Quality Chop House Comfort Food in Farringdon: £29 Set Lunch

The Quality Chop House at 94 Farringdon Road, London EC1R 3EA, serves a three-course set lunch for £29 from Tuesday to Friday, and the menu changes every fortnight. The restaurant marked its 150th anniversary in 2019, and its narrow wooden booths are Grade II-listed. For comfort food in Clerkenwell, the order that regulars talk about is the confit potatoes at £11, a side dish that has become the signature of the room.

The set lunch runs Tuesday to Friday, and the current card for 27 October to 6 November reads like a winter cure: squash soup with seeds and oats, then Hereford beef and ale stew with smoked bone marrow mash, then crème brûlée. Vegetarian replacements are available. At £29 for three courses it is the cheapest way into a dining room whose à la carte steaks run well past that.

Lunch service is short, so plan around it. The kitchen takes lunch orders from 12pm to 2:30pm Tuesday to Friday and from 12pm to 2:45pm on Saturday. Book through the online system, which takes tables of up to six. A good routine is to arrive at noon, order the set menu plus a shared portion of confit potatoes, and still be back at a Farringdon desk well inside the hour and a half.

The confit potatoes are the side the restaurant itself calls iconic, a layered block of potato cooked in fat until the edges turn crisp. They cost £11 on both the à la carte menu and the Sunday menu, and the private dining feast lists them among the dishes from the restaurant history. One portion between two people is enough alongside a main course.

The name on the door still points to chops. The daily menu lists a Suffolk Barnsley chop of 400g at £39, a Middle White loin chop of 400g at £41 and a British Shorthorn sirloin of 400g at £54, with béarnaise, peppercorn or seaweed chimichurri at £5. The menu warns that steaks and chops take up to 40 minutes. For a table of two, the Hereford T-bone of 800g is £90 and needs up to an hour.

If you only want a small comfort fix, the snacks are worth knowing: sourdough with Bungay butter for £6, a cup of game tea for £8 and British Lop shoulder croquettes with ancho chilli mayonnaise for £8. Puddings change with the season, and on the 29 October menu a pear and hazelnut cake with Jersey cream was £13. The à la carte menu is written each day, so dishes rotate with what the suppliers bring.

Sunday is lunch only, served from 12pm to 3:30pm. The Sunday menu is a set price: £49 for two courses or £59 for three. On 25 October the roasts were Aberdeen Angus rump with smoked brisket, Middle White belly with apple sauce, Yorkshire mallard, Cornish monkfish with chive butter sauce and a herb butter roasted celeriac for vegetarians. Every roast comes with roast potatoes, Yorkshire pudding, cavolo nero, roast onions and honey carrots.

The confit potatoes are an extra £11 on Sunday too, and with roast potatoes already on the plate they are a luxury rather than a need. An honest call: if you are booking Sunday for the roast, skip the extra potatoes and spend the money on a bottle from the list instead. The wine list has been central to the restaurant since 2012 and aims for interesting bottles at every price point.

The restaurant's own history is candid about what it does not know. Council records name early tenants, including W. Trevelyan, who arrived in 1876 and was gone within two years, and P. F. Harris, who ran the site from 1888 to 1903. Around 1950 the family of the landlord's grandfather, Mr Enrico, cooked and served here, when the Progressive Working Class Caterer label on the window meant quick, fuss-free breakfasts and lunches.

In early 1990 Charles Fontaine, previously head chef at The Ivy, reopened the room and won strong reviews, including praise from Nigella Lawson in The Spectator. The current team took over in 2012, and while they were clearing mock-Victorian bench seating from the bar side, a passer-by stopped them to plead for the booths. They were never going anywhere, the history notes, because the booths are listed. Today the head chef is Nathan Chapman and the general manager is Jasmine Badr.

Those booths shape the meal. The seats are high-backed, wooden and close together, which suits a long Sunday lunch and suits an elbow-to-elbow weekday catch-up less well. Groups of eight to fourteen can book the air-conditioned private room on the first floor, which has one large table and its own waiter for the whole meal. Everyone else should book a standard table for six or fewer.

Farringdon station is a short walk south, which makes the Chop House easy to reach on the Elizabeth line or the Thameslink trains. Walk north instead and you reach Exmouth Market within a few minutes, a pedestrian street of cafés and small shops that works well for a coffee after a heavy lunch. The Chop House is part of the Woodhead Restaurant Group, alongside Portland and Clipstone in Fitzrovia.

If the dining room is fully booked, the backup is next door on the same block: the sister wine bar Quality Wines, which opens Tuesday to Saturday and shares the group's interest in good bottles at fair prices. It is a smaller, more casual room, so it suits a glass and a plate rather than the full roast. Mondays are dinner only at the Chop House, served from 6pm to 9:45pm.

Address: 94 Farringdon Road, London EC1R 3EA. Kitchen hours are Monday dinner from 6pm to 9:45pm, Tuesday to Friday lunch from 12pm to 2:30pm, Tuesday to Saturday dinner from 6pm to 9:45pm, Saturday lunch from 12pm to 2:45pm and Sunday lunch from 12pm to 3:30pm. Online bookings take up to six guests, and the private room takes eight to fourteen.

The restaurant does not currently accept cash, and a discretionary 13.5% service charge is added to the bill. Menus also add an optional £1 donation to The Open Door Community Kitchen. To line up a Farringdon lunch with a walk to Exmouth Market or a meeting in Clerkenwell, the Karpo APP can map the route and suggest what else sits nearby.