Museum and gallery restaurants have an important part to play in keeping everyone from the casual observer to the serious academic fed and watered. Step forward this lot, who do just that but to a standard far higher than you might expect.

Portrait at the National Portrait Gallery
The views from Portrait are straight from a tourist’s deepest fantasy, including Nelson’s Column, the London Eye, and Big Ben. While you’re admiring them, you might as well settle in for lunch – braised lamb shoulder followed by honey rum baba, perhaps? – or a spot of afternoon tea.

Bryn Williams and Spring at Somerset House
Not one, not two, but five restaurants grace the halls of one of the UK’s foremost art centres. Bryn Williams’ eponymous restaurant and Skye Gyngell’s Spring are chief among them – the former for its Welsh-themed menu where veg takes the lead role; the latter for its seasonal British cooking with a focus on sustainability.

Garden Museum Café at the Garden Museum
Backed up by some remarkable pedigree in the kitchen and arguably one of the best wine lists in Lambeth, the Garden Museum’s café is well worth a visit. The focus is on simple, quality ingredients so expect dishes like gnocchi with wild garlic or pollock with roasted fennel. It is, as you might expect, best visited when the flowers are out to bloom.

V&A Café
Want to know what museum cafés looked like during the period of Victorian revival? This is your chance. With its stained glass windows and imposing columns circa 1868, the V&A’s café is the oldest of its kind in London. Compared to the ‘gaily-adorned’ cafés of Paris of the time, it’s a fantastic spot to enjoy the likes of fresh salads, sandwiches, and tea and scones.

Level 9 Restaurant at Tate Modern
When does modern art transcend its allotted space? The search begins at Level 9, where prettily-plated modern European dishes are made with carefully sourced British produce. Head chef Jon Atashroo has spent time behind the pass at Elliot’s Café and Arbutus – so art or otherwise, diners are in good hands here.

Rochelle Canteen at the ICA
Margot Henderson and Melanie Arnold’s Rochelle Canteen is head and shoulders above just about any other restaurant of its ilk in London – it just so happens to be tucked round the side of the Institute of Contemporary Arts on The Mall. The theme is, like the name, modern canteen-style: rough-round-the-edges British dishes (soups, pies, faggots, shoulders of lamb), only with a shrewd chef in charge of them.

Rex Whistler Restaurant at Tate Britain
Named after the wartime British artist (the room-sized mural ‘Expedition in Pursuit of Rare Meats’ in the restaurant is probably his most recognised work), this place is going strong after 93 years. The award-winning wine list and ambitious British menu might have something to do with it.

Visit OpenTable to discover more restaurants in London.

This is a guest post from freelance food journalist Hugh Thomas. He’s contributed to Foodism, Time Out, Great British Chefs, and is part of British Street Food’s small team of vigilant writers. Find him on twitter @hughwrites.

Don’t forget to share this via Twitter and LinkedIn.

Short of farming livestock themselves, restaurants are able to retain utmost control over the meat they use with their own butchery. Nose-to-tail – probably the most sustainable way to cook meat in restaurants – becomes that much more efficient, while menus suggest an entire universe beyond the world of steak and chips. Here are nine London restaurants that butcher in-house.

Temper
Each iteration of Temper is built around a fire pit, where rare breed beef, pork and goat finishes its journey. Temper’s meat is sourced from high-welfare UK farms, butchered in-house, then seasoned, smoked or cooked over open flame. Don’t miss their house-made beef sausage or the smoked goat tacos.

Visit OpenTable to book a table at Temper Soho, City, and Covent Garden.

The Quality Chop House
Putting ‘quality’ in the name might seem far too daring to most businesses, but it’s worth every syllable here on this corner of Farringdon Road. The restaurant serves the best of what it can find in the UK – meat-based or otherwise – and the same applies to its own working butcher and shop next door.

Flat Iron
Flat Iron, named after the cut from the cow’s shoulder, remains one London’s best stops for a budget-friendly steak. Its hero cut, and others criminally underappreciated cuts like featherblade, bavette, onglet, and Denver, come from the small chain’s seasoned in-house butchers, who are able to break a carcass down to 20 different variations of steak.

Boxcar Butcher & Grill
Part butcher part restaurant, Boxcar champions high welfare meat from farms with traceable names. Beef, for example, is grass-fed on the Yorkshire moors at Mount Grace Farm – it’s up to you whether it’s for cooking at home or served hot from Boxcar’s charcoal grill with Charlotte potatoes and charred onion ketchup.

The Pig & Butcher
Reminiscent of elevated pub grub or hearty British suppers for wet winter days, The Pig & Butcher’s speciality is meat and two veg done well. (Sunday lunches are where it really shines). With the butcher’s room downstairs working closely with farms around the country, the whole operation’s mission is to show off the quality meat that Britain is famous for, and a very good job it does too.

Honest Burgers
Honest are good chums with some of the best butchers in town, but for the past couple of years they’ve been taking meat processing into their own hands. Their very own butchery minces chuck, rib cap, and all the fat required to make their burgers the juicy, buttery pucks of gratification they’re known to be.

Smokehouse
Smokehouse are proud of who they source from in their smoke-stained and charcoal-grilled dedication to good meat. So proud that their names are at the forefront of what they do, like the dry-aged Lincoln Russet beef from Amy Jobe’s farm that’s currently on the menu. Other highlights include lamb scrumpets, smoked poussin, and beef tacos.

Macellaio RC
This Italian butchery-restaurant group claims to be the first of its kind to open in London. Their Fassona beef is sourced from farmers in the mountain valleys north of Genoa and then transported to the UK to be butchered and dry-aged in-house. Try their Fiorentina – an impressive T-bone steak aged for 7-9 weeks for maximum flavour.

Macellaio RC has restaurants in Fitzrovia, South Kensington, Exmouth Market, Union Street, and Battersea.

Hill & Szrok
First a butcher, second a restaurant, and third a cookshop: Hill & Szrok have swapped the traditional butcher’s model of ordering many carcasses and selling or cooking select cuts, for the more sustainable method of ordering in small batch and using the whole animal. It’s a philosophy that manifests itself in the menu, with things like fried pig’s head, lamb rack, and pork collar on offer.

This is a guest post from freelance food journalist Hugh Thomas. He’s contributed to Foodism, Time Out, Great British Chefs, and is part of British Street Food’s small team of vigilant writers. Find him on twitter @hughwrites.

Don’t forget to share this via Twitter and LinkedIn.