurant' comes from the French verb to restore; it's a perfect fit for Bouchon Racine, in its comforting food and charming service it feels utterly restorative." ref
• Andy Hayler (September 2023), on what the kitchen is choosing to do: "There is no attempt here to push culinary boundaries to show how clever the chef is, and for that we can all be grateful." ref
• Awards: National Restaurant Awards 2026, number one in the UK and National Restaurant of the Year, up from fifth in 2025, from a panel of more than 200 food writers, chefs and restaurateurs (Hot Dinners). Harden's 2026 diners' survey scores the food 5, "Exceptional", up from 3 the previous round.

Good to know

• Where: first floor of The Three Compasses, 66 Cowcross Street EC1M 6BP, about a minute from Farringdon station. The staircase is narrow and the entrance is through the pub.
• Booking: essential, and hard. If you cannot get in, the pub downstairs serves a smaller version of the same kitchen: pints of prawns with aioli, mackerel on toast, gratinated oysters.
• Operator: Henry Harris with Dave Strauss, who ran operations at Goodman for a decade and then Rockfish. They own the pub as well as the restaurant, so this is two chef-owners betting on one building rather than a group format.
• Michelin: not recorded here. The local guide cache this project holds covers stars only, so it can say nothing about whether the restaurant carries a Bib or a plain listing, and no bylined trade source establishing one was found. Absence from a stars file is not absence from the guide.
• Hygiene: FSA rating 5, inspected 24 March 2026, clean fives across all three components. The register holds the pub and the restaurant under one record. ref

Jeff's take (his words)

Nothing. His saved-places export carries an empty Note for this row, checked against london/data/_src-part3.csv. The master CSV's "Henry Harris's bistro above a Farringdon pub; instant classic" line came from an enrichment pass rather than from him. The first half is true and is sourced above; the second half was dropped in favor of the award, which has a body, a panel and a year attached to it.

Verdict (Chef Jeff ladder)

must-visit — Plan around it, and start planning early, because getting in is the hard part. Four working chefs name this room in four separate pieces: Tim Siadatan puts it in his top three in London, Trevor Gulliver of St. John says it is a bouchon as it should be, a sous chef says you can never go wrong there, and Pierre Koffmann, who held three stars in this city, says a British cook is doing the real French thing. The National Restaurant Awards panel of over 200 industry people moved it from fifth to first in a year and named it National Restaurant of the Year 2026, and Harden's diners' survey moved its food score from 3 to 5 over the same period. Underneath all of that is one continuity fact: Chris Handley has been cooking Henry Harris's menu since the original Racine opened in Knightsbridge in 2002, which is why a three-year-old room tastes like it has been there for decades. The rabbit in mustard sauce with Alsace bacon is the dish that came with them.