The Clove Club

The Clove Club sits inside the old council chamber of Shoreditch Town Hall, which is either the most or least likely setting for two Michelin stars, depending on how long you’ve lived in the area. Isaac McHale opened here in 2013, when a tasting menu inside a civic building sounded like a novelty rather than a serious proposition, and the two stars that followed have settled the argument.

This is not a restaurant borrowing gravitas from an interesting building. The building has, if anything, had to catch up to what the kitchen is doing inside it.

The Room

A Grade II-listed civic hall turned dining room — high ceilings, tall arched windows, and an open kitchen pass that puts the entire brigade on display rather than tucked behind a service door. None of the stiffness the address might suggest survives contact with the room itself: the lighting is warm rather than municipal, the tables are close enough to feel convivial without crowding, and the noise level sits somewhere between a hushed fine-dining hush and an actual dinner party.

Service moves at the unhurried pace a two-star kitchen can afford, but nothing about the pacing feels performative. You are here for several hours, and the room is built to make that feel like the right amount of time rather than an endurance test. It is, by some distance, the most purely enjoyable fine dining room this critic has sat in on Old Street.

What to Order

The tasting menu is fixed and seasonal, which means the specific line-up shifts through the year, but one course has stayed constant since the early days: the buttermilk fried chicken.

It is worth explaining why a piece of fried chicken belongs on a two-Michelin-star menu at all — the brining, the double-fry technique, the exact ratio of crust to meat have all been worked at for over a decade, and the result is the dish most regulars will bring up unprompted before anything else on the table.

Beyond that anchor course, expect Isle of Skye langoustine treated with real restraint rather than over-worked, and a rotating game course that leans into whatever’s genuinely in season — venison and grouse in autumn, something lighter earlier in the year. The kitchen’s judgment about when to stop adding to a plate is, as much as any single ingredient, the actual skill on display here.

The Drinks List

A serious pairing menu runs alongside the tasting menu, built specifically around each course rather than poured on autopilot the way pairing menus sometimes are elsewhere. The sommelier team treats the pairing as its own parallel tasting experience — a few unexpected bottles turn up alongside the classical choices, and the fried chicken course in particular gets a pairing that plays genuinely well against the fat and salt rather than just cutting through it.

Ordering the pairing is a real financial step up, but it is not a formality tacked onto the food; it changes the meal.

What You Will Pay

The shorter tasting menu runs around £185 on quieter nights (Tuesdays and Wednesdays); the full menu, served on the busier nights of the week, is closer to £285. Both figures are before drinks, pairing, and service, so a full evening with wine easily clears £300–400 per person.

That is a genuine two-Michelin-star price point, not a discounted version of one — but per course, against London’s other two- and three-star kitchens, it holds up as reasonable rather than exceptional.

The Verdict

Book weeks ahead — the room is small and the two stars mean it fills fast regardless of night. Come hungry, pace yourself through the courses rather than rushing to the end, and do not skip the fried chicken. Whatever else is on the seasonal menu when you visit, that course is the through-line that’s kept people coming back since 2013.

A full 5-star rating is not something this review hands out casually, and it reflects a kitchen with essentially no weak courses to point to, not just one famous one.

What’s Being Said

A council chamber turned two-star dining room shouldn’t work as well as it does — civic buildings converted into restaurants usually trade on the novelty of the space rather than genuinely earning their reviews on the plate. Here, the fried chicken course is the reason nobody questions the premise twice: it’s the kind of dish that could carry a much less interesting room, and instead it’s carrying one of London’s most interesting ones.