The Park

Queensway's Quiet Comeback and the Brasserie That Fits It

London's brasserie format has always depended on a specific tension: rooms big enough to generate atmosphere but designed carefully enough to make each table feel considered. The stretch of Queensway around Bayswater has spent years in the shadow of more aggressively fashionable neighbourhoods, but the arrival of large-format, quality-conscious restaurants has started to reframe the area. The Park, at 2 Queensway, sits directly inside that shift. It occupies a scale and price point (£££) that positions it between the neighbourhood bistro tier and the full fine-dining bracket occupied by places like CORE by Clare Smyth or Restaurant Gordon Ramsay — a mid-to-upper-mid register where the quality of the room and the range of the menu carry as much weight as any single dish.

The restaurateur behind The Park is Jeremy King, whose track record in London's large-format dining rooms is well established. The patterns he has developed across previous openings — generous menus, rooms that combine scale with comfort, a level of polish that stops short of formality , are all present here. Michelin awarded the restaurant a Plate in 2025, a recognition that signals cooking worth attention without placing it in the same category as the city's tasting-menu-driven fine dining. Early Google reviews average 4.3 across 224 ratings, a figure that suggests consistent delivery rather than polarised opinion.

The Menu Logic: Italy, America, and the Brasserie Breadth

The broad-church brasserie menu is a distinct format from the tightly edited tasting menus that dominate the conversation around London's top tier. Places like Sketch, The Lecture Room and Library operate on a fundamentally different logic , high commitment, single direction, theatrical framing. The Park's approach is closer to the American and Italian traditions of the all-day room: a menu where a lobster roll and a chicken Milanese can sit alongside each other without either feeling out of place. That range is not a compromise; it is the point. The kitchen draws on both Italian and American references, producing a menu that allows a table of four to order in completely different directions and still feel like they are in the same restaurant.

Park Monkey Bread, a tear-and-share format designed for the table, functions as an early signal of this philosophy. Shared bread as a centrepiece is a device more common in American dining rooms than in traditional London restaurants, and its presence here reinforces the transatlantic register of the menu. For those arriving earlier in the evening, the bar programme offers cocktails before the table, extending the visit into a longer format typical of the brasserie tradition. For comparable American-influenced dining in a different city context, Hilda and Jesse in San Francisco and Selby's in Atherton represent how the format plays out at the premium end of the American market.

Within London, the American steakhouse model at Cut at 45 Park Lane or the long-standing American diner tradition at Joe Allen show how differently the same broad culinary heritage can be expressed depending on the room and the operator. The Park reads as a brasserie synthesis rather than a genre exercise.

Planning the Visit: What the Booking Picture Tells You

The editorial angle that matters most for The Park right now is timing. New openings from restaurateurs with established track records in London tend to fill quickly in the first months of operation, and The Park fits that pattern. Jeremy King's previous projects have consistently attracted an audience that books ahead rather than walking in, and a Michelin Plate in the opening year accelerates that demand cycle. The practical implication is that anyone planning a visit should treat advance booking as a baseline assumption rather than a precaution.

The £££ price point places The Park in the upper-mid bracket where the cost of a missed reservation is meaningful. This is not the tier where a walk-in gamble makes sense. The restaurant's Bayswater location on Queensway is accessible by tube (Bayswater and Queensway stations both within walking distance), and the address at 2 Queensway puts it close to Hyde Park, which makes it a natural endpoint for an afternoon in the park or a pre-theatre dinner given the neighbourhood's transport links. The large-format room, typical of King's openings, means that once inside, the space does not feel rushed or compressed in the way that smaller reservation-driven rooms can. But getting to that point requires planning.

For readers building a broader London dining itinerary, the EP Club guides cover the full range: 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 provide the wider context. Those extending the trip beyond the city can explore the UK's destination restaurant scene at 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.