The Princess Royal

The Dining Pub, Reframed

London's dining-pub category has always occupied an awkward position: too casual to compete with destination restaurants, too ambitious to settle for bar snacks and a microwaved pie. Over the past decade, a handful of operators have tried to resolve the tension by treating the pub format as a genuine dining room with draught beer on the side rather than the reverse. Cubitt House is among the more deliberate of those operators, running a small group of London properties where the kitchen receives the same attention as the room. Among that group, The Princess Royal on Hereford Road in Notting Hill is, by the assessment of inspectors, the strongest performer.

The approach it represents — Mediterranean-leaning menus, a raw bar, proper wine lists in a Victorian pub shell — has become something of a London archetype in the 2020s. What separates the better examples from the merely competent is the consistency of execution and the willingness to let the food make the case without the room doing all the work. At 47 Hereford Road, the room does considerable work, but the kitchen keeps pace.

Racing Green and Bare Brick

The exterior arrives in British racing green, which signals something immediately: this is a pub that has been thought about. The colour choice sits in a long tradition of London pub fronts designed to stop foot traffic, and it works on a quiet residential street where the competition is white stucco and parked cars. Inside, the aesthetic runs to bare brick walls, potted plants, and marble-topped tables , the kind of material palette that reads as rustic but requires curatorial restraint to avoid becoming pastiche. Here it holds together.

Room divides into distinct zones, and the choice of where to sit shapes the rhythm of the meal. Counter seating by the raw bar positions you close to the action, with a view of the preparation that makes snacking feel participatory rather than incidental. The rear room offers black leather chesterfields and a degree of enclosure suited to longer, slower dinners. The conservatory at the back opens toward a garden and admits enough natural light to make it the obvious choice on a clear afternoon. Each zone has a slightly different tempo, and regulars tend to have a preferred position.

How the Meal Moves

Menu structure at The Princess Royal follows the small-plates format that has dominated London restaurant openings since roughly 2015, but the pacing here is better considered than in many comparable rooms. The format is snacks, small plates, large plates, and salads, with the raw bar offering a separate sequence that can anchor the opening of a meal independently. This is not a menu designed to be ordered all at once and consumed at speed; it rewards incremental ordering and the kind of table conversation that shapes a dinner over two hours rather than ninety minutes.

Ben Tish, who leads the kitchen with a background at Norma and the Game Bird, has built a Mediterranean-inflected menu in which the sourcing does a meaningful share of the work. A hand-dived scallop crudo from the raw bar , dressed with lemon, dill, chilli, and marjoram, accompanied by carosello cucumber , arrives with the kind of freshness that makes the preparation feel beside the point. An inspector noted that this is not the sort of dish you encounter in most pubs, and that observation captures something accurate about the register the kitchen is aiming for.

The small plates push further. Three cheese pizzette fritti, fried and served with burrata, mascarpone, Fontina, and spring truffle, occupy a category of dish that requires precise timing and a kitchen confident enough not to over-dress. A salt marsh lamb plate, served with French beans, peas, courgettes, and ricotta, gains definition from rose harissa used with restraint rather than as a shortcut to heat. These are dishes where the Mediterranean reference is structural rather than decorative , the technique and the ingredient logic are consistent, not merely the flavour profile.

Dessert options include doughnuts with raspberry jam and Marsala custard, which an inspector described as delicious, and a Neal's Yard cheese selection that functions as a natural bridge between the food and the wine list rather than a standalone afterthought.

The Wine Argument

The wine list at a dining pub is often where ambition retreats. Lists get shortlisted to safe crowd-pleasers, markups run high, and by-the-glass options are an afterthought. The Princess Royal takes a different position: the list is described as broad-minded, covering variety across most budgets, with bottles starting at £29 and a meaningful by-the-glass offering. In a neighbourhood where wine bars and restaurant wine programs set a competitive benchmark, this matters. The cheese selection makes more sense when the list supports extended drinking, and the Mediterranean menu provides enough direction that a knowledgeable list manager could build interesting pairings without much stretching.

Service and the Dog Question

The service approach is laid-back and pleasant , attentive without the kind of choreographed formality that creates distance between a table and the room. In the context of a pub, this is the right calibration: too stiff and the informality of the space becomes a contradiction; too loose and the food stops landing as it should. The venue is dog-friendly, which in Notting Hill is not a minor point. The neighbourhood runs a high density of dogs per resident, and a dining pub that accommodates them reaches a different weekday lunch clientele than one that doesn't.

Notting Hill's Dining Position

Hereford Road sits in the quieter residential band of Notting Hill, away from the Portobello Road market crowds and the higher-profile restaurant cluster around Westbourne Grove. The street is the kind of address that requires intent to reach , you arrive because you planned to, not because you passed by. That self-selection shapes the room: the clientele skews local and returning rather than tourist-heavy, which reinforces the relaxed register the venue is aiming for. For a broader survey of where London's dining energy is concentrated right now, the full London restaurants guide provides context across neighbourhoods and price tiers.

London's drinking scene is equally worth mapping. For cocktail programs with technical ambition, 69 Colebrooke Row in Islington remains a reference point for the clarified and spirit-forward school. A Bar with Shapes For a Name represents a different strand of the city's cocktail progression, while Academy and Amaro each occupy distinct positions in the broader scene. Beyond the capital, the same editorial logic , serious programs operating within informal formats , plays out at Bramble in Edinburgh, Schofield's in Manchester, Horseshoe Bar Glasgow, Mojo Leeds, and Merchant Hotel in Belfast. Further afield, L'Atelier Du Vin in Brighton and Bar Leather Apron in Honolulu show how the template travels across formats and latitudes.

Planning Your Visit

Address: 47 Hereford Rd, London W2 5AH. Reservations: Contact the venue directly; walk-ins are possible but the conservatory and rear dining room fill on weekends. Budget: Wine bottles from £29, plentiful by-the-glass options; the small-plates format allows flexible spend. Dress: Relaxed; smart casual fits the room without over-dressing it. Dogs: Welcome throughout.