Take a leisurely stroll down Bruton Street, Mayfair and you’ll find yourself at one of London’s most historical addresses. Ross Shonhan’s new seafood restaurant, Lilibet’s, at 17 Bruton Street. The entrance is a quiet door set to one side of the building, enclosed within a very pretty terrace. Inside, the interior breaks gently into something else entirely, a private residence imagined into existence, layered with botanical wallpapers, antique fireplaces, and the kind of ornate detail that continuously reveals itself the longer you stay.
Unlike the neighbouring restaurants that has dominated Bruton Street for years, Lilibet’s is something rarer, a restaurant built on a thirty-year culinary career, a decade of planning, and a single coherent point of view about what London hospitality should feel like in 2026. It is also, by Shonhan’s own view, his most personal project.
17 Bruton Street is, of course, a famous address. The Palladian townhouse that once stood here belonged to the Earl and Countess of Strathmore, and it was within those walls that their granddaughter, Princess Elizabeth Alexandra Mary, was born in 1926, the future Queen Elizabeth II, known to her family as Lilibet. The original building has long since been demolished. Across the street, the original Norman Hartnell signage remains on the wall, marking the workshop where the late Queen’s wedding dress was designed.
Shonhan has resisted the obvious move to create a Royal shrine. The restaurant is instead, in his framing, an alternate history, an imagined version of what Number 17 might have become had the late Queen’s uncle never abdicated, allowing the young princess to live an entirely private life in this house. It is a quietly elegant conceit, and it gives the restaurant something most themed restaurants lack, a licence to be playful.
“Lilibet’s is my best work. It’s been more than thirty years in the making, and it’s my most complete thought-out restaurant.”
— Ross Shonhan
The interiors are by Russell Sage Studio, who understand that a beautiful interior story is made with care, craft and skill with magic to inspire and influence. Sage’s brief, was to reimagine what the building might have looked like had it remained in royal family hands for a century, a private residence renovated room by room across decades, where the floors, walls, and ceilings carry the memory of different generations of taste.
The execution is exquisite. The arrival sequence threads through a tented entrance, a quiet reference to a 1930s Bruton Street interior designer whose name only the most informed guest will catch, into a series of adjoining rooms that subtly feel like distinct parts of a residence. Custom botanical wallpapers, the kind of richness that reads more as fabric than paper. Handwoven silks, powder pink fringed bar seats and banquettes upholstered in jewel tones, stitched with attention to the seam. Antique fireplaces newly installed and gilt-framed eighteenth-century French paintings hung alongside contemporary ceramics. The cocktail bar and the oyster bar each carry their own atmosphere, the first romantic, the second theatrical, with a marble counter where the less squeamish can sit eye to eye with the day’s catch.
What strikes me most is not the maximalism, though it is properly maximalist, in a way the design press has noticed, but the restraint underneath it. Every surface is decorated, in a complimenting sequence. This is the work of a designer who understands that opulence requires editing.
I have known Ross Shonhan in the way one knows people in this industry, across openings, across dinners, across the slow accumulation of years in adjacent rooms. Australian by origin, he came up through the most demanding kitchens of his generation, Nobu, Zuma. In 2012 he founded Bone Daddies, the ramen group that quietly reshaped how casual Japanese dining was understood in London. His Middle Eastern projects, Netsu at Mandarin Oriental Jumeira in Dubai, Strawfire at Emirates Palace Mandarin Oriental in Abu Dhabi, built his reputation in the global luxury hospitality conversation. Lilibet’s is his twelfth project.
What’s striking, when you sit with him, is how clear his thesis is. Mayfair is at a hinge moment, he believes, swinging back toward classic, properly elegant restaurants after a decade of pared-back minimalism and design-forward casual. Lilibet’s is his answer to where he believes London hospitality is heading.
The kitchen is run by Alex Harper as head chef, with Shonhan’s signature visible across the menu’s structure. The cuisine is classified as British seafood with Mediterranean influence, but that description undersells what’s happening on the plate. Shonhan has framed Lilibet’s, in his more poetic mode, as the food a princess might recognise from her travels, down the French coast, around the Iberian Peninsula, along the Mediterranean as far as Greece. There is reverence for the produce and confidence in the technique. There is also, refreshingly, a willingness to be playful.
Two menu choices reveal the kitchen’s intelligence. The first is the Unsung Heroes section, a deliberate showcase of underappreciated species that British waters produce in abundance and that British restaurants almost never serve. The menu includes squat lobster, fluke, sea cucumber, hake head and garfish. It is a quiet act of culinary advocacy, one that more London kitchens should attempt.
The second is the Fish Triptych. Shonhan developed the concept after observing in Peru that locals would only eat fish at lunch, believing it freshest then, and would always cook a single catch three ways, raw, grilled, and as a soup made from the bones. He has refined it into a course on the menu, one fish, three preparations, and the most honest possible expression of what was caught that morning. It is one of the most thoughtful single dishes I have eaten in a London restaurant this year.
Beyond these set-pieces, the menu reads with the rhythm of a confident kitchen. Oysters, dressed and roasted and fried. Caviar service and seafood platters built for the marble counter at the oyster bar. A raw fish section that gives way to a pasta section, Alex Harper’s signature agnolotti, the golden pasta filled with cool ricotta, deserves its growing reputation. Whole fish from the fireside grill and dessert that runs to eleven choices, including a stack of choux buns with hot chocolate sauce and a steak sandwich offered as pudding for those who refuse to take dinner seriously. The wine list is exceptionally built, with strong representation from coastal France, Portugal, and the Aegean, exactly where the food itself wants to live.
Lilibet’s is one of the great new openings I have visited in Mayfair in some time. It is built on a clear vision, that London is ready for the return of properly classic and elegant restaurants, and it backs that vision with thirty years of culinary experience, a designer at the height of his powers, and a founder who has been thinking about this restaurant for a long time.
Lilibet’s, 17 Bruton Street, Mayfair, London W1J 6QB.
Open for dinner Tuesday to Saturday and lunch Wednesday to Saturday.
Founder & Restaurateur: Ross Shonhan
Head Chef: Alex Harper
Interior Design: Russell Sage Studio
The Luxe Resident 