An ex-Hawksmoor chef cooking up thick slabs of meat on a grill with a hot iron in the basement of a former brothel? Sounds like our kind of Soho hangout. And add in an off-menu cocktail trolley and it's our kind of hangout, full stop. Blacklock's excellent cocktails are an absolute steal at a fiver a pop, but if you want something tableside, order a decanter of old fashioneds or negronis, which will be brought over to you on a decadent, golden trolley.
Theatricality is part of the fabric at Heston Blumenthal's restaurants, so it's no surprise that when it comes to dessert at his London restaurant (and his recent Dinner pop-up in Melbourne) he wheels out a pretty tasty trolley. Built at a rumoured cost of around £25,000, his bespoke ice-cream trolley mixes fresh custard with nitrogen at the table, meaning that – as long as you've saved room – you can watch on as your ice cream's made in real time right in front of your eyes.
St John's Wood's Oslo Court is an undoubted institution, having been there since 1970 – and with old-school seafood starters in glasses and big, bold service, it feels like it. Its vaunted dessert trolley's an institution, too: the veteran waiter, known only, as Neil will bound over to the table after your main and offer up the day's desserts with unparalleled enthusiasm.
You might not expect it from one of Jason Atherton's flagship restaurants, but the Michelin-starred super chef does indeed make use of a pie trolley at Berner's Tavern. It's simple: the pie's brought round on its ceremonial trolley with pickled vegetables, condiments and other accompaniments, and it's cut off tableside according to your appetite. It should be pretty decent, too – head chef Phil Carmichael reports that the pie's magic formula – which includes Dingly Dell pork, sage and mace, with a hot-water pastry crust – has taken more than four months to get just right.
You've heard of a martini trolley – you might even have been served an ice-cold, perfectly diluted martini tableside. So it stands to reason that the same formula would hold up pretty well for London's undisputed aperitif of the moment, the negroni. The trolley at BAR45 will offer up three options: classic, vintage, and aged. The differences are as you'd imagine: the vintage negroni will use heavily aged spirits, while the aged one will benefit from ageing in an American oak barrel, giving it a little kick of vanilla and spice. Never a bad thing, in our opinion.
