Guinness Poured Nitro-Heavy and a Beef Cheek Suet Pudding Worth the Thursday Alarm
Soho's Guinness-and-suet-pudding phenomenon, three floors of it, with a Thursday-morning booking drop that sells out in minutes. The walk-in floors are the part nobody plans for.
The Guinness arrives first, because it always arrives first. Two-part pour, the head allowed to settle for the full ninety seconds, the surge lines visible through the glass before they aren't. It's poured with a higher nitrogen-to-carbon-dioxide ratio than most London taps, which is the sort of detail that sounds like marketing until you drink one and understand what's been withheld from you elsewhere. Creamier, softer, less gassy on the second half of the pint. This is the room the country talks about, and the pint is the reason.
Oisin Rogers has been working London pubs for thirty years. Ashley Palmer-Watts came out of the Heston Blumenthal kitchens. Charlie Carroll is Flat Iron. That combination — old-school landlord, technique-heavy chef, meat-supply chain — produced the venue that took the #1 slot on the 2026 Top 50 Gastropubs list after coming in second the year before. The downstairs pub floods onto Denman Street most nights. The upstairs Grill Room requires a Thursday 10:30am alarm and functional broadband. The roof terrace is walk-in and the reason to keep an eye on the weather.
Britain's #1 gastropub is a Heston alum cooking pub food over fire above a Guinness room that pours creamier than any tap in Soho.
Editorial Deep
The butchery happens in-house. The bread is baked in-house. The Scottish beef, the Devon hand-dived scallops, the sourcing chain that runs through Rogers and Carroll's connections — all of it lands before the fire does its work, and the fire is doing a lot of it. The wood-fired grill runs the meat, the wood-fired oven runs everything else, and the kitchen's job is largely to stop cooking things at the right moment. They do.
At 6pm on a Wednesday the downstairs pub is already three deep at the bar and the Grill Room upstairs is quiet enough to hear the fire. By 9pm the pub crowd has spilled onto Denman Street in a solid wedge that Soho hasn't seen at this density in a decade, and the Grill Room is running hot — literally, near the wood-fired ovens, where the tables closest to the pass are noticeably warmer than the ones by the window. The two rooms are almost different businesses at peak, sharing a staircase.
Order the beef cheek suet pudding as a second course and the floor will ask, unprompted, whether it should follow the brawn straight on or arrive after a fifteen-minute gap to let the first course settle. That kind of pacing awareness is what separates a competent gastropub floor from a good one. Wine knowledge is solid rather than encyclopaedic; the staff know their own list and don't oversell.
Put the £29 three-course set menu next to the equivalent lunch at Quo Vadis a few streets over, and The Devonshire wins outright on ingredient quality — the skirt steak comes off a wood-fired grill from a supply chain that runs through Flat Iron, and the sticky toffee pudding is the one people write home about. Quo Vadis is a more polished room and a longer wine list; The Devonshire is more meat, more fire, less ceremony, and a materially better pint. For the money, it's not close.
If you're coming for a quiet dinner and a bottle of wine you would like to taste rather than shout over, this is not the return trip. The upstairs room runs hot, the pub noise carries up the stairs after 8pm, and there are calmer places in Soho — Noble Rot, Andrew Edmunds — for the conversation-first evening. Skip the return if that's what you want.
What to eat
Don't miss.
Beef cheek suet pudding, brawn toast, duck-fat chips, sticky toffee pudding, and a Guinness downstairs
“The ranking that put this pub top of the list holds up. The Thursday morning booking sprint will decide whether you ever find out.”
Go for the beef cheek suet pudding, the Guinness, and the sourcing chain behind both. Skip if you want a quiet conversation or hate booking sprints; try the walk-in roof terrace or the downstairs pub for bar snacks instead, or head to Quo Vadis for a calmer Soho set lunch.
The Verdict
