It’s an unlikely proposition in the most touristy part of London, but The Devonshire is defying the odds to become one of the British capital’s hottest places to eat, drink and party.
Ed Sheeran, Margot Robbie and Bono have all been spotted there, while Jonathan Anderson, whose shop is a few minutes walk away in Soho, hosted a private dinner at The Devonshire to celebrate the recent JW Anderson Guinness collaboration. The reservation list is months long.
The Devonshire, which is located in the former Jamie’s Italian restaurant, tucked between the theater showing “Moulin Rouge! The Musical” and an entrance to the Piccadilly Tube station, has also become a magnet for locals, and tourists, with thick crowds of patrons clustering inside and outside, drinking pints of Guinness and dressed in Arc’teryx or Barbour jackets.
With so many bars and pubs closing, and nightlife virtually dead in London post-COVID-19, The Devonshire is proving that excellent food, Guinness on tap and small-village charm is a winning formula.
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It didn’t happen by accident.
The founders are seasoned restaurateurs and businessmen: Oisín Rogers, the former landlord of the popular Guinea Grill pub in Mayfair; Charlie Carroll, founder of the steakhouse Flat Iron, and Ashley Palmer-Watts, who spent two decades as a chef at the Fat Duck.
“We want this pub to be for everybody — egalitarian and welcoming in its nature whether you’re coming in for a pint, or beef on the grill with duck fat chips. It doesn’t matter what you’re coming here for, something for everyone is very of the moment right now and it’s challenging out there for a lot of people — things don’t have to cost so much money,” Palmer-Watts says from one of the booths in the green room on the ground floor.
Palmer-Watts adds that it took the founders a year to develop the pub’s menu, prior to the opening in November 2023. “We went through what the vision was for these dishes, what we each liked, what we didn’t like about [certain dishes] — and what we thought they should become.”
The handwritten menu ranges from five pounds for a plate of creamed leeks or buttered carrots to 36 pounds for a pile of langoustines, and 39 British pounds for a 9-ounce fillet of beef.
The pub also does a two-course set menu for 25 pounds, or three courses for 29 pounds, which includes a prawn and langoustine cocktail; steak and fries with bérnaise sauce, and sticky toffee pudding. It’s rare to get a meal deal for excellent food at those prices in central London.
Like any good chef, Palmer-Watts pays close attention to his suppliers. The meat comes directly from British abattoirs; the langoustines are bought from a boat in Oban, Scotland, and the scallops are from fisheries in Devon, England, and Scotland.
“I’ve been around a long time. It would’ve been easy for me to turn up six weeks before, get my recipe book out and open a restaurant — that’s generally what happens,” says Palmer-Watts, who instead spent the year before opening in a development kitchen in New Covent Garden Market creating and perfecting every dish.
“I wanted to make sure that we could build recipes that can be followed and scaled to do 550 people a day,” he adds.
For passersby wanting to sample the menu, the pub serves sausages at the bar along with its famous Guinness, which is considered some of the best in London.
It also is one of few places in town that sells nonalcoholic Guinness 0 on draft, which is particularly popular among younger drinkers not big on alcohol.
One week in October, the pub used up 215 kegs of Guinness, equivalent to 4,172 pints a day, or six pints every minute.
To achieve Guinness’ perfectly dark, creamy stout, Rogers traveled to Ireland to investigate the making of the beer, which dates to 1759. He found that pubs in Ireland have their own unique mixture of gas and use carbon dioxide and nitrogen for their Guinness. In London, by contrast, a majority of pubs buy pre-mixed gas to pull their pints.
The Devonshire has a dedicated chiller for its Guinness kegs, but the pressure of the gas is also important. At The Devonshire they use 82-18 PSI, otherwise known as pound per square inch, instead of the standard 80-20 PSI or 75-25 PSI, which is a more intense concentration of gas.
While plenty of drinkers crowd the bar area, lots of Guinness also flows upstairs at the gastropub, which has the spirit of a French village restaurant.
The Devonshire is made up of four floors: butchery and cellar in the basement; the pub and by invitation-only green room on the ground level, with the restaurant and main kitchen on floor one followed by the Claret Room, the pub’s largest room on the second floor along with the terrace.
The tables and chairs in the restaurant have all been sourced from eBay or vintage markets, while the Grill Room features artwork of ducks and rabbits from the artist Jeff Robb and the Claret Room has the iconic photograph of the late Irish restaurateur Peter Langan collapsed on the floor of his famous restaurant Langan’s Brasserie, captured by Richard Young.
Jesse Burgess, the host of Topjaw, the viral food channel, praises the pub for “excelling in every department,” from the ham hock toasties to the pub interiors and the “lovable gregarious landlord Osh.”
The Devonshire is defying the downward hospitality trend in London, and Palmer-Watts thinks he knows why.
Last year, real estate analysts Altus Group reported that the capital saw more than 174 pub closures and in total the U.K. witnessed 383 pubs shutting their doors forever, a number not far from the 386 pubs that were lost in 2022 due to the pandemic and the difficulty in finding staff after Brexit.
“A lot of places are quite boring. A pub really needs the atmosphere, whether you’ve had a good or bad day, it should be the place that gets everyone back in the right head space. It’s also about value for money — it doesn’t matter if it’s 10 pounds or 200 [pounds], people want something that feels like heart and soul have been poured into it,” Palmer-Watts says.
