Fleurie

Fleurie makes its priorities plain in the name: this is a wine bar that happens to serve food, built around Beaujolais and natural wine rather than the other way round. Bermondsey Street has no shortage of restaurants with a wine list bolted on as an afterthought — a page at the back of the menu, arranged by grape and grouped by price point, chosen by someone who’d rather be talking about the kitchen.

Fleurie inverts that arrangement entirely. The food exists to give the wine somewhere to land, and once you understand that, the whole room makes more sense.

The Room

Small, candlelit, intimate — the kind of room built for a bottle and a long conversation rather than a quick dinner. There’s no rush built into the layout: tables sit close enough for the room to feel full even on a quiet Tuesday, and low light does most of the work that elsewhere gets handed to music or décor.

It reads less like a restaurant that added ambience and more like a room that was always going to end up here, wine-first, food second, with nothing in the space fighting that priority. Come in a group of two rather than six — the tables are not built for a crowd, and a crowd would rather defeat the point of the place.

What to Order

The artichoke and truffle soup is the dish worth ordering on its own merits, not just as an accompaniment to whatever’s in the glass — a genuinely considered plate in a room that could easily have coasted on a cheese board and called it a menu.

From there, a French cheese and charcuterie board is the correct, unfussy move: nothing that competes with the wine, everything built to extend the evening rather than punctuate it. Ask what’s being poured by the glass before you commit to a bottle — the biodynamic Beaujolais rotates, and the staff clearly taste through it themselves rather than reciting a sheet.

Order less food than feels natural and more wine than feels reasonable; that’s the ratio this room is built around.

The Drinks List

The reason to come. A genuinely deep, natural-leaning Beaujolais list — not the jammy, over-extracted version of Beaujolais that gave the region a bad name for a decade, but the serious, structured, ageable wines that made it worth arguing about in the first place.

Alongside it sits a short list of classic cocktails, and the gimlet in particular is worth asking for rather than defaulting to wine on arrival: sharp, correctly balanced, and a good palate-cleanser before the reds take over. Staff here talk about the list the way sommeliers do at rooms three times the price, without any of the performance that sometimes comes with it.

What You Will Pay

Around £35–50 per person with wine, which for a room built almost entirely around the drinks list is a genuinely fair number. A lighter visit — soup, cheese board, two glasses — sits at the bottom of that range; committing to a full bottle of the good stuff pushes it toward the top. Either way, you’re paying for what’s in the glass, not for the room around it, and that’s exactly as it should be.

The Verdict

Come for the wine, let the food play a supporting role, and don’t rush it. This is not a restaurant to fit in before something else — book it as the destination itself, arrive with no fixed end time in mind, and trust the staff’s recommendations over your own first instinct on the list.

What’s Being Said

A wine bar this small only works if the list is genuinely worth the trip — here, it is. What’s easy to miss on a first visit is how unshowy the whole operation is about it: no elaborate tasting notes recited at the table, no theatre around the pour, just a genuinely well-chosen list served by people who clearly drink the stuff themselves rather than simply sell it.

For a wine bar built around drinking well rather than dining formally, this review’s four-star rating reflects a list that rewards genuine curiosity over ceremony.