When Café Clement swung open its doors inside the new St Clement Hotel on the Thames back in June, it became the place to be seen almost overnight. Stanley Tucci, Nick Grimshaw and Paul Mescal were all spotted there within the first week, picking at lobster omelettes and oeufs mayonnaise while the hotel around them was still very much a work in progress.
The restaurant sits inside Nick Jones’ latest venture at 180 The Thames in central London. Jones, the man behind the Soho House empire, has a well-earned reputation for creating places that people desperately want to get into, and Café Clement was no different. Securing a terrace table in those early weeks was reportedly the kind of challenge that required either serious connections or an alarming amount of patience.
But here is the thing about buzzy London openings. The real test is never the launch. It is what happens on a quiet Tuesday in August, when the famous faces have all disappeared to Italy and nobody is picking up the bill for you.
The St Clement Hotel itself is not even fully open yet. The rooftop restaurant, Lunette, is expected to arrive in early autumn along with what are being described as some of the most spectacular views in the city. Chef Florence Knight will be running that kitchen, which has already generated plenty of its own excitement ahead of opening.
For now though, Café Clement is carrying the weight of expectation on its own, and the question is whether it can hold up without the celebrity glitter and opening-night energy doing the heavy lifting.
The menu leans into classic, unfussy European cooking. The kind of food that does not try too hard but relies on decent ingredients and solid technique. Oeufs mayonnaise, the sort of dish that sounds almost too simple to justify ordering, turns out to be exactly the kind of thing a good all-day restaurant should be doing well. And from what early visitors have reported, Café Clement does it well.
The lobster omelette has become something of a signature already, the sort of dish that gets photographed and shared and talked about in a way that either means it genuinely delivers or that people are just excited to be there. Early signs suggest it is the former.
The setting helps. Being on the Thames in central London gives the place an energy that is hard to manufacture, and the terrace in particular has become the kind of spot that feels like a genuine treat rather than just somewhere to eat. On a good day, with the river doing its thing outside, it is easy to see why people were so keen to get in.
The service has drawn some mixed early comments, which is not unusual for a restaurant still finding its feet inside a hotel that is not yet fully operational. Running a busy restaurant while the building around you is still being finished is not a straightforward task, and some of the early rough edges are understandable.
What matters now is whether the kitchen and the team can maintain standards as the novelty fades and the bookings settle into something more normal. The Soho House track record suggests Jones knows how to build something that lasts rather than just something that trends, but every new opening has to prove itself on its own terms eventually.
London has seen plenty of restaurants that launched with enormous fanfare and then quietly faded once the spotlight moved on. The city is brutal in that way. A famous face in the corner can carry a place for a few weeks, but after that the food has to do the talking.
On the evidence so far, Café Clement looks like it might actually have something real behind the hype. The cooking is honest, the location is genuinely special, and the full picture will only become clearer once Lunette opens upstairs and the hotel starts operating as it was designed to. For now, it seems to be holding its own, which for a London opening two months in, is already saying something.