From the October 2026 issue of Apollo.

Walk down Lexington Street in Soho on a weekday morning and you’ll almost certainly see a waiter sitting outside a black-fronted Georgian townhouse, smoking and hand-writing a menu. This is the restaurant Andrew Edmunds, and the menus are no affectation but a stamp of authenticity: amid the Prets and Leons that have sprung up around it in recent years, Andrew Edmunds is a throwback to the old Soho populated by men of letters, artists and boozy ‘working lunches’.

The restaurant’s eponymous founder was a dealer of satirical prints by the likes of Gillray, Rowlandson and Hogarth. In 1974 he opened his print shop on Lexington Street, next to Schultz’s Wine Bar, and a decade later pounced on the opportunity to take over Schultz’s and turn it into a restaurant, serviced by his bountiful cellar of vintage wines. Each menu is branded with the restaurant’s logo, a drawing of a plate that Edmunds took from one of his Hogarths. The food served is elegant without pretension, comforting and slightly old-fashioned – a typical menu might include potted shrimp, ox tongue and a custard-based dessert of some kind – and the same could be said of the restaurant’s candlelit interior. Edmunds used to joke that he was responsible for fathering the most children in London, since his establishment was such a popular date spot.

In the late 1990s Auberon Waugh, son of Evelyn and editor of Literary Review, moved both the magazine’s office and the members’ club he had founded, the Academy (rules: no poets, no golfers), into the building on Lexington Street. The former occupies a small office above Edmunds’s shop and the latter the floor above the restaurant, where it serves its members food and wine from downstairs. Edmunds died in 2022 and a portion of the world-class collection of prints he amassed is this month being shown at Frieze by Daniel Crouch Rare Books. It feels fitting that this group of witty and esoteric cartoons, unfashionable nowadays, should come from the founder of an establishment that feels like a relic of a lost era.

From its early days, artists and dealers flocked to the restaurant, says Mandana Ruane, who ran the Academy from 1998–2017. Dealers including Paul Kasmin passed through the doors, as well as one unnamed ‘art-slinger’ whom Ruane had to bar three times and has since ‘grown up to be an éminence grise’. In 2007 Karsten Schubert, whose gallery on nearby Golden Square was taken over by Marian Goodman, began renting a space on the second floor of Edmunds’s building, bringing with him Bridget Riley, who used to ‘get lively on Sancerre’ and chase Ruane’s border terrier around Soho. Perhaps the most consistent artistic presence on Lexington Street was Norman Rosenthal, long-time exhibitions secretary at the Royal Academy, who rented a flat above the Literary Review office for a time. He had been living just across the street, until one day, while in the bath, he heard a crash and stepped out of the bathroom to find that the ceiling of his front room had collapsed, so he was forced to make other arrangements. ‘Normal for Lexington Street,’ Ruane says. 

I worked at Literary Review from 2019 until 2024, during which time I gained some insight into this milieu. More than once I stepped out to see Tom Stoppard smoking on the pavement outside; Nadira Naipaul, widow of the writer V.S., would buzz the door of our office and announce ‘It’s me!’ through the intercom; unspecified literary men would pop by and rhapsodise about how books were no longer what they used to be. It was the perfect place to do that, since the building was a time capsule: the curtains were saturated with Marlboro fug from the days when Waugh would smoke at his desk and tip ash into the metal bins, there was no central heating and there was a foot-sized hole in the floorboards, to which various solutions were devised (the one that stuck was plonking a pile of book proofs over it). There was never any question, it seemed, of Edmunds, our landlord, fixing the problem; perhaps it was just the price we paid for being granted access to this slice of old-school romance.

I don’t miss breathing in dust there, or the run-ins I had with Edmunds, which mostly involved him complaining that the piles of books we kept in the office were bending his floorboards. But there was a charm about it all, and Andrew Edmunds restaurant is one of the truly great things about Soho. I’m as partial to a hot honey pizza as the next person, but if it’s between that and some potted shrimp on Lexington Street, I know which one I’d choose.

From the October 2026 issue of Apollo.