The Pub Behind the Royal Courts With a Cat in a Ruff
A tiny Grade II listed pub behind the Royal Courts of Justice, run by Roxy Beaujolais with a daily-changing blackboard menu and a martini that doesn't ask questions.
The pub cat wears a ruff. That's the first thing to know, and it tells you most of what you need to know about the sensibility running The Seven Stars: a tiny Grade II listed pub sitting directly behind the Royal Courts of Justice on Carey Street, dressing its resident feline in Elizabethan neckwear and daring the barristers next door to comment.
The building claims 1602. Whether it's really that old is contested — the source itself hedges — but the shape of the place is honest to the claim. Three rooms, each maybe four metres front-to-back, one of the smallest pubs in London. Roxy Beaujolais has run it for decades, cooks whatever she feels like cooking on any given day, and pours martinis with the kind of hand that has generated the same one-word review from multiple sources: lethal. The pub sits in one of the wealthiest wig-and-gown corners of central London and behaves like a rough-and-ready French wine bar that got lost on the way to the Marais.
The best small pub in central London, provided you accept that most nights you will be drinking it standing up.
Editorial Deep
The house martini has been generating the same warning for two decades: near-lethal, poured with a hand that assumes you know what you asked for. It's the drink to order, and the drink to pace. Order a second only if you have somewhere to be tomorrow that doesn't require judgment.
At six on a weekday the pub belongs to whichever barristers finished early, gowns off, wine in hand, half a lamb something on the plate. Come back at nine and the three little rooms have compressed into one continuous crowd, drinkers standing in the doorways, the noise doubling every time someone opens the Carey Street door.
The Royal Courts of Justice are on the other side of the wall, and the pub fills accordingly: barristers and solicitors from the Inns of Court, court reporters, the occasional client who has just found out how the afternoon went. After eight the legal crowd thins and a wider Holborn mix comes in — people who've read about the pub, regulars who've been coming for years, tourists who found it by accident and can't believe their luck. The room is small enough that the crowd is the atmosphere, and on a good night that's exactly what you want; on a bad night it's what you're stuck with.
Nobody has updated the numbers publicly in a while, so treat the blackboard as the authority rather than anything printed. What holds is the shape: this is Holborn pub pricing, not Mayfair cocktail-bar pricing, on a street where the postcode could easily justify the other. A pint and a plate off the board still comes in materially under what the wine bars three streets away charge for the equivalent evening, and that gap is the whole argument for eating here rather than somewhere with more chairs.
This is the best version of a very specific thing: a tiny historic London pub with a cook in the kitchen who cares more than the format requires, run by someone with a point of view, in a location that has no business being this good. Come back on a Saturday afternoon when the courts are dark and the pub breathes, sit down properly, order the lamb burger if it's on and a glass of whatever the staff are drinking. Skip it if you need a table on a Wednesday at seven and can't stand up for an hour to earn one — the room will not adjust for you, and it shouldn't.
Order this
Drink this.
The martini (one, paced), a properly kept cask ale, and whatever's on the blackboard
“The best small historic pub in central London, with a cook who cares.”
A tiny Grade II listed pub behind the Royal Courts of Justice, run for decades by Roxy Beaujolais, who still cooks the daily blackboard herself. Come for a lethal martini, a properly kept cask ale, a plate of unfussy British home cooking, and a cat in an Elizabethan ruff. Come after 8pm for a shot at a seat, or on a Saturday when the courts are dark and the pub breathes. Skip it if you need a guaranteed table on a Wednesday night — the room won't adjust for you.
The Verdict
