Steakhouses in London: Twenty-Eight Rooms Across Six Boroughs

Fifteen of the twenty-eight sit in the City of Westminster, and they are not one kind of room.

Goodman Mayfair is at 24-26 Maddox Street, and the operator calls it "the first Goodman, the flagship, 2008 original". Each Goodman keeps its own ageing room, where the kitchen dry ages the beef and cuts, trims and prepares it by hand; the daily specials board is called The Cut. The Guinea Grill is round the corner at 30 Bruton Place, in a Mayfair mews, with a Young's pub over the restaurant and a meat counter at the door. An inn has stood on the site since 1423, according to the restaurant's own history; the grill itself opened in 1952. The beef is dry-aged and grass-fed British, supplied by Godfreys of Finsbury Park and cooked over an open grill, and the beef shin, Guinness and oyster pie carries a suet lid.

CUT at 45 Park Lane is the Wolfgang Puck room, one of seven CUTs worldwide. Beast is at 3 Chapel Place off Oxford Street and serves two things — beef and crab — which is the whole proposition. Zoilo is on Duke Street, a modern Argentine grill.

Soho carries three. Blacklock Soho, at 24 Great Windmill Street, is the first of the group's chophouses; the operator says Blacklock "was born from a love of the traditional Chophouse", the trade of serving cuts of meat left on the bone for the flavour it adds. Sophie's Steakhouse is a few doors along at 42-44 Great Windmill Street, with the Jack Solomons cocktail bar attached, and Flat Iron Soho is at 17 Beak Street, where the menu is one cut and the cut is beef. The Devonshire is at 17 Denman Street: a pub downstairs, a grill room above it, a wood ember fire and Scottish beef dry-aged and butchered on site, with creel-caught langoustines from Oban and hand-dived Devon scallops beside it.

On the Strand and around Piccadilly: Smith & Wollensky occupies the Adelphi Building at 1-11 John Adam Street, the American chophouse's only British room, working USDA Prime dry-aged beef; STK London is at 336-337 Strand; Gaucho Piccadilly is at 25 Swallow Street; Hawksmoor Air Street is up an Art Deco staircase at 5a Air Street with ten commissioned floor-to-ceiling stained-glass windows over Regent Street; Blacklock Covent Garden is at 16a Bedford Street and Flat Iron Covent Garden at 17 Henrietta Street.

Nine rooms east of Kingsway, and the City's four are the densest quarter-mile on this page.

Goodman City is at 11 Old Jewry, a business-lunch room by day. Blacklock City is at 13 Philpot Lane. Lutyens Grill is the grill room inside The Ned at 27 Poultry. Hawksmoor Guildhall is at 10 Basinghall Street, a few minutes from the site of Dolly's, a chophouse the restaurant's own history dates to somewhere between 1702 and 1714; a newspaper of the mid-1800s praised its bars for "simmering and simpering forth their greaseful admiration of the tender steaks upon them".

Shoreditch straddles two boroughs and holds three rooms. Blacklock Shoreditch is at 28-30 Rivington Street and Sagardi at Cordy House, 95 Curtain Road, both in Hackney; Sagardi is a Basque asador run by the brothers Iñaki and Mikel López de Viñaspre, and its txuleta is the reason to go. Brat is on Redchurch Street in Tower Hamlets, cooking whole beef over fire, with a second kitchen at Climpson's Arch in Hackney.

Further east, Hawksmoor Wood Wharf is at 1 Water Street in Canary Wharf, an eco-designed floating pavilion that rises and falls with the tide and the group's largest London room, with a 120-seat waterside bar. Hawksmoor Spitalfields at 157a Commercial Street was the first of them all to open.

Four rooms south and north of the centre.

Hawksmoor Borough is at 16 Winchester Walk, on the edge of Borough Market, in a former hops warehouse and auction hall — a building that was already in the meat and drink trade before the restaurant arrived. Gaucho Tower Bridge is at 2 More London Place, on the river walk between the bridge and City Hall; open-fire cooking has been the operator's method since 1994, according to Gaucho's own account of itself.

In Camden, Hawksmoor Seven Dials is at 11 Langley Street in what was the Watney-Combe brewery, once the largest brewer in London — and the restaurant found that its first owner, Alderman Combe, had hosted an annual steak supper, reported in 1807 as having left the company "highly gratified with their beef-steaks". Hawksmoor St Pancras is the newest of the seven, on Euston Road inside St Pancras station.

Three of the multi-site operators publish what they do to the beef, and the three answers are different.

Hawksmoor works native British breeds and puts Longhorn — the rare breed the group says helped shape it nearly twenty years ago — on the menu as sharing cuts of dry-aged beef cooked over live charcoal with roasted bone marrow and slow-cooked onions. The Michelin Guide's line on the Spitalfields room is that it is "all about British beef here: hand-butchered, hung for 35 days", according to the guide's 2023 entry.

Goodman gives every restaurant its own ageing room and dry ages in house, with the chefs cutting and trimming by hand each day. Blacklock does not run an ageing programme as its headline; it runs a chophouse, with big chops at butcher's prices on Mondays and a Sunday roast the rest of the week.

And then there is the opposite approach: Flat Iron sells one cut, priced flat, in two rooms on this page and fourteen more across London that this survey did not scope.