Pick the Beer Garden or Don't Bother
A Grade II-listed Highgate pub with one of north London's best beer gardens and a Sunday roast worth the Northern line. Skip the cocktails and go straight for the cask.
The path from Highgate West Hill to the front door of The Flask runs past better-looking Georgian houses than most Londoners will ever set foot in, and then delivers you to a pub that has been on this corner long enough to feel like it belongs to the hill rather than the other way round. The building is Grade II-listed. The ritual it is most famous for — the Swearing on the Horns, a bit of theatrical nonsense a coach party used to perform on the way out of London — is the kind of history that a lesser pub would print on the coasters.
This is a Fuller's pub, and it is best understood as one: a cask-ale operation with a proper kitchen bolted to it, run on the assumption that most people are here for a pint, a roast, and a chair outside when the sun cooperates. Confirm before you set off that you want the Highgate Flask and not the Hampstead one — they share a name, a postcode band, and almost nothing else. The à la carte runs from a £19.50 double cheeseburger to a £38 225g ribeye, with an £80 800g côte de boeuf for two at the top.
The Flask is a beer garden with a pub attached to it, and the reader who books the wrong seat gets the wrong evening.
Editorial Deep
The cocktail list is the weakest part of the operation, and it is not what you are here for. Order a cask ale. Fuller's runs the taps, which means the London Pride pours as it should and the rotating guest pumps are worth reading before you commit.
You approach along Highgate West Hill and the pub reveals itself in the wrong order: the garden first, tucked behind railings and a low wall, then the entrance around the side. Push through and the interior does what a 300-year-old Grade II-listed pub is supposed to do — low ceilings, small linked rooms, dark wood, the kind of nooks that a large group cannot colonise even if they try.
Highgate villagers, Hampstead Heath walkers finishing their loop, north London families doing the Sunday roast run, and the occasional dog under every third table. It skews local and it skews older than the Dalston pub scene by a decade. That is the appeal — the room hums rather than roars, conversations stay at conversation volume, and nobody is angling for your table because nobody is queueing at the door. The exception is Sunday lunch and any bright Saturday between April and September, when the garden fills and the pace changes.
The Sunday roast is the item to defend on price. It arrives with cauliflower cheese, sprouts and peas, Yorkshire pudding and red wine gravy. The cocktails are the line item that doesn't justify its markup; stay on the cask and the wine and the bill defends itself.
This is the best version of a Fuller's village pub in north London, which is a narrower claim than best pub in London but a more useful one. Come back for Sunday lunch with the garden booked, or for a weeknight pint after a Heath walk when the small rooms inside are doing their job. Don't come back expecting a cocktail bar, a late night, or a scene. The kitchen shuts at 22:00 Monday to Saturday and 21:00 on Sunday, and the pub itself closes at 23:00 — this is a room that ends its evening early and expects you to as well.
Order this
Drink this.
Sunday roast with a pint of London Pride; skip the cocktails
“A Fuller's pub that lives up to its Grade II listing — cask, roast, garden, in that order.”
The Flask is the best version of a Highgate village pub, which is exactly what it should be and no more. Book the garden when it's warm, book a small interior room when it isn't, order a cask pint and the Sunday roast, and leave the cocktail list alone. If you want a late night or a scene, the pub closes at 23:00 and expects you to as well — head to Dalston. If you want a considered London afternoon spent well, this is the room.
The Verdict
