Duchy

Duchy took over a site with a real weight of expectation attached to it — the one-Michelin-starred Leroy ran here before closing, and rather than start from nothing, the new owners promoted Leroy’s own head chef, Simon Shand, to run the kitchen under a new name and a more specific idea.

The Duchy of Savoy, the historic territory that once straddled the French Alps and the top of Italy, gives the restaurant both its name and its actual cooking logic: dishes that sit on the border between French bistro technique and northern Italian ingredients, rather than picking one national cuisine and staying inside it.

The Room

A compact, roughly 40-seat room on a quiet stretch of Phipp Street, warmer and less austere than the fine-dining register its predecessor sometimes reached for — this reads as a proper neighbourhood bistro rather than a restaurant still trying to justify a Michelin star. The room does the same work Shoreditch’s better recent openings tend to: unfussy enough for a Tuesday, sharp enough for an occasion, without over-committing to either mode.

What to Order

Start with the fougasse — Shand spent two weeks developing the recipe before opening and has kept refining it since, a seeded, herbed Alpine flatbread that’s become the dish regulars mention before anything else on the menu. Brown crab arancini is the clearest expression of the French-Italian border premise in one dish: classically French crab, classically Italian technique.

Ricotta-stuffed courgette flowers with bagna cauda are a lighter order worth taking early, and smoked trout with spätzle shows the kitchen’s Alpine leaning most directly — spätzle rarely turns up on a London menu outside a dedicated German or Austrian restaurant, and it’s handled here with real competence rather than as a novelty garnish.

The menu is built entirely for sharing; two or three dishes between two people, ordered in rounds, is the right approach rather than one starter and one main each. It’s also a short enough menu that a table of four can reasonably work through most of it across a couple of rounds without repeating anything, which is worth knowing before deciding how many dishes to open with.

The Drinks List

A wine list assembled with real care, leaning into the same French-Italian Alpine borderland as the food — expect Savoie whites and northern Italian reds alongside more familiar bistro standards, chosen specifically to pair with a menu that doesn’t sit neatly in either country’s usual wine pairings.

What You Will Pay

The set lunch is genuinely good value at £24 for two courses or £29 for three; dinner à la carte, shared across a table, runs closer to £40–55 per person once wine is added. It’s priced as a proper neighbourhood bistro, not as a restaurant still charging for the star its predecessor once held.

The Verdict

Duchy is a rare case of a strong restaurant replacing another strong restaurant on the same site without either coasting on the address’s reputation or trying too hard to prove it’s different. The fougasse alone is worth the booking, and the Alpine-Italian border premise gives the kitchen a genuinely distinct identity in a part of Shoreditch that doesn’t lack for good bistros.

Go with an appetite for sharing rather than a fixed idea of starter-main-dessert, and go with more than one other person if possible — the menu’s logic rewards a table working through several dishes together over an evening rather than two people trying to cover the same ground with only three or four plates between them.

What’s Being Said

Taking over a one-star site and promoting the outgoing kitchen’s own head chef, rather than importing a name from elsewhere, is a quieter kind of continuity than most restaurant reinventions attempt — and it shows in how assured Duchy already feels for a relatively new opening.

The Alpine-Savoyard framing could easily have read as a gimmick, a “concept” bolted onto a standard bistro menu; instead it’s the thing that gives otherwise-familiar dishes like arancini and spätzle a genuine reason to sit on the same menu together.

Fifteen iterations of a bread recipe before landing on the version now on the table is the kind of detail that doesn’t show up in a single visit, but it’s consistent with a kitchen more interested in getting the fundamentals exactly right than in chasing novelty for its own sake.

This review’s rating — a strong four and a half — is really a bet on that patience holding up over the years still ahead of it, the same way the site’s history did for the room before it.