'Butter is applied with the kind of exactitude usually reserved for open-heart surgeries': London's hautest potatoes

At this time of year, as the nights get colder, there is one thing and one thing only I want to stuff my face with, and that is potatoes. Baked, mashed, smashed, roasted or — of course — in chip form, there simply isn’t anything cosier (potato salad excluded, that dish is meant for summer only).

Thankfully, if you don't feel like cooking, there are plenty of excellent restaurants in which you can indulge your cravings for this particular carby goodness. It is why we at Country Life have compiled a list of the hautest potatoes in London. It’s a list nobody asked for, but that you’ll be thanking us for when your next spud craving kicks in.

What? The hash browns

Where? Milk London

There aren’t many things that would get me out of bed before noon on a Sunday, but Milk London’s hash browns are one of them — and that’s even with the inevitable queue to get through its doors.

Whether it’s the crispy stack piled high with feathery shavings of Lincolnshire Poacher cheese, or the one hiding in the middle of The Convict — a gloriously indulgent breakfast sarnie stuffed with a Gloucester Old Spot pork patty, crispy streaky bacon, scrambled egg, cheese and Milk’s homemade ‘hangover sauce’, aptly named given the sorry state of many of its Sunday customers, my flatmate sitting opposite me included — these are, without doubt, the best hash browns in London.

Milk makes excellent use of seasonal ingredients, with an ever-changing menu of inventive specials that are well worth investigating. Accompanied by a very good coffee and my favourite smoothie in London (The Lauren), this is a combination capable of chasing away even the most harrowing of Sunday scaries. Flo Allen

What? The vanilla mash

Where? Bar de Prés

Mashed potato is the queen of potatoes, largely because it is enveloped in (ideally the same amount of) butter and also because it has been the preferred side of the nation’s favourite flesh — the banger — for over 100 years.

Throwing vanilla into the mix is a choice that may not fly with purists; but cooking, perhaps more than any other art form, has been demonstrably improved by the fusions and innovations of the past 40 years (a quick search for ‘1970s British food’ is confirmation enough).

At Bar Des Prés, where chef Cyril Lignac has been serving a mélange of French and Japanese flavours since opening on Albemarle Street in 2021 (it moved to a larger home, in Mount Street, this May), the vanilla mash has complemented such dishes as miso black cod, Chilean seabass and wagyu sando.

It melts in your mouth like silk so smooth you’ll want to order another, and another, and another until you resemble the very vegetable that started it all. Roll all the way home — and back for more. Will Hosie

What? The jacket potato

Where? The Goring

This is a potato at its most theatrical, its most decadent and, let’s be honest, its most ridiculous. Wheeled out on a cart, under a smart silver cloche is the most depressing, bland and, frankly, pathetic form of all the incarnations of cooked spuds — a plain, beige, wrinkly baked potato. Then, with all the grandeur deserved of a prince or a sultan, the most indulgent and delicious of ingredients are used to garnish it and, like a caterpillar to a butterfly, it becomes a thing of beauty.

You can almost hear executive chef Graham Squire of The Goring hotel's Michelin-starred dining room laughing from behind the scenes as the spectacle takes place, and yet my-oh-my does it work.

With lashings of creamy mushrooms, crème fraîche, sweetcorn, chive emulsion, parmesan, caviar and even popcorn, a basic staple becomes the classiest thing on the menu — and elusive too. It is only served at lunchtimes and, when I went, it wasn’t on the menu, so I had to ask specifically for it.

With toppings changing with the seasons it will be different each time, based on Squire's fancy. Is this the fanciest potato in London? Let’s just say that this potato doesn’t just have a jacket on, it has a top hat, black tie and tails to boot. Lotte Brundle

What? The mashed potato

Where? Pavyllon

If mashed potato typically stirs up memories of school dinners and pub lunches, it ought as easily to conjure an image of Michelin-grade refinement. Allow me to explain. You see, in the French kitchens from which we take our cues, mashed potato is called ‘pomme purée’, which does not mean apple compote despite ‘pomme’ indeed meaning apple but a silky-smooth substance that has been passed through a sieve so fine it could maim a small animal.

At Pavyllon, the exceptional ground-floor restaurant of the Four Seasons Hotel in Park Lane, the potato has been maimed to the point of sublimation—whipped, drenched and cloaked in a facade of unsalted butter, applied with the kind of exactitude usually reserved for open-heart surgeries.

An army of chefs works in the eerie and pacifying calm that only a Michelin-star kitchen can muster and under the culinary direction of Yannick Alléno, of Paris’s Ledoyen and Courchevel’s Le 1947.

Topped with shavings of nutmeg and served in a small bowl of stainless steel with handles on either side, it is the perfect accompaniment to the confit duck — or, when it’s in, the monkfish. [Ed. note: Cholesterol may rise.] Will Hosie

What? The caviar, crispy potatoes and crème fraîche

Where? 45 Jermyn Street

Ah, martinis and chips: the adult Happy Meal. If you're in St James's with a workaday hankering Maison Francois will do you nicely, but if you're in the mood to take things in a truly haute direction 45 Jermyn Street has you covered with its caviar, crispy potatoes & crème fraîche.

Somewhere between a chip, a hash brown and a roastie, the spuds take up two compartments of a specially designed three-leaf-clover holder; the third is full of caviar, with a little crème fraîche beneath (think mayo and chips). Y

ou're not obliged to pair them with the restaurant's signature martini for two (Hepple gin, Noilly Prat Dry, palo cortado sherry) but we'd strongly encourage you to. Emma Hughes

What? The smoked potatoes

Where? BRAT

If the Michelin star won’t convince you to visit BRAT, then perhaps their smoked potatoes will. They’re by no means the most extravagant dish on the menu — think whole turbot or Angus beef rib — but these humble potatoes deserve to take centre stage.

Taking inspiration from Basque-style cooking over fire, as well as chef Tomos Parry’s own upbringing cooking over fire on the beaches of coastal Wales, everything at BRAT has a smoky, flame-kissed quality, thanks to its huge Basque-style grill. Following the restaurant’s shtick, the potatoes have a gentle smokiness that seeps right into their hearts. Less like eating an ashtray and more like eating a golden nugget that has danced among flames.

They’re satisfyingly crisp and bronzed on the outside, yet wonderfully light and fluffy within. They come with hay butter, smoked over real hay, which is salty, faintly sweet and dangerously moreish. It had me wondering whether it would be socially acceptable to drink it by the strawful. It’s a dish that neatly captures BRAT’s cooking: simple ingredients, treated with fire and given time to develop their flavour. The potatoes are unfussy, unique and undeniably high-quality — much like BRAT itself. Bella Fulford

What? The croustillant potato

Where? Julie’s

A croustillant, perhaps, makes the most obvious case for the potato’s innate versatility. Cut into wafer thin slices and layered upon itself over and over, then drenched in oil that crackles and pops as the beatific carbohydrate emerges in chef’s pincers, it is to an actual potato what Philip Seymour Hoffman was to Along Came Polly.

The best croustillant I’ve had in London is at Julie’s, the beloved family-run restaurant in Holland Park, where it serves as an appetiser and is topped with a dollop of aioli — and caviar. Will Hosie

What? Dripping hash brown with whipped cod’s roe and scampi fries

Where? Whole Beast

Truly a gem of South London, Whole Beast’s hash browns are something worth going back for again and again. They have lived in my memory even since I first tasted them and have the ability to make me salivate by the act of thinking about them alone (fortunately for me, I live just down the road).

Served as a thick beefy slab — quite literally, it is a beef-dripping hash brown — the potatoey goodness comes with lashings of smoked cods roe, best used as a dip, and crushed scampi fries. Moreish would be an understatement.

The perfect meal is actually a couple of these combined with a few of the pickled eggs on the menu (which come with a brilliant hot sauce), and a gilda each. Swill the whole lot down down with a slew of either the house negronis (earl grey infused gin, campari, vermouth blend) or the house picantes (tequila, orange cordial, crystal hot sauce, lime saline), and you have a salty and delicious night out on your hands. Lotte Brundle

What? The sweet potato

Where? Nammos London

If you prefer the potato’s ‘healthier’ and more nutritious relative, this one is for you. Sweet potato is so often relegated to the role of a fry, but at the newly opened Nammos on Berkeley Street, it gets a makeover.

Listed as a side dish, the baked sweet potato with feta and melissa is good enough to be a dish in its own right. Soft, sweet and comforting, it’s beautifully balanced by the salty tang of feta and the freshness of lemon balm. It makes you wonder why sweet potato isn’t given the starring role more often.

If you’re a sweet potato enthusiast, it’s worth a visit for this alone. Pair it with the sirloin steak to share and one of the most interesting non-alcoholic drinks I’ve had in London in a while. I would, however, advise against finishing with two helpings of chocolate mousse, as I did. Flo Allen

Full of potatoes? For Country Life's guide to the most innovative eggs in the capital, click here.