45 Seats, Three Stars Regained After 2022, and a 90-Day Countdown
Brett Graham's Notting Hill three-star has been back since February 2022, and the calendar tells you everything about how badly London wants in.
A plate of game arrives at the table dressed with black truffle shaved thick enough that the smell reaches you before the waiter finishes his sentence. The room hums — actual conversation at actual volume, not the strained whispering that curdles most three-star dining rooms into libraries. Someone across the way laughs at their own joke. Nobody looks over.
Brett Graham opened The Ledbury on Ledbury Road in 2005, closed it during COVID in 2020, and reopened in February 2022 with 45 seats instead of the original 55. The Michelin stars came back after the February 2022 reopening — all three of them — and Notting Hill now holds two three-star restaurants within walking distance of each other, this one and Core by Clare Smyth. Tom Spenceley runs the pass alongside Graham. British ingredients drive the menu: game, foraged mushrooms, black truffle used generously enough to feel like a decision rather than a garnish, with French technique underneath and the occasional Japanese ingredient sharpening an edge.
The Ledbury runs the rare three-star dining room that sounds like a restaurant instead of a mausoleum, and that alone earns the trip.
Editorial Deep
A course of game lands early on the eight-course dinner tasting, black truffle shaved across it at a rate most restaurants save for a supplement. The truffle is not a flourish here — it recurs, generous, across the menu, and the kitchen treats it as an ingredient rather than a garnish. British game and foraged mushrooms carry the menu's spine, with French technique underneath and the occasional Japanese ingredient — a citrus, a pickle — pulling a dish tighter.
Conversation is possible at a normal volume, which sounds like a small thing until you have eaten in enough three-star rooms to know it isn't. The Ledbury sounds like a restaurant — cutlery on plate, someone laughing two tables away, a sommelier explaining something without dropping to a whisper. The reverent hush that flattens most rooms at this level never settles.
Three months in advance sounds generous until you notice the calendar rolls forward one day at a time: the day you want opens, and is gone within hours. Miss the 90-day window on your target date and you are out. Go to theledbury.com online booking exactly three months before your target date, or call +44 (0) 207 792 9090 the morning it releases. Instagram DM is also referenced as a channel. If the prime slots are gone, take the 9:45 pm dinner — it is the most attainable fallback and the food is unchanged. Lunch runs Friday and Saturday only; dinner Tuesday through Saturday. Closed Sunday and Monday.
Recommendable, with a caveat: if you have flown for The Ledbury, do dinner.
The condition currently unmet: a service where the range across the tasting flattens out — where the peaks and the plateaus stop sitting in the same meal. On a night where every course lands at the top of what this kitchen can do, The Ledbury is the London dinner. On a night where two or three courses are excellent and the rest are merely correct, it is a very expensive reminder that a top rating is a ceiling, not a guarantee.
What to eat
Don't miss.
The eight-course dinner tasting; take the 9:45pm slot if that's what's available
“A room where you can still hear the person opposite you, and truffle shaved at a rate most kitchens charge extra for.”
Book exactly 90 days out for the eight-course dinner tasting; if invention matters more than execution, Ikoyi or Kol deliver a different kind of memorable meal for comparable money.
The Verdict
