Brunch Above London with Aqua Shard
There are restaurants with a view, and then there is Aqua Shard. Thirty-one floors above London Bridge, with the Thames curling through the city beneath you and landmarks suddenly reduced to pieces on a Monopoly board, this is a dining room where looking out of the window can become a serious distraction.
But perhaps the more interesting question is whether, more than a decade after The Shard transformed London's skyline, the food at Aqua Shard can still command attention of its own. Its latest Saturday brunch makes a convincing argument that it can, as The Knife found out.
London, looking up
Arriving at Aqua Shard inevitably feels different from walking into a conventional London restaurant. You don't simply cross a threshold; you ascend into it.
The lift doors open on Level 31 after a rapid, ear-popping lift ride, and London suddenly appears from an entirely different perspective. Floor-to-ceiling windows wrap around the dining room, flooding it with daylight and offering panoramic views across the capital. Tower Bridge, St Paul's and the River Thames all form part of the backdrop.
It's spectacular, obviously. But the clever thing about visiting at brunch is that the daylight makes the city feel less like scenery and more like part of the meal.
Aqua Shard has long positioned itself around contemporary British cooking and seasonal British produce, and its latest brunch menu pushes that identity further. This isn't simply eggs, avocado and something sparkling served at altitude.
Brunch grows up
Saturday brunch is a three-course affair priced at £60 per person, running from 10.30am until 3pm. There is an optional £39 wine pairing, but the drinks list also makes a persuasive case for starting the weekend with a cocktail.
And the Aqua Bellini is the obvious opener; peach liqueur, apricot brandy and peach purée topped with fizz, while more adventurous territory includes The Bird of Sichuan, combining tequila and mezcal with bergamot, Sichuan infusion, agave and grapefruit.
Then the food begins. A Royal Oak Farm salt-baked beetroot salad is the sort of starter that immediately establishes what Aqua Shard is trying to do. Pickled candy beetroot and William pear bring acidity and sweetness, crisp walnuts supply texture and English whipped goat's curd gives everything richness, with wild herb pesto pulling the plate together.
Elsewhere, an Isle of Wight tomato gazpacho makes a particularly summery proposition, while gravadlax of Scottish salmon arrives with shallots, capers, salty fingers and sauce Gribiche. And then there is Devon crab piled onto focaccia toast, sharpened with pineapple, chilli and an aromatic jelly. It carries an £11 supplement, but also neatly demonstrates the kitchen's willingness to nudge brunch beyond the expected.
The classics remain
Not everything needs reinventing, though. For those who believe brunch should still fundamentally involve eggs, bacon and Hollandaise, Aqua Shard hasn't abandoned the classics. Eggs Benedict, Florentine and Royale are all present, built around St. Ewe eggs, while The Shard's Breakfast – available until midday – assembles fried eggs, Butler's banger, maple-cured bacon, Stornoway black pudding, hash brown and Portobello mushroom.
The Royale is perhaps the most fitting expression of the room itself: familiar enough to feel comforting, but polished for the occasion. Scottish smoked salmon joins poached eggs and lemon Hollandaise, with sea vegetables and roe adding salinity.
Even French toast receives a little restraint. Thick brioche comes with crème fraîche, blueberry and lemon rather than disappearing beneath an avalanche of toppings. It is recognisably brunch, just wearing considerably better clothes.
Beyond breakfast
The menu becomes more interesting still once it moves away from conventional brunch dishes. Roasted Chalk Stream trout, cured in beetroot and served with new-season turnips, Granny Smith apple and foraged sea vegetables, could comfortably belong on a dinner menu. So could cider-glazed pork medallions with courgette, pumpkin-seed pesto and braised cabbage, or IPA-brined corn-fed chicken with Jerusalem artichoke purée, confit onion and roasting juices.
That breadth matters because Aqua Shard demonstrates that it can be as suited to the person who wants pancakes and a Bellini as it is to someone who has essentially decided that 1pm is lunch, regardless of what the menu calls itself.
Save room
Dessert at brunch can sometimes feel like an unnecessary final hurdle. Here, however, it is worth pacing yourself for.
The yuzu posset keeps things relatively bright, pairing citrus set cream with blueberry, white chocolate and vanilla shortbread. A Tuma Yellow chocolate mousse heads in the opposite direction, hiding banana and spiced rum at its centre before adding miso caramel and banana sorbet.
But the caramel custard tart is the one that lingers in the memory: buttery pastry, silky caramel custard and crème fraîche, interrupted by sugar-bacon tuile and salted blackcurrant. Sweetness, salt and acidity continually chase one another around the plate.
It's playful without becoming gimmicky – a useful distinction in a restaurant where spectacle is already supplied by the architecture.
A seasonal shift
Brunch also offers a window into the broader direction of Aqua Shard's cooking. Across its menus, the restaurant continues to put British produce and seasonality at the centre of its contemporary approach. Current dishes draw heavily on ingredients including Chalk Stream trout, Jersey Royal potatoes, British and Irish artisan cheeses, corn-fed chicken, beetroot, courgettes and British-grown tomatoes.
Its wider seasonal menus follow the same philosophy, allowing the restaurant to move with British produce rather than treating its location as the only attraction. That's an important part of Aqua Shard's identity. The view may remain essentially unchanged, but the kitchen doesn't have that luxury. Returning at different points in the year should mean finding something different on the plate.
There's an unavoidable temptation with restaurants inside famous buildings to assume the architecture is doing most of the heavy lifting and Aqua Shard could probably survive on the 31st-floor panorama alone. London is magnificent from up here, particularly over a long weekend lunch when there is nowhere else you urgently need to be.
But that undersells what makes brunch enjoyable. The menu here understands the occasion without being trapped by it. There are pancakes, eggs and Bellinis when you want brunch to behave like brunch, alongside trout, crab, pork and corn-fed chicken when you want something more substantial. British ingredients provide the common thread.
And perhaps that's the best way to experience Aqua Shard. Not simply as somewhere to eat while looking at London, but as somewhere that encourages you to spend a few hours enjoying it. The skyline gets you into the lift, but the brunch gives you a reason to stay.
