The best new comfort-food menus London has to offer

Royale, Bow

Royale is the hip sister restaurant to Michelin-starred Leroy. Its head chef, 28-year-old Lucy Timm, offers a simple and deliciously comforting cuisine that is paying homage to Provençal food. Royale is inspired in part by the legendary matriarch of Domaine Tempier, Lucie ‘Lulu’ Peyraud and her ‘cuisine de bonne femme’.

The crisp rotisserie chicken and the chicory salad are worth the hype. And then there is the pleasure of being sat amongst some of east London’s coolest interiors – the perfect place to revive your joie de vivre.

Café Cecilia, Hackney

We booked Café Cecilia in November to secure a table for a Sunday brunch in February so imagine our excitement when we finally walked into Hackney’s über-hyped fixture.

Beyond the softly reverberating canal light coming from the south-facing windows, there is something surprisingly unfussy and comforting about Café Cecilia’s food. Whether a gooey cheese toast or a Dover sole with Jersey new potatoes and melted butter, dishes are simple but well executed. The key is in sourcing the perfect ingredients.

Rita's, Soho

At recently opened Rita’s, a bricks-and-mortar home in Soho for Gabriel Pryce and Missy Flynn’s former Dalston pop-up, is a menu featuring jazzed-up takes on comfort-food classics from the Americas, plus a punchy, tequila-led cocktail list to complement it.

Highlights from Gabriel's menu include hot bean devilled eggs (a favourite at the old pop-up); barbecued beef tartare; a steak dinner for two; and a dessert of house-made key lime pie. (Feeling snug yet?). All this comes served in the sort of warm, inviting atmosphere you'll want to linger in long after the plates have been cleared.

Trattoria Brutto, Farringdon

Almost exactly a year after leaving Polpo, the Italian restaurant group he co-founded with Richard Beatty in 2008, restaurateur-to-watch Russell Norman launched a new venture, Trattoria Brutto, in Farringdon. Swapping Polpo’s signature small plates for hearty Italian fare of the Tuscan variety, Norman’s ‘brutto ma buono’ (‘ugly but good’) restaurant places his former Polpo collaborator Oliver Diver in charge of the stoves, serving dishes ranging from comforting plates of pappardelle with wild boar to lesser-known Italian stews. Cin-cin!

Walter’s, Dulwich

Opening this March, from the team behind Covent Garden institution The Oysterman, is Walter’s, an all-day dining joint through which co-founding duo Rob Hampton and Matt Lovell will champion hearty dishes made with quality British produce. Chef Khalid Hassan (ex Social Eating House and Murano) is in charge of the menu, which includes plates of braised ox cheek; mushroom orzo risotto; and roasted hake with romesco sauce.

Sessions Arts Club, Clerkenwell

As trendy as Café Cecilia and boasting a menu that's equally as comforting, Sessions Arts Club is one of the places to dine this season. It's shabby-chic, plant-strewn dining room looks like a crumbling palace, but in fact, it's the site of the old judges’ dining room at Sessions House, a Grade II listed building in Clerkenwell.

Rustic dishes in generous proportions are the order of the day here, with February's menu boasting crab croquettes, rabbit cotechino, and traditional sirloin steaks.