The Ninth

The Ninth takes Jun Tanaka’s French-Mediterranean cooking and serves it as small plates rather than a fixed tasting menu — a genuinely rare format for a Michelin-starred kitchen, and one that makes the room feel far less formal than the accolade suggests. Tanaka spent years cooking in exactly the kind of grand, hushed dining rooms this format deliberately avoids, and the decision to open something looser and more sociable reads as a considered choice rather than a compromise.

The star followed the format, not the other way round, which says something about how confident the kitchen was that small plates could carry the same weight as a set menu.

The Room

A relaxed, Charlotte Street dining room built for sharing rather than a formal set-course structure — tables sit close enough that ordering for the middle of the table feels natural rather than awkward, and the pace of service is set by the kitchen’s rhythm of sending out plates as they’re ready, not in a rigid three-course march.

It’s bright without being stark, busy without being loud, and the sort of room that works equally well for a two-person lunch or a table of six splitting everything. Nothing about the design announces a Michelin star; the confidence here is entirely on the plate.

What to Order

Start with the cured meats and fish plates — thinly sliced, precisely seasoned, built to be picked at while the rest of the table’s order arrives.

The genuine surprise on the menu is the vegetable “sides,” which the kitchen treats as full dishes in their own right rather than a garnish tacked onto a protein course; ordering two or three of these alongside a main plate or two is the way to eat here, not stacking proteins and treating vegetables as an afterthought.

Let the table order broadly rather than each person picking their own starter-main-dessert — the format rewards a shared, exploratory approach more than an individually plated one.

The Drinks List

A considered, mid-sized wine list built to move across a table of shared plates rather than being matched to any single dish — by-the-glass options are generous enough that a table trying several wines across a meal doesn’t feel like it’s overspending, and the staff are genuinely useful if you ask for a steer between two or three options.

It leans French and Mediterranean, in keeping with the kitchen’s own influences, and there’s enough range in weight and acidity across the by-the-glass list that switching wines between courses feels like the intended way to drink through the meal rather than an indulgence.

What You Will Pay

Set lunch runs around £21 for two courses, which for a Michelin-starred kitchen is a genuinely startling price and worth building a visit around on its own. À la carte dinner, ordering small plates across the table, runs closer to £45–65 per person depending on how many dishes you order — still fair for the quality, but the lunch is where the real value sits.

The Verdict

The set lunch is one of the best-value Michelin-starred meals in London — book it before the à la carte dinner, and treat the evening service as the version to save for when you want to order more widely across the vegetable sides. Either way, resist the instinct to order a protein-heavy meal out of habit; the format works best when the table lets the “sides” carry equal weight.

What’s Being Said

A star for small plates is unusual enough to be worth the booking on that fact alone, but what actually justifies it is the vegetable cooking — dishes that would be sides anywhere else are treated with the same care as the fish and meat plates, and that’s a harder discipline to maintain than it sounds.

Most small-plates menus let the vegetables coast, treating them as filler between more expensive proteins; this one consistently doesn’t, and that consistency across visits is what separates a genuinely considered format from a gimmick borrowed to look approachable. That consistency is exactly why this review settles on a full 5 stars rather than a merely-good 4.

Call that rating a reward for discipline rather than novelty — vegetables treated as the format’s actual point, not filler around it.