Decimo

Ten Floors Up, Where Tacos Meet Tapas

Arrive at the Standard London on Argyle Street and the lift does much of the storytelling before a plate arrives. At the tenth floor, the doors open onto a room where cacti and trailing succulents line the bar, a DJ sets a tempo that sits between restaurant and late-night venue, and the entire north London skyline arranges itself behind floor-to-ceiling glass. The physical context matters here: this is a rooftop room that operates as a serious dining destination, not a bar that happens to serve food.

The Street-Food Tradition Behind the Small Plates

Spanish and Mexican cuisines share more structural DNA than their geographic distance implies. Both traditions built their everyday eating around portable, shareable formats: the tapa as a bite beside a drink, the taco as a self-contained unit of protein, acid, and fat. The street-food logic of the taco, specifically, has a discipline to it that fine dining often loses when it tries to absorb the format. At Decimo, Peter Sanchez-Iglesias works from a position with genuine roots in both traditions, drawing on Spanish heritage and documented time in Mexico to shape a small-plates menu that respects those portable formats rather than inflating them into something they were never meant to be.

That lineage matters for how the food reads. Sanchez-Iglesias is the son of a Spanish father and has worked across both Iberian and Mexican culinary contexts, which gives the kitchen a different credibility than the more common approach of treating Mexican cuisine as a flavour palette layered onto a European tasting-menu structure. The small-plate format here sits closer to the rhythm of a taqueria or a tapas bar than to the composed, course-by-course architecture of the ££££ tier occupied by venues like CORE by Clare Smyth, Restaurant Gordon Ramsay, Sketch, The Lecture Room and Library, or The Ledbury. Decimo prices at ££, which means the entry point is lower, the ordering is self-directed, and the energy in the room reflects that informality.

What the Awards Signal

The Michelin Plate, held consecutively in 2024 and 2025, is the Guide's marker for good cooking that does not yet meet star criteria. In practice, it places Decimo in the tier of London restaurants that receive professional recognition without the booking-pressure and price escalation that accompany a star. Together, the two signals suggest a kitchen that performs reliably rather than erratically, which matters in a room that also functions as a nightlife venue on Thursday through Saturday, when hours extend to 1am and 2am respectively.

Decimo in London's Broader Dining Picture

London's Spanish-Mexican hybrid category is narrow. The city has well-established Spanish kitchens and a growing cohort of serious Mexican operations, but the overlap between the two remains a small niche. Decimo operates in that space alongside a handful of other venues, without the institutional weight of long-running Spanish addresses or the cultural specificity that the newer wave of Mexican restaurants in London has built its reputation on. What it has instead is a distinctive room, a price point that sits well below the three-Michelin-star tier, and a format that rewards sharing and ordering broadly rather than treating dinner as a linear progression.

For context on what the ££££ bracket delivers in this city, venues like Dinner by Heston Blumenthal sit in a different category entirely, where the investment per head is substantially higher and the format is structured around a set number of courses. Decimo's ££ positioning means a table of two can eat well across five or six plates and leave without the commitment of a tasting-menu budget. That is a specific and deliberate market position, not an accident of ambition.

The Fat Duck in Bray, L'Enclume in Cartmel, Moor Hall in Aughton, Gidleigh Park in Chagford, Hand and Flowers in Marlow, and hide and fox in Saltwood all represent the country's serious dining circuit. Decimo operates in a different register from all of them, leaning into an urban, late-night energy that those countryside addresses deliberately do not attempt. The international point of comparison for technically serious small-plate formats might reach across to New York, where venues like Le Bernardin and Atomix anchor opposite ends of the spectrum between disciplined French technique and Korean progression menus.

Timing and the Room After Dark

The split personality of Decimo's week is worth understanding before booking. Tuesday evenings and Wednesday lunchtimes represent the quieter, more restaurant-focused end of the schedule. By Thursday the kitchen runs until 1am, and Friday and Saturday push that to 2am, with the DJ presence shifting the atmosphere progressively toward something closer to a bar with food than a restaurant with music. For those prioritising the cooking, mid-week or a Wednesday or Thursday lunch slot offers the better signal-to-noise ratio. For those who want the full rooftop experience with the city lit up at midnight, the weekend late sessions are the obvious choice. Sunday and Monday are closed.

Planning Your Visit

Decimo is located on the tenth floor of the Standard London hotel at 10 Argyle St, London WC1H 8EG, a short walk from King's Cross St. Pancras station. Hours: Tuesday 5pm–midnight; Wednesday 12 to 2:30pm and 5pm–midnight; Thursday 12 to 2:30pm and 5pm–1am; Friday and Saturday 12 to 2:30pm and 5pm–2am; Sunday and Monday closed. Price range: ££££ (about $100 per person). Dress: smart casual. Reservations: Recommended. Google rating: 4.4 across 1,341 reviews.