By the time dinner rolled around one evening back in July, the City felt spent. Heat was rising off Moorgate in visible waves, glass towers throwing back the last of the sun in hard, metallic flashes. A few hours earlier, I’d been on the Angler Rooftop Place Hotel’s terrace, glass of rosé in hand, hidden from the heat. It’s a rare thing in London to find a terrace that feels both central and somehow removed; Angler’s rooftop perch manages it. When I walked back inside that evening from open sky to the cool of the dining room, it felt less like changing locations and more like moving onto the next act.
Angler sits at the top of South Place Hotel, essentially part of it but very much its own world. The dining room is bright without being harsh – all pale woods, glass and soft fabric – with those slanted windows framing the skyline. You catch glimpses of the kitchen from the “Chef’s View”, a feature that is part of a semi-private dining space. Through a pass that glows like a small, well-lit stage, a line of chefs work in concert, the occasional flash of a pan, steam rising then disappearing. There’s no theatre in the sense of shouting or clatter. If anything, what strikes you is the opposite: a kind of quiet, practised calm. Head Chef Craig Johnston has refined Angler in his own voice. The kitchen works in the language of British seafood and seasonal produce, but it does so with the sort of confidence that allows restraint.
Johnston is the improbably young MasterChef: The Professionals winner who went on to run the kitchen at Marcus before taking over Angler’s rooftop domain. By the time we finally met in person, he was already deep into service, moving between sections with the same quiet focus I’d read about. He’s now a Roux Scholar, with the weight of a Michelin star and a supply chain stretching from Newlyn and St Austell Bay up to the City. I met with Johnston briefly at the pass and asked how he feels about the menu, now it’s firmly his. “The produce has to lead,” he explained. “We talk to our suppliers every day – Flying Fish in Cornwall, farms and growers all over the country, and once you see what’s actually best that week, you get out of its way. The team’s job is to make sure it arrives on the plate tasting of where it came from, not of what we can do to it.” In this room, with this team, it rings true.
The opening moves of the evening are small but telling. A prelude of seafood, perhaps a tartare of tuna dressed with ginger and toasted sesame, the fish cut with that almost absurd neatness that only comes from repetition and pride. A wafer of cornbread with something rich and silky on top, more a mousse than a pâté, vanishing before you’ve quite finished parsing it. The tasting menu here is designed to start in a murmur and build, and Johnston understands pacing as much as he understands seasoning. The plates arrive in a sequence that feels inevitable rather than merely clever.
One of the dishes that has become something of a signature is the native lobster ravioli: a single, plump parcel in a pool of deeply flavoured bisque, lifted with fennel and Thai basil. Versions of it appear regularly on Angler’s menus, and with reason. The pasta is thin enough to be almost fragile, the lobster inside sweet and fulfilling, the sauce reduced to a glossy intensity that never tips into heaviness. It’s the sort of dish that looks simple enough on the plate but is absolutely merciless if the kitchen is off by even a few seconds. On this night it was perfect, the kind of course that makes the room recede for a moment. It’s perhaps just one of the reasons that Angler has its star.
Fish cookery is where Angler stands or falls, and it stands very well. The Michelin Guide notes the “top-drawer fish” and pared-back treatment, including a now-famous roasted Newlyn cod, and that’s very much the energy at play. A fillet of John Dory might arrive with Coco de Paimpol beans, the skin crisped but not shattered, the flesh just at that point where it yields to the fork but still has definition. A roast Orkney scallop, caramelised just at the edges, might be paired with artichoke and hazelnut – the whole dish built as much on texture as on flavour. What links each plate is a refusal to over-complicate. Despite the tasting-menu format there’s no sense of the kitchen trying to show you everything it can do at once.
What’s easy to overlook – at least, when the food is this precise – is the machinery behind it. Watch the brigade for more than a few seconds and you’ll see just how well-drilled they are. Fish is portioned and checked, sauces tasted constantly, garnishes placed with an almost architectural sense of space. Plates don’t leave the pass until two pairs of eyes have agreed.
Pudding is a continuation rather than a detour. Angler has, over the years, served dishes like buttermilk panna cotta and meticulously assembled seasonal desserts, the kind of finales that focus on clarity and temperature as much as sweetness. On my visit, a cool, gently tangy finish of blood peach Champagne and chamomile did exactly what it was supposed to do after all that richness: reset the palate without erasing what came before. Again, nothing shouted. Nothing needed to.
The wine list deserves its own mention. This is not a trophy-bottle collection for those who need to be seen to spend; it’s an intelligent document built to play to the menu’s strengths. There’s Burgundy, of course, but also interesting whites from elsewhere in Europe and further afield, and with a range of price points, it doesn’t feel punitive. The wines feel like an extension of that same sensibility: thoughtful, unfussy and there to do a job, much like Angler’s technically precise cooking. My own glass, a mineral-driven white with a spine of citrus, was poured with just enough context to be interesting, then left to get on with supporting the John Dory without another word.
Service is pitched exactly where a restaurant of this calibre should aim: present, informed, and human. Plates are described succinctly, questions about sourcing or technique are answered with a level of detail that satisfies a curious diner without drifting into lecture, and there’s a lightness of touch that keeps the room from ever feeling stiff.
What I took away from Angler that night was not just a well-curated selection of dishes, or the memory of a particularly well-timed plate of lobster ravioli, or even the sense of calm in the room. It was a more joined-up chain of notions and imagery, of Cornish boats landing early in the morning, of a supplier business built on speed and respect for the catch, of a city rooftop dining room that could easily have been content to coast on its postcode but instead continues to refine. It was a crystal-clear picture of a head chef who sees himself not as a star turn but as the conductor of a wider network, of kitchen, front-of-house, fishermen, farmers and winemakers, all aligned behind the idea that seafood, treated properly, works like a symphony.
London is full of places that trade on altitude and hype. Angler doesn’t need to. On a hot July evening, high above the City streets, it offered something rarer: focus, craft and a sense of where things come from, presented with just enough polish to feel special and just enough ease to feel welcoming. You leave not dazzled, but satisfied – which, for a restaurant built around the sea, seems exactly right.
