Granger & Co, Notting Hill

Granger & Co was the London outpost that introduced Bill Granger’s Australian brunch style to Notting Hill, and the weekend queue outside is still one of the neighbourhood’s fixed points, more than a decade after it first opened.

Before this restaurant, “brunch” in London mostly meant a fry-up with an egg on top or a hotel buffet; Granger’s bright, produce-forward, slightly beach-café approach to the meal reshaped what a whole generation of London restaurants understood weekend morning eating to look like, and this branch is where a lot of that reshaping actually started.

The Room

Bright, bustling, unmistakably a brunch room — expect a wait on weekends, no bookings taken, and a genuine buzz that builds from the moment the doors open. Communal-leaning tables and a lot of natural light through large windows give the space an easy, unfussy energy that suits a menu built around shared plates and quick turnover rather than a leisurely, formally-served meal.

Staff move fast without seeming rushed, which is a harder trick to pull off during a Saturday rush than it looks, and the room somehow stays pleasant even at its busiest rather than tipping into chaos.

What to Order

The ricotta hotcakes with banana and honeycomb butter are the dish this restaurant is actually known for — light, properly fluffy rather than dense, and sweet without tipping into dessert territory before noon. The sweetcorn fritters with tomato, spinach and bacon are the savoury equivalent, a genuinely well-balanced plate rather than a token vegetable gesture next to a protein.

The soba noodle breakfast bowl with avocado and kimchi is worth ordering if you want something lighter and less traditionally “brunch” — a nod to the wider Sydney-café tradition Granger’s cooking comes out of, and a good option for anyone at the table who’d rather not do sweet pancakes at 11am.

The Drinks List

A straightforward coffee-and-juice morning list that takes both seriously rather than treating them as an afterthought to the food, moving to wine and cocktails by evening once the room shifts out of brunch mode. The fresh juices in particular are worth ordering over a soft drink — they’re clearly squeezed to order rather than poured from a carton, which is not something every all-day brunch spot in the area bothers with.

By evening the room reads almost as a different restaurant, calmer and slower, with a short but sensible wine list that suits the more relaxed dinner crowd rather than the queue-and-turnover energy of a Saturday morning.

What You Will Pay

Around £20–35 per person for brunch, which for the quality and the reputation behind the format is genuinely reasonable — this isn’t a restaurant charging a premium for the queue outside, even on the busiest Saturday mornings. Dinner runs a little higher once the wine list and the more considered evening menu come into play, but it’s still priced as a genuine neighbourhood restaurant rather than a destination trading purely on its brunch reputation.

The Verdict

Turn up early on a weekend, or accept the queue — the hotcakes are worth either, and trying to avoid the wait entirely by coming at an odd hour rather defeats the point of a room built around weekend brunch energy. If queuing isn’t for you, a weekday breakfast or an evening visit gets you the same kitchen without the Saturday crowd, and it’s worth knowing that trade-off exists rather than writing the restaurant off after one long wait.

What’s Being Said

The brunch that helped define an entire London genre, still doing the job that made it famous, more than a decade after the format it popularised became the default across half the city’s weekend menus. Plenty of restaurants that started a trend get overtaken by the imitators that followed; this one hasn’t needed to change much to stay relevant, which is its own quiet vindication.

Walk into any number of newer brunch spots across London and you’ll recognise the DNA — bright rooms, produce-forward plates, a menu unafraid of vegetables at breakfast — and most of it traces back, one way or another, to what this kitchen was doing first.

That quiet influence is worth spelling out plainly in this review: a four-star rating for a brunch room whose format has since been copied across the city is, if anything, a modest number for how much it changed London dining.