Smiths Of Smithfield

67-77 Charterhouse Street
London EC1M 6HJ
+44 (0) 20 7251 7950

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Runners up in the Evening Standard Pub of The Year Award 2001, Smiths Of Smithfield has four floors. On the first floor, they have a champagne reception area as well as a private function room. The second floor consists of a brasserie dining room serving a variety of modern English dishes and the third floor is a specialist restaurant serving a wide range of dishes. Downstairs in the basement area is a lively bar and cafe serving a variety of snacks.

3.0 out of 5.0

Based on 1 review

Sending out an SOS

3.0 out of 5.0

May 09, 2008

We ended up at this kind of bizarre, but mostly serviceable bar/restaurant/etc. beside the train tracks for drinks, but hoping for food as well. As it happened, the large downstairs bar area had only just stopped serving food, and the dining room upstairs was a bit more of an ordeal than we were prepared for, so we decided to have a sit and drink instead.
You can tell that they feel pretty good about themselves at SoS, and why shouldn't they, I suppose? They have an impressively long bar packed with fancy booze bottles behind, although the bartender was stumped when one of my colleagues asked for an ever-so-obscure cocktail: a Manhattan. Although he was quite polite about her first effort, he later said out of earshot that it was terrible. Oh well, I go for pints of beer myself normally, and the house Czech lager, SOS, went down nicely. The downstairs bar has many smaller tables as well as two big communal tables and a large square of comfy-looking leather couches.
So what of this place overall? I guess it was nice enough - we had a good place to sit at the communal table and although it was a bit noisy, we carried on with good conversation for a while. Upstairs there is much more to explore, including two floors of dining and one that is apparently geared towards wine tasting. All that said, I got a sense of the after-work element of SoS kind of limiting its ambition, and I don't know how likely I am to run back there again.

Tags: after work crowd, house beer, brunch

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