Honey & Smoke

Should You Book Honey & Smoke?

Honey & Smoke is easy to book and worth booking. This is the rare Fitzrovia restaurant where you can usually secure a table within a few days, sometimes same-week, for both lunch and dinner. The question is not whether you can get in; it is whether the format suits your occasion. For a relaxed group meal built around sharing plates, grilled meat and fish, a genuinely interesting wine list, it delivers consistently. For a formal celebration or a business dinner that requires a quieter, more structured room, you will want to look elsewhere.

The Room and the Experience

Honey & Smoke occupies a large, canteen-style space on Great Portland Street: tiled floors, plain square tables, plastic chairs, enough covers to generate real noise on a busy evening. The energy is deliberately casual and the sound level reflects that. By 8 PM on a Friday or Saturday, expect a buzzy, high-decibel room. If you are planning a date or a celebration where conversation matters, arrive early; the 6 PM slot gives you the room at its finest before it fills. Midweek lunch is the quietest window across the week, the kitchen runs the same menu, so you lose nothing on quality by going then.

The format is communal and sharing-focused, which suits groups of three to six well. Two people can eat comfortably, but you will want four or more to move through a proper spread of the meze, grill plates, desserts without over-ordering. There is no private dining room in the database record, so if your occasion requires an exclusive or semi-private space, this is not the venue, consider that a hard constraint before booking for a board dinner or a proposal. What it does well is deliver a warm, animated atmosphere that makes a birthday dinner or a celebratory group lunch feel natural rather than forced.

The Food and Credentials

Honey & Smoke is run by Sarit Packer and Itamar Srulovich, who built their reputation at Ottolenghi before opening Honey & Co. The cooking draws on Israeli and Middle Eastern tradition, with the grill doing most of the heavy lifting on the main plates. The menu moves through seasonal meze, houmous, baba ganoush, salt-baked beetroot with yoghurt, before arriving at coal-fired meat, fish, vegetable dishes. The feta and honey cheesecake on a kadaif pastry base is the dish most consistently mentioned by repeat visitors. The wine list is built around Mediterranean producers and fits the food well.

On the awards side, Honey & Smoke has appeared in the Opinionated About Dining Casual Europe rankings for three consecutive years: Recommended in 2023, ranked 446th in 2024, 484th in 2025. That trajectory is a useful signal, the restaurant is holding its position in a competitive category rather than climbing, which suggests a settled, reliable operation rather than a kitchen pushing into new territory. For Israeli cooking of comparable ambition in other cities, 12 Chairs in New York City and Ash'Kara in Denver offer useful reference points for the style.

Booking and Practical Details

Booking difficulty is low. The restaurant is closed on Sundays. Lunch service runs Tuesday through Saturday from noon; dinner runs Monday through Saturday from 5 PM, with last orders at 10:30 PM. Monday is dinner-only, which makes it a useful option when the rest of the week fills up. Book a week out for a standard weekday table; two weeks out for weekend dinner if you have a specific time in mind. The address is 216 Great Portland St, London W1W 5QW, a short walk from Great Portland Street station.

Price range is not confirmed in the venue data, but the format, shared meze plus grill plates, positions Honey & Smoke in the accessible mid-range for London's restaurant scene. It is not a cheap eat, but it is significantly more affordable than the formal dining options nearby. For context on how it sits relative to the wider London restaurant scene, see our full London restaurants guide. If you are planning a broader trip, our London hotels guide, bars guide, wineries guide, and experiences guide cover the rest of the city.

Quick reference: 216 Great Portland St W1W 5QW | Closed Sunday | Lunch from noon Tue–Sat | Dinner from 5 PM Mon–Sat | Booking difficulty: Easy