Lyle’s is so called because it’s housed in the Lyle’s Tea Building on Bethnal Green Road, just around the corner from Shoreditch High Street, in London’s trendy East End.  Lyle’s has one Michelin star and recently retained its number 33 position in the World’s 50 Best Restaurants, the second highest UK restaurant listed.  During the 2021 pandemic I ordered a couple of their make-away boxes, which blew me away with their flavours and seasonality.  But their location in a part of London unfamiliar to me, some distance from a mainline railway station and my habit of combining a good meal with hospital appointments in town, meant it wasn’t until March 2022 that I secured a table to eat at Lyle’s, with a small group of close friends.

Many apologies for the blurred photo above, but I’ve included it so you can get some feel of the minimalist almost industrial feel of the restaurant. It’s all bare wooden tables and ‘school chairs’, so don’t go with the idea that the world’s 33rd best restaurant is going to be plush and luxurious; it got its ranking because of its food, not its decor.  Lyle’s offers only a daily changing set menu of the most in season produce at £79 for 5 courses (including snacks), but there’s a vegetarian option too.  A complementary wine flight is £59.

We all had a couple of cocktails from their interesting list (try the negroni-like “Boulevardier”), and then the bread arrived. It was a good brown sourdough, but the butter was too cold and still hard, and, bizarrely, we didn’t have any side plates to use for the bread. 5/10

Next came the snacks. We each had a crunchy deep-fried Mylor prawn with a black pepper mayo. The whole prawn can be eaten, to get the most out of the flavoursome crispy heads!

We had a nicely chilled Maldon rock oyster with winter tomato and horseradish, which was particularly tasty and refreshing, and finally chicory leaves in a Beenleigh Blue cheese and hazelnut dip.

None of the snacks required any special technical skills from the kitchen brigade, but they provided interesting and varied flavours and textures for the introduction to our dinner. 9/10

Our first course was “Calcots, egg yolk and wild garlic” which had all of us asking what a calcot is! It’s a Spanish/Catalan spring onion with a texture similar to leek. The dish also contained barley and an amazing onion vinegar, which I felt cut through the richness of the egg yolk superbly well and made the dish. 9/10

Our fish course was roast monkfish, charred broccoli and a monkfish liver and butter sauce.  Again this was a simple-looking dish bursting with flavours. The liver in the sauce brought a lot of umami, and I yearned for more of it. 8/10

Our main course was Aylesbury duck with beetroot and blood orange. The beetroot sauce was delicious and the duck was so flavoursome. Despite the duck skin beeing heavily scored, the fat had not rendered down that much, which usually puts me off eating it, but this fat and skin were so lovely.  But at the end of the day, this was another relatively light and simple plate of food. 8.5/10

I have to note that by this stage of our meal more than 3 hours had passed and I still felt hungry; one smallish dish an hour just didn’t satiate me!  So it transpired that we all wanted to share the optional cheese course of Gubbeen and Hafod cheese, with red onion chutney and crumbly spelt biscuits, at £11 each.  We had 3 portions between the six of us.

I forgot to take a picture of our dessert of Yorkshire rhubarb with clotted cream custard, which was nice but unremarkable. 7/10

None of us had a coffee, but we were served petit fours in the form of a pate de fruit (jelly), a macaron and a brown butter financier. 8.5/10

Some 4 hours after we had sat down we suddenly became very rushed to meet last train deadlines. The extended service time had spoilt part of our evening, and caused us to leave the restaurant more stressed and hungrier than we should have been, which was a great shame.  I don’t know why things were so slow (they said larger groups are harder to cater for!), and I should note that when the table was booked for 18:45 we were told we had to give it back by 21:15.  Everyone else who had arrived after us were long gone when we left, so the service element shouldn’t be taken as a common feature of Lyle’s.  I found the food to be flavoursome, in season and simply presented (one of my friends noted, positively, that there weren’t any edible flowers on any of our plates).  Aesop products in the toilets impressed me. The wine flight was best described as “interesting”.  Overall my score is just 7/10. I had expected to score it higher, but the time spent waiting for our food was just ridiculous. IMHO Lyle’s is certainly not the 33rd best restaurant in the world.

Total bill for 6 people was £1169.44, or £195 each.