Phil Howard spent twenty-five years at The Square. He opened it in 1991, earned two Michelin stars in 1998 and held them until the restaurant closed in 2016, when its Mayfair site was absorbed into a hotel project. In those twenty-five years he became, without particular fanfare, one of the most technically accomplished and intellectually serious chefs in Britain — a cook whose influence on the generation below him is felt in kitchens from London to the North without always being attributed to him. He was not a television chef. He did not write a great many books. He cooked at The Square.
Elystan Street, which opened in Chelsea's Billing Road in 2016 within months of The Square closing, was described at the time as a lighter, less formal version of what Howard had been doing in Mayfair. That framing, while not inaccurate, slightly misses the point. Elystan Street is not The Square with the tablecloths removed. It is a different restaurant expressing a different idea about what Howard wanted to cook in his fifties — one that earned a Michelin star in its first year and has held it since.
"When The Square closed I had to think quite seriously about what I actually wanted to do," he says, sitting at a table near the open kitchen that is one of the room's defining features. "I had been cooking in a particular way, in a particular register, for a long time. The question was whether I wanted to continue that or whether the closure was an opportunity to think differently."
What Changed
The visible differences between The Square and Elystan Street are real. The room at Elystan Street is smaller — 60 covers rather than The Square's larger capacity — and more domestic in feel: carpet, warm lighting, a service style that Howard describes as "engaged without being performative." There are no tablecloths. The à la carte runs alongside a fixed-price menu rather than being the primary format.
The less visible change is in the cooking itself. Howard describes Elystan Street's menu as cooking that has "the confidence to be quieter" — dishes that achieve their effect through restraint and precision rather than accumulation. "At The Square I was sometimes trying to demonstrate something," he says. "Here I'm less interested in demonstration and more interested in the food itself. That sounds like a small shift but it changes everything about how you approach a dish."
The spring menu at Elystan Street this week runs to a concise selection of starters, main courses and desserts that, on reading, appears straightforward and, on eating, reveals the depth of technique that straightforwardness requires. A crab bisque with brown crab meat and tarragon cream. Cornish turbot with morels, asparagus and a light chicken jus. Herdwick lamb rack with sweetbreads, spring onion and a sauce built from two days of bones. A rhubarb soufflé that Howard has been making in various forms for thirty years and that remains, by the accounts of those who have eaten it, essentially perfect.
On the Current State of British Fine Dining
Howard is thoughtful and slightly reluctant on the subject of British fine dining's current moment — the question of whether the category is flourishing, contracting, or transforming into something that doesn't quite have a name yet.
"The honest answer is that I don't think about it much," he says. "What I think about is whether the food at Elystan Street is as good as it can be. The broader conversation about what British fine dining is or isn't happening — I read about it, I find it interesting, but it doesn't change what I do in this kitchen."
He is, however, willing to observe that the chefs he most admires in the current generation share a characteristic he also ascribes to himself: they are cooking something specific rather than something general. "The restaurants I find most interesting right now are the ones that could only exist in one place, made by one person, at this particular moment. That's what Ynyshir is. That's what The Sportsman is. The restaurant that could be anywhere, made by anyone, is less interesting to me."
Elystan Street is open for lunch and dinner Tuesday through Saturday. The spring set menu is £75 for three courses; the tasting menu is £115.