Mr & Mrs Smith

St John Hotel

London, United Kingdom

The St John Hotel has much in common with its menu: straight talking, with an emphasis on quality components. Rooms are so modern, they’re almost futuristic: stark white spaces, pepped up with pops of aqua green. The man behind this pared-down city stop-off is Fergus Henderson – London's latest culinary hero.

Need to know

• Rooms 15, including one suite.
• Rates Double rooms from $195.82 (£125), excluding tax at 20 per cent.
  Prices have been converted from the hotel's local currency (£125), via XE.com, using today's exchange rate.
• More details Rates usually include breakfast, which starts at £4 and changes daily.
• Facilities Free WiFi throughout. In rooms: flatscreen TV, CD/DVD player, iPod dock. There’s a stash of Penhaligon products, and minibars yield carefully chosen treats, including Toblerone, Fernet Branca (a bitter herbal Italian digestif) and Poire William.
• Check-out 12 noon but flexible, subject to availability (half the room rate may be charged, depending on departure time). Earliest check-in, 3pm.
• Children This is a grown-up hotel, with a grown-up menu: leave little ones at home.
• Eco-friendly As you’d expect from a Fergus Henderson gaffe, food is local and seasonal, everything that can be is recycled, and the hotel has a few humanitarian projects up its sleeve, including Action Against Hunger.
• Also Kill two (pickled-walnut-scattered) birds with one stone, by booking your bed and table in one fell swoop: though small, the restaurant has already generated an excited buzz amid the city’s culinary cognoscenti.

Food and drink at St John Hotel

• Hotel restaurant

  Since St John Hotel follows hot on the footsteps of Fergus Henderson’s other culinary strongholds – St John Restaurant, St John Bread & Wine and St John Bakery – you can expect a head chef that knows what he’s doing (Tom Harris, formerly St John’s sous chef), and a menu of unrestrained carnality. Henderson’s near-religious zeal for ‘nose to tail’ eating continues apace here, but offal-fearers need not be scared: there are a few leafy, green options too, and a daily fish special, plucked from the Cornish waters each morning and shipped back by the hotel’s boat.

• Dress code Imagine a full stomach, and what would best clothe it: corsetry and high waistbands are ill advised. Alternatively, channel the man behind the menu and wear a three-piece pinstripe suit fashioned from butchers’ aprons.
• Top table Spy on London life with a seat by the window. Plans are afoot for an outside dining area…
• Last orders It would be no crime to have all three meals here, so memorise these timings: breakfast, 7am–10.15am; lunch, noon until 3pm; and, for dinner, a deliciously decadent stretch: 5.30pm to midnight.
• Room service The 24-hour menu includes a potted selection of items from the restaurant: Welsh rarebit, pigeon and mustard pickle, and barley with carrots and curd. The list varies, according to the chef’s latest culinary fling.
• Hotel bar

  This futuristic white drinking den is perched above the dining room, on the first floor. It’s a gleaming little setting for postprandials, or browsing the papers with a steaming coffee and a bread bun. Ingratiate yourself with the barman by requesting a Dr Henderson cocktail, the hotel’s signature tipple, and enjoy it on one of the red leather chesterfields.

St John Hotel 1 Leicester St, London, WC2H 7BL