Where to Eat Like an Oscar-Winning Film Star in London (2025)

This story of forbidden lesbian love is set in north London’s Orthodox Jewish community but has scenes set halfway across London, in the Vallance Road outpost of Rinkoff’s 107-year-old Jewish bakery. Ronit, played by Rachel Weisz, who was nominated as best actress at the 2019 London Critics Circle awards for her performance, heads to the bustling café for a pastry and a coffee when she’s feeling low. Which is quite often, as it happens.

Rinkoff Bakery [Official Photo]

The Home Office thriller set pulses racing across the pond, with Golden Globe nominations and a win for the titular bodyguard, Richard Madden. Set within a fractious London, its first episode sees a vindictive ex-employee of the Home Secretary(Keeley Hawes) meet with a journalist in a Strand restaurant. Too busy to conspiring to eat much, the pair surely missed out on the pub’s homemade sausage roll with onion marmalade. Elsewhere in the series, though not featuring its Michelin starred rooftop restaurant Angler, or its chop house, a room in Liverpool Street’s South Place Hotel sets the scene of the Home Secretary’s safehouse.

The Theodore Bullfrog [Official Photo]

Edible sustenance isn’t high on heroin addict Patrick Melrose’s (Benedict Cumberbatch) list of cravings, but this relatively unchanged working men’s club in south London is now Golden Globes-adjacent, following Cumberbatch’s nomination for best actor in a miniseries. Doubling up for a Notting Hill working men’s club, it plays host to the AA and NA meetings Melrose should have attended. Founded in 1875, the venue serves bar fare of crisps, peanuts and scampi fries along with all the drinks, with membership costing just £20 a year.

EJ Richards/FilmFixer

The surprise Golden Globes best picture, which has its star, Rami Malek, shortlisted for best actor at the Oscars for his role as Freddie Mercury, includes a surprise filming location. The Griffin pub is a trad-Brit sort of joint near Brentford football club, with a menu including fish and chips, burgers and sausage and mash. Though supper club offerings are a cut above, include ‘locally-sourced pigeon’ lobster and osso bucco, the decor is so steeped in early 1980s nostalgia — all red and yellow carpets, oak-wood-panels and a stack of trophies teeming next to the darts board — that it was the perfect location for a cameo. For a scene set in 1985, over 100 pub-goers, all crammed in, watch Queen play at Live Aid.

The Griffin [Official Photo]

When Eve Polastri (Sandra Oh, who won a Golden Globe for her performance in the hit show) is first roped into service with MI6 through shady spy Carolyn Martens (Fiona Shaw), she’s told to meet the Purple Penguin Restaurant in Charing Cross for a discreet chat. Could such a muted place exist in one of London’s busiest thoroughfares, chock full of identikit lunchtime offerings and Caffé Concertos? Well, the cavernous Zela just up the road in Aldwych, is close enough. But it can be heard from space. Appearing in the show as itsprevious incarnation, Cucina Asellina, with big arched windows, bombastic brass-lit wine fridges, purple walls and white leather chairs, it’s now even more pompously garish under the auspices of new ownersCristiano Ronaldo and Enrique Iglesias, who’ve bankrolled this foliage and a ‘meppon’— Mediterranean-Japanese fusion-themed gaff.

Susanna Diallo/AMC Networks

Exteriors and principle shooting of Yorgos Lanthimos’s 10-times Oscar-nominated black comedy The Favourite took place in not-quite-London’s Hatfield House. However, west London’s Hampton Court Palace is the setting of several of the film’s scenes. The long wood-panelled Cartoon Gallery, grand Fountain Court and King Henry VIII kitchens all have starring roles alongside Olivia Colman, Emma Stone and Rachel Weisz. In a film of blue iced cakes, duck races and fruit-pelting games, the King Henry VIII kitchens were anything but anachronistic — Queen Anne spent time in residence at Hampton Court, enjoying the proceeds of those very same kitchens. A place for cakes to be baked, deer to be spit roasted and beef steaks to be stored in case the Queen’s gout-afflicted legs needed soothing, the kitchen is display-only these days. So if you’re after some cake to gorge on, Hampton Court has three cafés, one serving ‘Tudor-style pies.’

Photo by Dan Kitwood/Getty Images

This story of forbidden lesbian love is set in north London’s Orthodox Jewish community but has scenes set halfway across London, in the Vallance Road outpost of Rinkoff’s 107-year-old Jewish bakery. Ronit, played by Rachel Weisz, who was nominated as best actress at the 2019 London Critics Circle awards for her performance, heads to the bustling café for a pastry and a coffee when she’s feeling low. Which is quite often, as it happens.

• Open in Google Maps

Rinkoff Bakery [Official Photo]

The Home Office thriller set pulses racing across the pond, with Golden Globe nominations and a win for the titular bodyguard, Richard Madden. Set within a fractious London, its first episode sees a vindictive ex-employee of the Home Secretary(Keeley Hawes) meet with a journalist in a Strand restaurant. Too busy to conspiring to eat much, the pair surely missed out on the pub’s homemade sausage roll with onion marmalade. Elsewhere in the series, though not featuring its Michelin starred rooftop restaurant Angler, or its chop house, a room in Liverpool Street’s South Place Hotel sets the scene of the Home Secretary’s safehouse.

• Open in Google Maps

The Theodore Bullfrog [Official Photo]

Edible sustenance isn’t high on heroin addict Patrick Melrose’s (Benedict Cumberbatch) list of cravings, but this relatively unchanged working men’s club in south London is now Golden Globes-adjacent, following Cumberbatch’s nomination for best actor in a miniseries. Doubling up for a Notting Hill working men’s club, it plays host to the AA and NA meetings Melrose should have attended. Founded in 1875, the venue serves bar fare of crisps, peanuts and scampi fries along with all the drinks, with membership costing just £20 a year.

• Open in Google Maps

EJ Richards/FilmFixer

The surprise Golden Globes best picture, which has its star, Rami Malek, shortlisted for best actor at the Oscars for his role as Freddie Mercury, includes a surprise filming location. The Griffin pub is a trad-Brit sort of joint near Brentford football club, with a menu including fish and chips, burgers and sausage and mash. Though supper club offerings are a cut above, include ‘locally-sourced pigeon’ lobster and osso bucco, the decor is so steeped in early 1980s nostalgia — all red and yellow carpets, oak-wood-panels and a stack of trophies teeming next to the darts board — that it was the perfect location for a cameo. For a scene set in 1985, over 100 pub-goers, all crammed in, watch Queen play at Live Aid.

• Open in Google Maps

The Griffin [Official Photo]

When Eve Polastri (Sandra Oh, who won a Golden Globe for her performance in the hit show) is first roped into service with MI6 through shady spy Carolyn Martens (Fiona Shaw), she’s told to meet the Purple Penguin Restaurant in Charing Cross for a discreet chat. Could such a muted place exist in one of London’s busiest thoroughfares, chock full of identikit lunchtime offerings and Caffé Concertos? Well, the cavernous Zela just up the road in Aldwych, is close enough. But it can be heard from space. Appearing in the show as itsprevious incarnation, Cucina Asellina, with big arched windows, bombastic brass-lit wine fridges, purple walls and white leather chairs, it’s now even more pompously garish under the auspices of new ownersCristiano Ronaldo and Enrique Iglesias, who’ve bankrolled this foliage and a ‘meppon’— Mediterranean-Japanese fusion-themed gaff.

• Open in Google Maps

Susanna Diallo/AMC Networks

Exteriors and principle shooting of Yorgos Lanthimos’s 10-times Oscar-nominated black comedy The Favourite took place in not-quite-London’s Hatfield House. However, west London’s Hampton Court Palace is the setting of several of the film’s scenes. The long wood-panelled Cartoon Gallery, grand Fountain Court and King Henry VIII kitchens all have starring roles alongside Olivia Colman, Emma Stone and Rachel Weisz. In a film of blue iced cakes, duck races and fruit-pelting games, the King Henry VIII kitchens were anything but anachronistic — Queen Anne spent time in residence at Hampton Court, enjoying the proceeds of those very same kitchens. A place for cakes to be baked, deer to be spit roasted and beef steaks to be stored in case the Queen’s gout-afflicted legs needed soothing, the kitchen is display-only these days. So if you’re after some cake to gorge on, Hampton Court has three cafés, one serving ‘Tudor-style pies.’

• Open in Google Maps

Photo by Dan Kitwood/Getty Images