The Pelican

Land and sea on the same pass

For a Victorian corner pub remade for seasonal British cooking, head chef Owen Kenworthy holds the pass at The Pelican in London. It asks for crab, pie, and beef in the same breath. Land and sea share the brief here, and local seasonal produce carries the method, which makes sense of the menu’s range rather than softening it. Kenworthy arrived with a run of respected London rooms behind him, including The Wolseley, Sketch, Brawn, Primeur and Western’s Laundry, and he keeps provenance at the front of the buying, working with suppliers such as Paddock Farms and Whittington Lodge. Spider crab on toast, lobster and monkfish pie, and bone-in sirloin do not ask for the same hand, but they do ask for the same discipline at the station.

The kitchen works through technical handling, local seasonal products, and an instinct that does not separate sourcing from method. The Pelican gives that instinct a British frame: shellfish on toast, potted and roasted things, pies with proper gravy, fish and meat moving through a room built for pints as much as plates. The house began as a Victorian pub dating back to 1870 and was relaunched in 2022 after a major refurbishment led by James Gummer, with Phil Winser and Richard Squire among the co-owners. That history matters because the kitchen cannot behave like a dining room dropped into a pub. It has to feed the room it inherited.

A short menu with weight behind it

The cooking is built for brevity. Dishes appear with little adornment, often as the principal ingredient and its pressure point: chicken and girolles, mullet and mussels, crab on toast. Daily specials extend the à la carte without turning the place into a tasting-menu house. The method is in the choices: puff pastry burnished around lobster and monkfish; cod cheeks held crisp enough for curry sauce; bone marrow cut with parsley; calves liver cooked so the centre keeps its purpose.

The lobster and monkfish pie is the dish that best explains the kitchen’s nerve. It takes a pub form and loads it with shellfish, firm fish, and lobster head gravy, a plate closer to a shared centrepiece than a garnish-led composition. Spider crab on toast works in the other direction, smaller, saltier, direct from the counter rhythm of eating with a glass nearby. The bone-in sirloin keeps the same plain grammar. At The Pelican, provenance is not stretched into a speech; the menu stays short, the specials keep moving, and the plate has to carry the claim.

Candlelight, timber, and the corner pub

The room keeps the memory of the old boozer without pretending it was untouched. Soft candlelight sits against stripped-back surfaces, and the corner position on All Saints Road gives the place a steady local current: families, after-work drinkers, tables that came for supper, people leaning into the bar before deciding whether food should follow. The noise stays conversational rather than hushed. That matters for this kind of cooking. A pie lands differently in a room that still understands a pint.

There is glamour here, but it is held close to the wood, the glass, the bench, and the pass. The Pelican Room upstairs gives the house another register, while the main floor keeps the push and pull of a neighborhood pub: the bar drawing its own crowd, the kitchen sending out plates with enough substance to hold attention. Polish is not the point. What counts is whether spider crab on toast sits naturally beside the All Saints Road room that serves it.