Honey & Co

Where Bloomsbury Meets the Eastern Mediterranean

Lamb's Conduit Street occupies an interesting position in London's dining geography: too far east for Fitzrovia's restaurant density, too residential to attract the tourist traffic of Covent Garden. It rewards the deliberate visitor, and the restaurants that have taken root here tend to reflect that self-selecting audience. Honey & Co, at number 54, fits the street's character precisely. The room is calmer than the food suggests it should be — foliage, muted tones, paper tablecloths — with a pace that encourages the kind of meal where dishes arrive in the middle of the table and the conversation outlasts the last plate.

The paper tablecloths are not an affectation. Sharing plates of harissa-dressed labneh and slow-cooked lamb with saffron rice are the sort of food that generates pools of sauce and requires the bread to be present in quantity at all times. The room anticipates the mess that comes with eating generously, and that permissiveness is part of the experience.

The Critical Reception: What the Awards Signal

In a city where Michelin three-star counters like CORE by Clare Smyth, Restaurant Gordon Ramsay, Sketch, The Lecture Room and Library, and The Ledbury define one end of the critical spectrum, the awards Honey & Co has accumulated operate in a different register , but they are no less instructive. A Michelin Plate in 2024 signals that the guide's inspectors consider the kitchen consistent and the cooking worth the detour. More telling is the Opinionated About Dining ranking: placed at number 302 in Casual Europe for 2024, and listed as Recommended in 2023, OAD draws its data from the votes of frequent and professional diners rather than a single inspector's visit. Consistent OAD placement at this price point, in this format, is harder to dismiss than it might appear.

The awards position Honey & Co inside a peer set that includes other critically recognised informal Middle Eastern restaurants across Europe, rather than against the tasting-menu circuit. Within London specifically, the closest analogue is Palomar, which occupies a similarly recognised niche in contemporary Israeli cooking. The difference in register , Honey & Co's Bloomsbury room against Palomar's Soho counter , reflects the two approaches the city's Israeli dining scene has split between: convivial neighbourhood restaurant versus higher-energy central location.

For international context, the genre that Honey & Co represents has developed independent momentum in other cities. Bavel in Los Angeles and Laser Wolf in New York City both work within Israeli and Middle Eastern sharing-plate formats with sustained critical attention. London's version of this conversation is older and arguably more embedded , the influence of Yotam Ottolenghi's restaurants on the city's appetite for this style of cooking stretches back more than fifteen years, and Packer and Srulovich both worked in Ottolenghi kitchens before establishing their own operation in 2012.

The Food: Sharing as Structure, Not Suggestion

The menu at Honey & Co is organised around the logic of sharing rather than the convention of individual courses. Breakfast runs to egg dishes following a meze opening. Lunch and dinner expand into a seasonal carte, but the underlying architecture remains the same: food designed for the centre of the table, eaten in whatever order the kitchen sends it.

The dishes described in critical records include labneh with roast butternut squash, harissa, and pine nuts; sea bream and fennel tagine; slow-cooked lamb with saffron rice; and lentil hotpot with burnt aubergine, scorched egg yolk, and sfinge , the Moroccan doughnut that appears here as garnish. The category these dishes belong to is not fusion or reinvention. It is the cooking of the eastern Mediterranean taken seriously on its own terms, with the vegetable content high enough that critics have noted the meze as a particularly strong introduction to the kitchen's range.

Desserts are available across all service periods, which is the kind of policy that sounds minor and turns out to matter. The honey and feta cheesecake with crispy kadaif pastry is the most-cited single dish. The babka, listed as pillowy, is available alongside takeaway bakery items including the Bloomsbury bun , an orange blossom and almond pastry offered as a specific tribute to the neighbourhood. The fact that the team has named a product after the postcode it operates in suggests a degree of local rootedness that goes beyond location.

Wine, Cocktails, and the Noble Rot Connection

The wine list is curated by the team behind Noble Rot, the wine bar and restaurant that sits directly opposite on Lamb's Conduit Street. Noble Rot's reputation in London's wine community is well-established , its annual magazine and Michelin recognition place it among the city's more serious wine operations. Having that team select the bottles for Honey & Co creates an unusual situation where the wine programme is effectively outsourced to a credentialled neighbour. The result is a Mediterranean-leaning list that aligns with the food's geography rather than defaulting to the standard European carte. Cocktails are described as fun, which in this context reads as deliberately unpretentious rather than under-developed.

The Relocation and What Changed

The current Lamb's Conduit Street address is not where Honey & Co began. The original site was smaller and operated for over a decade before the move to this larger, brighter room. Critical commentary on the transition has been consistent: the new space is described as sleeker, with the founding warmth preserved. The increase in scale has not pushed the operation into a different category , the price range remains ££, the paper tablecloths remain, and the tasting option (small portions of every dish on the menu) continues to offer a structured way through the menu for first-time visitors.

Founders have also built a public profile that extends well beyond the restaurant: cookbooks, catering, and a podcast have kept Honey & Co in wider circulation than its single-site format would suggest. That broader output has contributed to the kitchen's reputation being sustained across the relocation period rather than disrupted by it.

Planning Your Visit

Honey & Co is closed on Sundays. From Tuesday through Friday, the kitchen opens at 8:00 for breakfast service and runs through to 22:30. Saturday service begins at 9:00. Monday runs lunch and dinner from 12:00 to 22:30. The address is 54 Lamb's Conduit Street, WC1N 3LW, in Bloomsbury. The Google rating sits at 4.5 from over 1,600 reviews , a volume that reflects consistent traffic rather than a single-visit spike.

For broader planning across the city, see our full London restaurants guide, our full London hotels guide, our full London bars guide, our full London wineries guide, and our full London experiences guide. If the Honey & Co style of cooking appeals and you are planning a broader UK trip, the country's starred restaurants occupy a very different register: The Fat Duck in Bray, L'Enclume in Cartmel, Moor Hall in Aughton, Gidleigh Park in Chagford, Hand and Flowers in Marlow, and Le Manoir aux Quat' Saisons in Great Milton each represent the formal end of British dining.

Quick reference: 54 Lamb's Conduit St, WC1N 3LW | ££ | Tues–Fri 08:00–22:30, Sat 09:00–22:30, Mon 12:00–22:30 | Closed Sunday

Frequently Asked Questions

What's the leading thing to order at Honey & Co?

The tasting option , a small portion of every dish on the menu , is the most practical answer for a first visit, and it is the choice endorsed by the critical record. Among individual dishes, the honey and feta cheesecake with crispy kadaif pastry is the most consistently noted across reviews, and the meze has been singled out specifically for the quality of the kitchen's vegetable cooking. Order bread in quantity: the sauces that accompany the sharing plates are the point, and you will need something to carry them. If you are visiting in the morning, cake is formally encouraged , desserts run across all service periods.