The Bull & Last

Where Highgate Road Meets Hampstead Heath

Approaching The Bull & Last along Highgate Road on a grey London afternoon, the building reads immediately as a pub that has not been softened for outside consumption. The exterior carries the weight of something built to last — which, given the original structure dates to 1721, it has. Hampstead Heath begins effectively at the door, and that adjacency shapes everything: the clientele arriving mud-booted after weekend walks, the appetite for something restorative and substantial, the sense that this is a local in the oldest and most functional meaning of that word.

Inside, the decision to juxtapose studied neutral decor with a collection of taxidermy is either a provocation or a statement of intent, and it works either way. The room does not try to look designed. It looks like somewhere that has accumulated character across decades, which makes the quality of what comes out of the kitchen a genuine surprise on first encounter.

How the Menu Earns Its Architecture

The menu at The Bull & Last is leading understood as a deliberate layering of register. The leading layer is immediately legible to anyone who has ever sat in a British pub: Scotch eggs at lunch, fish and chips, Sunday roasts. These are not ironic gestures or reconstructions aimed at tourists. They are what they advertise. The second layer is where the kitchen's ambitions become clearer.

Pan-fried king scallops arrive with an apple purée described as silky and tangy, finished with a Catalan-style picada — a preparation rooted in a tradition of nut-thickened sauces that adds texture and herbal depth where a lesser kitchen would stop at butter and lemon. Onglet, the skirt steak that sits outside the premium cuts and demands both confidence and precision to cook correctly, is handled with restraint: served rare, with pronounced char and a béarnaise that does not attempt to overshadow the meat. These are not dishes that announce themselves. They demonstrate technique through understatement.

The kitchen's preference for less obvious cuts and game cookery runs through the menu as a consistent position rather than an occasional feature. This is a deliberate choice about what kind of cooking to champion, and it places The Bull & Last in a category of gastropubs that treat sourcing and butchery as part of the editorial voice of their menus rather than as backstage concerns.

Vegetable dishes carry the same structural logic. A tenderstem broccoli and wild nettle risotto with sheep's ricotta and hazelnuts at dinner, or wild herb gnudi at lunch, are not afterthoughts filling a dietary requirement box. The combination of wild nettle with sheep's ricotta and the textural contrast of hazelnuts reflects the same attention to ingredient relationships that defines the meat cookery.

The two-course set lunch menu, priced at £20, represents a price-to-quality ratio that is genuinely rare in this part of London. At that price point in NW5, the competition is either volume-driven or considerably less ambitious in the kitchen.

Pudding, Cheese, and the End of the Meal

British pub cooking has historically collapsed at dessert, defaulting to a bought-in cheesecake or a token brownie. The Bull & Last's approach is different in a way that reveals something about the kitchen's priorities. The menu reliably offers a baked or steamed pudding alongside a panna cotta, maintaining a register consistent with the rest of the meal rather than dropping to afterthought territory. The cheeseboard is described as generous, which in the context of a kitchen that takes its sourcing seriously suggests selection and condition rather than volume alone.

The Drinks Program

The wine list operates from a Europe-centric base with a stated preference for producers working with minimal intervention. This is now a common position in London's better drinking establishments, but its presence here reflects a considered alignment between the sourcing ethos in the kitchen and the approach to the cellar. The list is built around producers rather than labels, which suits a clientele that comes to drink alongside food rather than to perform wine knowledge.

The British craft ale selection deserves its own consideration. London's craft brewing scene has expanded substantially over the past decade, and The Bull & Last's roster draws from that local production base. For a pub built in 1721 to be engaging with the contemporary London brewing scene is not nostalgic positioning , it is the kind of alignment between place and moment that keeps a pub relevant across centuries rather than decades.

Cocktail program is not the primary draw here, and the pub does not position itself as a destination bar in the way that London's dedicated cocktail venues do. For that tier of drinking, 69 Colebrooke Row and A Bar with Shapes For a Name operate at a different level of technical ambition. Closer to the gastropub spirit but with more formal bar programming, Academy and Amaro offer useful points of comparison within London. Further afield, Bramble in Edinburgh, Schofield's in Manchester, Merchant Hotel in Belfast, and Horseshoe Bar Glasgow in Glasgow represent the range of serious drinking establishments across the UK that are doing work comparable in seriousness, if different in format. Internationally, Bar Leather Apron in Honolulu and L'Atelier Du Vin Wine and Cocktail Bar in Brighton And Hove show the breadth of what wine-led bar programming can look like outside London. Mojo Leeds in Leeds represents the kind of neighbourhood-anchored drinking culture that The Bull & Last participates in, albeit through a completely different aesthetic register.

Seven Rooms and What They Change

Addition of seven guest rooms upstairs shifts The Bull & Last's category in a meaningful way. London's gastropub scene includes very few examples where overnight accommodation is part of the offer, and those that do it well occupy a specific niche: close enough to the city to be practical, far enough from the centre to feel like a partial retreat. Highgate Road, with Hampstead Heath on the doorstep, is precisely that geography. The rooms are not the reason to come, but they change the calculus of a visit, particularly for travellers arriving from outside London or for weekends built around the Heath.

Placing It in the London Gastropub Tier

London's gastropub market has stratified considerably since the early 2000s when the category was defined. At one end sit venues that have effectively become restaurants operating inside pub structures, with tasting menus and wine programs priced accordingly. At the other end, the volume-driven venues that improved their kitchen output but left the fundamentals of pub culture intact. The Bull & Last operates in a distinct third position: the cooking is good enough to anchor a meal as the main event, the pricing is reasonable enough to sustain regular use, and the physical experience remains genuinely pub-like rather than restaurant-in-pub-clothing.

Recognition from multiple London food publications positions it clearly in the upper tier of London gastropubs without placing it in competition with the city's formal restaurant scene. That is a considered position to hold, and holding it over time is harder than it appears.

For broader context on where The Bull & Last sits within London's wider dining and drinking picture, see our full London restaurants guide.

Planning Your Visit

Location: 168 Highgate Rd, London NW5 1QS, at the southern edge of Hampstead Heath. Rooms: Seven guest rooms available upstairs for overnight stays. Budget: The two-course set lunch is priced at £20; evening dining will run higher depending on selection. Reservations: Advisable for dinner and Sunday lunch, given consistent demand; walk-ins are more viable at off-peak lunch times during the week. Dress: No formal code; the room accommodates post-Heath walkers and dinner guests without distinction. Drinks: Europe-centric, minimal-intervention wine list alongside a rotating British craft ale selection.