The Anchor & Hope

The menu is rewritten every service and nothing on it is allowed to be out of season, which is why the trade press put it top of the gastropub poll two years running: "pink Yorkshire rhubarb in January and asparagus in May and when they run out, it's on to the next thing" (The Morning Advertiser).

Why go

It opened in August 2003 with a genealogy rather than a concept. Chef Jonathan Jones had spent three years at Fergus Henderson's St John, where he met Robert Shaw, then a barman there. Jones introduced Shaw to Harry Lester, who was cooking at The Eagle and The Fox Dining Room, and Mike Belben, who owned both of those pubs, was, in the trade paper's word, "the glue" (The Morning Advertiser). The Eagle is the Clerkenwell pub from 1991 that is credited with starting food in pubs at all, so this room inherits from both parents of the form, and you can taste which one is dominant. It is a nose-to-tail kitchen: offal, cheap cuts, whole braises, large-format plates meant for two or five people rather than one. The pub itself stays a pub, separated from the dining room by a heavy central curtain, and the wine comes in tumblers and carafes instead of stemware (Top 50 Gastropubs). Beer on tap is from Brewpoint, the wine list is long, and the soft drinks are mostly made in house (venue site). The Young Vic and the Old Vic are both a short walk, which is what fills the room at 6pm.

Order this / avoid

• Order: for the table. The two dishes that have defined the place are the rib of beef with chips and bearnaise for two and the slow-cooked lamb shoulder with gratin dauphinoise for five ref. Beyond that, take whatever unfamiliar cut or organ is on today, because that is the house skill. Dishes that have come round on the board include grilled Orkney kipper with tatties, a suet-crusted steak pie with buttered sprout tops for two, and a baked vanilla and poppy seed cheesecake with raspberry sauce ref. The menu changes every service, so treat all of that as the register, not the list.
• Avoid: planning lunch on a Monday or Tuesday. The kitchen only does dinner those days, and on Sunday the pub closes at 5pm with the last lunch orders at 3.15pm.

What locals & experts say

• Time Out London (5 out of 5, Recommended, August 2019): "Open for more than a decade, the Anchor & Hope is still a leading exponent of using offal and unusual cuts of meat in simple but artful combinations." On the room and the plate: "Unlike some gussied-up gastros, the dining area retains the atmosphere of a pub, in a low-lit, art-festooned room, and the food is terrific. textured venison kofte served on perkily dressed little gem lettuce, for example, or rabbit served savagely red with salty jus, fat chips and a big pot of béarnaise sauce." ref
• Good Food Guide 2025/26, best pubs in Britain: 58th in the UK, reported by Time Out's India Lawrence on 4 November 2025, whose one-line summary is "Opened by a former St John chef, the Anchor & Hope serves a nose-to-tail menu." For scale, The Pelican in Notting Hill took 7th on the same list and The Eagle took 11th. ref
• Estrella Damm Top 50 Gastropubs (profile, edition not stated): "Critics often comment on the pub's 'Mediterranean' feel, but that's likely more to do with the relaxed, lively atmosphere than the stellar food, which is modern British to a tee," and it has "become a firm fixture on the list." ref
• The Morning Advertiser, PubChef poll (2006): number one gastropub in Britain for the second year running, so 2005 and 2006. Co-owner Robert Shaw on why nothing had changed: "There may be items on the menu that people haven't seen before, but we're still doing the same thing. The style of cooking hasn't changed, but we're always trying different recipes because the guys in the kitchen are constantly reading." Twenty years old, and listed here as history. ref
• Vittles, "A Newcomer's Guide to London Food" (April 2022): its answer to what to eat near the Tate Modern is "Anchor and Hope, O'Ver, Bao Borough." ref
• Local rec: Jeff has it as a Vittles recommendation. REAL, and the Vittles line above is the published form of it.

Good to know

• Booking, and this has changed: reservations are now open and run 30 days in advance (venue site). The pub refused bookings for its first two decades, turning away, by 2006 rumor, both Gordon Ramsay and Kevin Spacey, and Time Out was still reporting a typical 45-minute midweek wait in 2019. Most of what you will read online is out of date on this.
• Timing: Monday and Tuesday 4pm to 10.30pm, Wednesday to Saturday 11am to 10.30pm, Sunday noon to 5pm. Kitchen lunch is Wednesday to Friday noon to 2pm, Saturday to 2.30pm, Sunday to 3.15pm; dinner runs 5.30pm to 9pm.
• The annual break: the pub shuts for a holiday over Christmas and reopens in the first week of January. In 2026 it closed after lunch on 21 December and reopened for dinner on Wednesday 7 January. This is a scheduled holiday, not a closure.
• Size: around 60 covers in the dining room and 23 outside, running about 1,000 covers a week as of the 2006 trade profile, with a 50:50 split between drink and food.
• Getting there: 36 The Cut, between Southwark and Waterloo stations, two minutes from the Young Vic and close to the Old Vic.
• Hygiene: FSA rating 4 at the Lambeth inspection of 25 February 2025 (FSA).
• Not the other one: there is a separate Anchor & Hope on the River Lea in Clapton, a riverside boozer with no relation to this kitchen.

Craft signals (kitchen: the card changes every service)

This is the fastest kitchen cadence in the London set. The menu changes with each service, not daily and not seasonally, which is why every dish named in any review of this pub including the ones in this entry is a register rather than tonight's card. The mechanism is the sourcing: the kitchen's use of seasonal produce is described as religious, with nothing on the card appearing out of season, and a menu rewritten twice a day is the only way to hold that line. Two signals, the stated per-service rewrite and the seasonality discipline behind it, and both are on the plate rather than in the room.

Jeff's take (his words)

• Note: "Vittles rec" REAL.

Verdict (Chef Jeff ladder)

should-visit — This is where the two lines of modern British cooking meet. Jonathan Jones came out of three years at Fergus Henderson's St John, Harry Lester came out of The Eagle and The Fox Dining Room, and Mike Belben, who owned both of those pubs, put them together in a Waterloo boozer in August 2003. The kitchen rewrites the menu every service and refuses to serve anything out of season, and twenty-three years later it is still 58th of the best pubs in Britain in the Good Food Guide 2025/26. Order for the table, drink the wine out of a tumbler, and eat the cut nobody else is cooking. Not a must-visit only because the freshest critical verdict on record is 2019.