The Quality Chop House has confirmed a second site on Exmouth Market, a short walk from the Farringdon Road original that has been one of London's most quietly exceptional restaurants since Will Lander and Josie Stead took over the Victorian dining rooms in 2012.
The Exmouth Market site will occupy a unit on the market strip itself, taking advantage of the footfall and neighbourhood character that has made Exmouth Market one of inner London's most successful independent food and drink destinations over the past decade. The format will be distinct from the original — which operates in genuinely historic Victorian pew seating that makes physical expansion of the Farringdon Road site effectively impossible — while carrying the culinary identity that the restaurant has built around exceptional British meat, wine and produce.
"We've been in one room for fourteen years," said Will Lander. "This isn't about making the Quality Chop House bigger. It's about making a second, different place with the same values — somewhere that couldn't exist if we hadn't spent fourteen years working out what those values actually are."
The Exmouth Market Concept
The new site will operate as a slightly more casual expression of the Quality Chop House's approach — a format Lander has described as better suited to the Exmouth Market environment than a direct replication of the formal Victorian dining room experience on Farringdon Road. The emphasis will be on the wine programme, which has always been one of the restaurant's most distinctive elements, and on a sharing-plates format that uses the same sourcing philosophy as the original: whole animal butchery, heritage breeds, direct farmer relationships.
The Quality Chop House's associated butchery and wine shop on Farringdon Road will continue to operate independently and supply both sites.
The Original's Standing
The Quality Chop House has occupied a specific and unusual position in London dining for over a decade — serious enough to attract the attention of restaurant critics and food professionals, informal enough that its regulars include the Farringdon and Clerkenwell neighbourhood crowd who eat there weekly without treating it as an occasion. That combination is genuinely difficult to sustain and has been the restaurant's primary asset through changing trends in London's dining culture.
Whether the Exmouth Market site can replicate the chemistry of the original — which benefits from the physical character of its Victorian rooms in ways that no other space can reproduce — is the open question any second site presents. Lander's track record suggests the attempt is worth watching closely.
An opening date for the Exmouth Market site is expected to be confirmed before the summer.