When friends visit London, and they pretty much always pick a weekend, I run the same Soho loop. It has been refined over a decade of doing this badly and then a decade of doing it well. Drinks high up to start, dinner on Kingly Street, cocktails in a basement that pretends to be a member’s club, and a late dim-sum-and-nightcap stop behind a jade door in Chinatown. It is a long evening. It is a good one.
Most of these places are five minutes apart on foot. The whole loop sits inside a few hundred metres between Oxford Circus and Leicester Square, which is why it works as a single night rather than a logistical exercise. I do not have any commercial relationship with any of the venues below. They are just where I keep going.
Start high, Aqua Kyoto and Aqua Spirit
Aqua sits five floors up on the corner of Regent Street and Argyll Street, in what used to be the Dickens & Jones building. The lift is unmarked enough that first-timers walk past it; the entrance is at 240 Regent Street, and the postcode is W1B 3BR. Get out at Oxford Circus, walk a hundred metres south, look for the doorway, take the lift to five.
What you actually get up there is two restaurants in one space, Aqua Kyoto on one side serving contemporary Japanese (sushi, sashimi, Wagyu), and Aqua Nueva on the other serving Spanish small plates. Between them sits Aqua Spirit, the rooftop bar that takes orders from both kitchens, which means you can graze across two cuisines and a long cocktail list without booking a full sit-down dinner. I almost always go for Aqua Spirit, the terrace, and a few small plates rather than the full restaurant move.
The view is the actual point. You are looking out over the rooftops of central London with Regent Street directly below, and on a clear evening it is one of the genuinely best terraces in the city. Cocktails are sharp and not cheap. Get there before sunset, get the terrace if you can, and start the night with a couple of negronis or whatever they are pushing on the seasonal list. Forty-five minutes here and you are warm.
I have lost count of how many times I have been to Aqua Kyoto. The first visit was the one I remember most precisely: a Saturday in early March 2020, two days before the international COVID lockdown was announced. The dining room was full, nobody yet knew what was coming, and I have a memory of the rooftop air that night that has stayed sharp for six years.
What I would not work out for myself on a first visit, and what tends to be the question every friend asks before we go: the dress code is smart casual, and they are genuinely relaxed about it. In the summer months you can walk in wearing shorts and they will seat you on either of the two rooftop terraces without a second look. One of those rooftops, the smaller one tucked behind the bar, gives you a glimpse of the London Eye in the distance through the rooflines. That view, in the right light, is one of the best in the West End.
On the food and drinks side, the cocktails are genuinely incredible. My standing order is the whisky sour, which they make with a precision that holds up against any serious cocktail bar in London, and I pair it with the sushi platter rather than the hot dishes. The combination is the meal I order again and again. The robata is excellent too if you are eating bigger, but the whisky sour and a generous sushi spread is the move that has worked every visit.
Dinner on Kingly Street, Dishoom or Inko Nito
A six-minute walk south-east takes you from Aqua to Kingly Street, the small parallel road that runs alongside Carnaby. Two restaurants on Kingly Street that I rotate between. Both are excellent. Pick by mood.
Dishoom Carnaby sits at 22 Kingly Street, W1B 5QP, and is the most consistently brilliant Indian restaurant in London. I say that as someone who grew up around Indian food and has eaten across more of it in this city than I can keep track of. Order the House Black Daal, twenty-four hours of cooking, dark and rich, the dish they are best known for. Order the Chicken Ruby. Order the Pau Bhaji. Order the gunpowder potatoes. Get House Chai to drink. Bombay comfort food, served at volume, somehow still consistently good. The queue is real on weekend evenings; book ahead or arrive at six and accept a forty-minute wait at the bar with a Picon Punch.
Inko Nito is two minutes further down at 55 Broadwick Street and is the move when you want an edgier, more design-forward dinner. It is a Rainer Becker venue, the chef behind Zuma, Roka, and Oblix, which tells you the price band and the food philosophy in one sentence. Robata grill sits open in the centre of the room, sushi counter to one side, the whole space designed around the heat and noise of the kitchen. Korean influences run through a Japanese menu. Order the Korean-spiced lamb rump from the robata. Order the Miso Canadian black cod. Order one of the dumpling plates. Sit at the counter if you can, watch the chefs work, eat in tasting-menu chunks even though the menu is technically à la carte. More expensive than Dishoom, more theatrical, less consistent, but on the right night, it is the better dinner.
Either way, finish dinner around nine, walk back to Carnaby, and head one block to Kingly Court for the next stop.
Cocktails in a basement, Disrepute
Disrepute is at 4 Kingly Court, W1F 9RR, on the lower-ground floor of the courtyard restaurant complex. From the outside, you walk down a narrow staircase past a small black door and a discreet plaque, and then you are in a hundred-seat basement that looks like it was decorated for a 1962 Soho member’s club and never updated since. The space took over from a real Sixties haunt called The Pinstripe Club, and the whole place leans into that history without it feeling like a theme bar.
The cocktails are presented as a series of short stories tied to characters from Soho’s heyday. Mezcal-and-citrus things like Smoke & Mirrors are the showpieces, but I almost always order the Old Fashioned. They make it well, proper measure, the right bitters, a single thick ice cube, and an orange peel that gets twisted in front of you rather than tossed in. It is the Old Fashioned I judge a new bar on, and Disrepute passes it every time.
It works as a member’s club but accepts non-members on a walk-up basis if there is space, which there usually is on a midweek evening and rarely is on a Friday or Saturday. Book ahead at the weekend. Plan for at least an hour here; the lighting and the booth layout are designed to make you stay longer than you intended.
Late dim sum and one more drink, Opium in Chinatown
The last stop is fifteen minutes south on foot. Walk down Carnaby Street, cross Shaftesbury Avenue, and head into Chinatown via Wardour Street. The address you are looking for is 15-16 Gerrard Street, W1D 6JE. There is no obvious sign for the bar at street level, what you see is a Chinese door framed in jade green, easy to walk straight past. Push it. There is a stairway behind it.
Opium is a cocktail-and-dim-sum parlour spread across three floors of a Chinatown townhouse. The Apothecary Bar on the first floor has a central jade-coloured counter and a wall of glass jars filled with what looks like Cantonese herbal medicine but is actually the bar’s ingredient library. The Peony Bar is a small red-curtained room tucked off the corridor. The Attic Bar on the third floor has armchairs and old photos and feels like a friend’s grandmother’s living room reimagined as a cocktail den.
Eight signature cocktails on the menu, all themed around East Asian flavour profiles. Opium No. 9 is the one I push at people every time, gin, coconut, lime, a clean and not-too-sweet finish, very moreish in the specific way that gets you ordering a second one when you should have gone home. The dim sum is a real menu in its own right; do not skip it. Cantonese pork buns, scallop dumplings, prawn har gow, the lot. Pair the cocktails with a half-dozen plates of dim sum and you have effectively had a second dinner.
They open at 5pm and run late seven days a week. Walk-ins work most weekday nights; weekends need a booking. The whole place is bookable for private events too, which is why you see the upstairs floors used for hen dos and small corporate things sometimes, avoid the third floor on a Friday if that bothers you.
The whole loop, end to end
Aqua at six. Dinner at Kingly Street at eight. Disrepute at nine-thirty. Opium at midnight. Black cab home at two. Five hours of central Soho, four cuisines, half a dozen distinct rooms, and no more than ten minutes of walking between any two stops. The variant I run depends on the friends visiting, two of these stops are usually enough on a weeknight, three on a weekend, the whole thing only when somebody is in town for a milestone and we want to do it properly.
A few practical notes. Aqua needs a booking on weekends; the terrace specifically gets snapped up early. Dishoom does not take dinner reservations on weekends, only the bar, so you queue on a Saturday, start at six or accept a wait. Inko Nito takes bookings; book. Disrepute is loose on a Tuesday and tight on a Friday; book past Wednesday. Opium is walk-in friendly weekdays, book on weekends. None of them have a dress code that anyone polices, but they are all the kind of room where you would feel underdressed in trainers, so plan accordingly.
Most of central London nightlife is decent. This particular loop is the version I keep coming back to. Run it once and you will see why.