The Devonshire, London restaurant review. “It’s Fine.”
Uninvited Opinion. We have been told for so long that The Devonshire is extraordinary that we have stopped asking whether it is.
Perhaps anticipation is better than the thing itself. That, at least, is what an evening at The Devonshire — arguably London’s most hyped pub — left me thinking.
At Bar School, once a week for a year, we were made to sit in a room and listen to ourselves fail. We would perform and record mock court applications onto a cassette (yes, a cassette — this ages me) before a mock judge, then rewind and play it back to a room of peers who were forbidden, under house rule, from offering us a single word of praise. For hours, I was told what I got wrong: tone, structure, my fidgeting fingers.
Some days the verdict was simple: you are still not good enough. It was possibly the best thing that ever happened to me.
The work, I came to understand, is Sisyphean. You wake up each morning, calibrate what needs to be done and PUSH uphill. The mechanism is the same one any serious craft uses. You strip away the dopamine of approval. You stop being told that you are clever. You identify what better means.
Research that explains why this works, and why its opposite does not. Stanford’s Carol Dweck showed that praising people for their qualities rather than their actions dulls performance precisely when a task is most demanding. It interferes with concentration. An older paper in Basic and Applied Social Psychology, archly titled “Negative Effects of Praise on Skilled Performance,” ran experiments to prove that praise can directly impair what you do next via reduced effort and the disruption of skilled automaticity.
Hearing how good you are is not a neutral act. It might feel good, but it costs something.
A sommelier at one of the world’s best restaurants — a three-Michelin-starred place and former World’s No 1 — once told me, at a bar, that each morning his team sit down together to read only the negative reviews from the day before. They skip the good ones, so the bad ones consume their focus. This is Dweck made operational, so the principle travels.
Which brings us to The Devonshire.
The Devonshire is a pub on Denman Street, a few yards from Piccadilly Circus, about which the entire London food press has frothed for two years. Dent called it the epitome of comfort food. Coren proclaimed “it’s just insane, what they’re doing.” The FT’s Hayward declared “The food was exemplary, the hospitality superb and the venue the stuff of dreams.”
Margot Robbie has been. Nigella has been.
I came primed to join the choir. I had the hymn sheet open, the descant ready. We even went on a Sunday, the four of us, back from a press event, aching to celebrate.
The ground floor teemed with bodies congregating at a perpetually flowing teat of creamy Guinness. Upstairs the Grill Room is the opposite: narrow, bright, practically civilised, and beige. A fresh spring breeze rolled in through open windows. At one end, four-finger deep steaks hissed over open flames as a wood-fired furnace roared like a witch’s oven readied for Hansel or Gretel.
Timothée Chalamet joined us for dinner. Not in person; a portrait adjacent that peacocks The Devonshire’s reputation.
The menu reads like a love letter to British pub food: white crab, lamb cutlets and hotpots, pea and ham soup, beef cheek and suet pudding, mashed potatoes and buttered carrots.
And what of the food? In comes a silver platter of glazed Ibérico ribs oleaginous with the richness of a pig that spent its life snuffling acorns. The duck-fat chips delivered on the promise of soft centres and roast-potato crunch. The brawn toast arrived in matchbox parcels festooned with pickled shallots and diced cornichon that cut clean against the offal. The sliced ribeye glistened, revealing a blushing medium.
The kitchen, it turned out, had shown its best hand early.
The least interesting element of the scallop with bacon and malt vinegar is the scallop, which is overwhelmed to obscurity. A tangle of emaciated langoustines is mostly shell and sauce at £36. The Ibérico pork chop which, at £26, was bland and gasping for salt — as are the creamed leeks. It is a sharp pivot from a kitchen that moments ago showed with the ribs exactly what Ibérico pork can be.
A sticky toffee pudding tastes of light caramel and restraint — pudding is no time for virtue. And then there was cheese and the Devonshire’s service. The menu says “Cheeses from La Fromagerie.” We asked what they were. They did not know. I asked, “Stilton?” They confirmed Stilton, which it wasn’t. The bill said Roquefort. Which it was. Go find out. Don’t bluff it for the sake of the table turn — and the table turn was palpable all evening: three different servers cycling through us, each nudging the meal forward with polite but detectable urgency.
Our RUA Pinot Noir arrived at room temperature (maybe one of the bottles stored on the back wall?…) in a room has a roaring furnace.
The Devonshire is fine. The downstairs Guinness operation is a genuine, uncomplicated triumph. The grill upstairs is mixed, buttressed by its reputation.
And that is where the Dweck principle lands.
The failure at The Devonshire is not that the kitchen has been coddled by its own success into complacency.
The real issue is the choir. This is our fault.
We have been told, so insistently, that The Devonshire is extraordinary that we have quietly stopped asking whether it actually is. Praise dulls our critical faculties and herd mentality takes hold. We swallow it wholesale. We parrot the consensus. We sit before an underseasoned chop, warm wine and someone who doesn’t know about blue cheese, and find ways to explain it away rather than call it what it is.
The Devonshire coasts towards good enough. The hype does the rest.
The Devonshire, Review Information:
Number of visits: 1.
Total Spend: £366.52 for four people.
Licensed? Yes, famously.
Dishes and drinks ordered, plus prices:
Liam is a food and travel writer based in the Middle East. He co-authored The Rise of Indian Food: Recipes Reimagined by Trèsind Studio is out now and available here. Published by Phaidon Press. Photography by Shresth Maloo. He owns EatGoSee and contributes to other publications. You can find Liam on Substack, Threads and Instagram.
This is on my list. I’ll still try and grab a table, but with pared down ecxpectations. Thanks
This is a superb piece of proper writing; thanks for sharing! There's a lot of 'reputation inertia' at the moment, especially in Dubai. As for The Devonshire, it's never really been appealing to me but I get why it is for others.