Nick Jones opens Café Clement in London, with a rooftop restaurant to follow

Nick Jones, the founder of Soho House, opened Café Clement inside the St Clement Hotel in London in June 2026. It arrives well ahead of the hotel's own full opening, scheduled for early autumn 2026 at 180 The Thames, giving diners a first taste of the project months before the building itself is complete.

The restaurant is run by head chef Danny Bohan, who spent more than two decades at the River Cafe before taking the post. That background matters: the River Cafe's reputation rests on simple, ingredient-led Italian cooking, and Bohan has carried a similar restraint into Café Clement's European bistro menu. The kitchen is open to the room, and terrace seating is built into the offer, both choices that put the cooking on display rather than hiding it behind a pass.

Reviewer Grace Dent covered the restaurant in August 2026, two months after it opened. She praised the eggs mayonnaise, the cheese soufflé and the sea bass carpaccio, three dishes that suggest a kitchen most comfortable with classic technique rendered precisely rather than reinvented.

Not everything held up. Dent criticised a fish casserole she found thin, and singled out the potato wedges as a weak point on an otherwise strong menu. The gap she identified is telling: the dishes that succeeded were the ones closest to bistro tradition, while the ones that faltered were further from that core, a pattern worth watching as the menu evolves.

Café Clement operates daily, with meals averaging £60 per person in London's WC2 postcode, a price point that places it firmly among the capital's mid to upper-tier hotel dining rooms rather than its formal fine dining. For a restaurant serving as the public face of a much larger hotel project, that pricing signals an ambition to be accessible rather than exclusive, at least at this stage.

The bigger opening is still to come. When the St Clement Hotel completes its rollout in early autumn 2026, chef Florence Knight will take charge of Lunette, the rooftop restaurant planned for the same address. Her arrival will effectively double the hotel's dining identity, adding a rooftop setting to the ground-floor bistro model Bohan has established.

Jones built Soho House into a private members' club group with a global footprint before turning to this new hotel project. Café Clement, in effect, is the preview. Bohan's kitchen has set the tone for what the fuller St Clement Hotel is meant to deliver once Lunette opens above it, and Dent's early verdict, more hits than misses, suggests the groundwork is solid even before the second restaurant arrives.