Gluten-Free Thanksgiving Dinner in Covent Garden at Indigo

Indigo, the signature restaurant inside One Aldwych at 1 Aldwych, London WC2B 4BZ, is serving a four-course Thanksgiving menu on Thursday 26 November 2026, and it has one feature no other London turkey table can match: every dish is entirely gluten and dairy free. Lunch costs £90 per person and is served from 12pm to 2:30pm. Dinner costs £125 per person, runs from 5pm to 9:30pm and adds a glass of Bollinger Special Cuvée. For Americans in London who cannot eat the usual stuffing, or who are hosting a coeliac relative, this is the rare holiday meal where nobody at the table has to ask the kitchen for a substitution.

The menu is short and printed without fuss. It opens with maple sourdough, a gluten-free loaf brushed with maple, and moves to a pumpkin velouté, a smooth autumn soup rather than a chunky one. The main course is Norfolk bronze turkey, a traditional British bronze-feathered bird reared in Norfolk, served with a chestnut-stuffed leg, cranberry red cabbage, roast potatoes, a warm bean salad and gravy.

Dessert is pecan pie with cinnamon ice cream. Executive Chef Edward Dutton, who oversees Indigo, makes a point of the pie on the hotel's Thanksgiving page, and the cinnamon ice cream is dairy free like everything else. Lunch and dinner use the same four dishes. The only difference on the printed menus is the price and the glass of Champagne that opens the evening sitting, so the choice comes down to timing and budget.

Lunch at £90 suits anyone who wants to eat turkey on the real day and still get back to an office, or families with young children who will be asleep by the time a dinner service ends. Thursday is a normal lunch day for Indigo, which serves lunch from Wednesday to Friday, so the room will feel like a working restaurant with a holiday menu rather than a closed private event.

Dinner at £125 is the more celebratory option. A glass of Bollinger Special Cuvée is poured on arrival, the lights around the Lobby Bar below are low, and the 5pm start means you can book an early table and still catch a West End show nearby. Both prices include VAT at the current rate. A discretionary service charge of 15% is added to the bill, which takes lunch to £103.50 and dinner to £143.75 per person before any extra wine.

Indigo already runs an entirely gluten-free lunch and dinner menu all year, and the Thanksgiving menus go further by stating that every dish is gluten and dairy free. That matters most for the parts of a Thanksgiving meal that are usually the hardest to make safe: bread, stuffing, gravy thickened with flour, buttery mash and a pie crust. Here the sourdough, the chestnut stuffing, the gravy, the potatoes and the pecan pie pastry are all made to the same rule.

The menu still asks guests to mention allergies or dietary needs when booking, and it is worth doing so, especially for nut allergies, since chestnuts and pecans are central to the meal. Vegetarians should ask when they reserve, because the published menu lists turkey as the only main course.

One Aldwych describes itself as one of the very few truly independent hotels in London, with no chain behind it. The building sits on the corner where Aldwych curves into the Strand, and its art nouveau curves house 101 suites and bedrooms, including signature suites named Waterloo Bridge and Somerset after the neighbouring landmarks, and a top-floor suite called The Dome. Art is everywhere: the hotel keeps a private collection of about 400 pieces, with an original work in every room and suite.

Indigo is described by the hotel as a calm, elegant space overlooking the Lobby Bar, the busy cocktail bar on the ground floor. That arrangement works well on Thanksgiving. You eat in relative quiet on the upper level while the bar fills with after-work drinkers, which gives the room more life than a hotel banquet suite. The menu leans on British ingredients, hence Norfolk turkey rather than an imported bird.

The Lobby Bar opens from 8am to 11:30pm Monday to Friday, so on Thanksgiving evening you can arrive early for a cocktail before the 5pm dinner sitting or move down after dessert. The hotel lists the bar as a London institution known for signature cocktails made by its mixologists. On weekends it opens at 9am, closing at 11:30pm on Saturday and 10pm on Sunday.

For a walk before lunch, cross to Somerset House and its broad stone courtyard on the Strand, then follow the Thames path onto Waterloo Bridge for the view east to St Paul's and the City. Covent Garden's market building and the Royal Opera House, where the Royal Ballet and Opera perform, are a few minutes north through the narrow streets behind the hotel, which makes a good loop after a long lunch when the light fades early.

Indigo is at 1 Aldwych, London WC2B 4BZ, on the corner of Aldwych and the Strand. The hotel says Covent Garden and Embankment Underground stations are each about a five-minute walk and Holborn about ten. Charing Cross mainline station is roughly a five-minute taxi ride.

On a normal week Indigo serves breakfast from 7am to 10:30am Monday to Friday and 7am to 11am at weekends, lunch from 12pm to 2:30pm Wednesday to Friday, from 12:30pm to 2:30pm on Saturday and a Sunday roast from 12:30pm to 4pm, and dinner from 5pm to 9:30pm Monday to Saturday. The hotel lists these as final order times. The Thanksgiving menus are for Thursday 26 November only, and the hotel's Charlie and the Chocolate Factory afternoon tea is a separate booking.

If you are staying in the hotel, the guest-only Library on the ground floor stays open from breakfast until the early hours, which makes it an easy place for coffee after the Thanksgiving lunch. Non-residents should plan the day around Indigo and the Lobby Bar instead, as the Library is not open to the public.