Pied à Terre has long championed sustainability. The London Michelin Star restaurant refuses to serve water from plastic bottles, prioritizes fresh, locally-sourced produce, and even stocks eco-friendly toilet paper. Since 2017, its extensive plant-based tasting menu has stood proudly alongside its meat-focused counterpart—driven by the same commitment to quality, skill, and flavor.
While plant-based fine-dining options can sometimes fall flat, even in a vegan-forward city like London, that’s not the case at Pied à Terre. Here, plant-based food is far from an afterthought. For an intimate, high-end dining experience in London’s Fitzrovia district, this iconic French eatery should be at the top of your list. Here’s what you can find on the menu.
From pig trotters to plants: a brief history of Pied à Terre
Pied à Terre has come a long way since the 1990s. Back then, the menu was all about “sweetbreads, pig trotters, and brazed pig heads,” the restaurant’s owner David Moore told the International Business Times last year. “If I’d have said ‘vegan and vegetarian menu’ to [head chef] Richard Neat, he would have stabbed me in the eye,” he added.
It’s hardly surprising. Back then, vegan food (and even vegetarian food) was limited to the fringes of society. Tofu was for hippies, meat was for the mainstream. “Neat didn’t focus on vegetarian dishes. None of the chefs did,” explained Moore. “If we go back and I said to one of the chefs ‘I’ve got a vegetarian on table 10, what do I do?’, he would have said: ‘Give them the f*****g seabass without the seabass!’”
Pied à Terre
The attitude in the restaurant industry stayed this way for a long time—decades, in fact. It’s only recently that more eateries have started to embrace plant-based options, thanks to the rise of flexitarians in the UK. In 2023, research suggests that up to 23 percent of Brits were reducing their meat intake for their health and the environment.
Chefs are adapting. Even top British celebrity chef Gordon Ramsay, infamous for once saying that he was “allergic to vegans,” recently admitted that he “actually loves” cooking plant-based food.
At Pied à Terre, it was head chef Shane Osborn, who took over the kitchen in the late 1990s, that saw the tables turn in the favor of vegetarians—still ahead of the curve in context with the rest of the industry at the time.
“I said I wanted a printed vegetarian menu every night, and I told them that it can be the same for the whole week or month,” recalled Moore. “I just didn’t want to run to the kitchen to ask what we were going to do for the vegetarian on table 10.” A vegetarian menu was indeed printed, and around 18 years later, the restaurant’s first vegan menu arrived.
What’s on the vegan menu at Pied à Terre?
There are several vegan dining options at Pied à Terre. You can stick to a two- or three-course à la carte menu, but the real showstopper is the tasting menu. Paired with wine or cocktails, the eight- or ten-course tasting menus celebrate the versatility of plants, showcasing them in innovative and unexpected ways. If you thought ingredients like beetroot, artichoke, or barley were boring, prepare to be proven wrong.
Take, for example, the third course of the ten-course tasting menu: Jerusalem Artichoke and Périgord Truffle. A carefully crafted dish featuring artichoke hazelnut cream, Piedmont hazelnuts, and roasted artichokes, it’s a perfect balance of earthy flavors and luxurious textures. This comes after courses with ingredients like vibrant citrus-infused carrots, delicate beetroot meringue, and a “fricassée of winter vegetables,” and just before the decadent Pumpkin and Sage Agnolotti with dairy-free ricotta, aged maple syrup, and crispy sage.
Pied à Terre
If you weren’t sold on functional mushrooms, the Textures of Lion’s Mane dish—featuring sea vegetables, barley, pine nuts, and Madeira foam—will make a fungi lover out of anyone. To finish, the Chocolate Mousse made with ethically sourced 80 percent red Honduras cocoa redefines “melt-in-your-mouth” indulgence. And that’s just scratching the surface of what this fine-dining hotspot has to offer.
Pied à Terre is located just a short walk from the Goodge Street and Tottenham Court Road underground stations. It’s open for dinner from 5:30 pm until 10 pm, Tuesday to Saturday. Find out more about tasting menus, prices, sustainablity practices, and—most importantly—how to book a table here.
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Charlotte is a VegNews editor and writer based in sunny Southsea on England’s southern coast.
