CORE by Clare Smyth opened in Notting Hill in August 2017. Two Michelin stars in 2019, three in 2021 — the first British woman to hold three Michelin stars at her own restaurant. A girl who grew up on a County Antrim farm, trained in the most demanding kitchens in the world, and came home to the potato. The warmest three-star table in London.

First, the Welcome


Clare Smyth is usually at the door when you arrive, and at the pass when you leave.


The restaurant is on Kensington Park Road at the northern end of Portobello Market, in a white-stucco Notting Hill townhouse on a street that feels exactly as expensive as it is. The building is elegant and understated: a small discreet sign, a entrance that gives little away. Inside, the dining room is calm and modern — walnut shelving, plush carpets, cream seating, a palette that the restaurant describes as earthy and quiet. The signature kelly green of the branding appears in the wallpaper, the menus, and the subtle details of the décor — woven through rather than announced. The room has been described by guests as feeling more like a very well-appointed townhouse than a formal restaurant, which is exactly the effect it is designed to produce.


What strikes visitors most, consistently across the years and across hundreds of guest accounts, is not the room but the welcome. Smyth herself greets guests at the door when she is able to — which is most evenings. She is present in the kitchen during service and visible from certain seats. At the end of the meal, the exit from the dining room passes a window into the kitchen, where Smyth and her team are working, and guests report being thanked directly by the chef as they leave. These details are not theatrical: they are the natural consequence of a chef patron who has consistently described her primary goal as making people feel comfortable, welcome, and genuinely looked after, in a building that is hers and reflects who she is.


Smyth was precise, before opening, about what she wanted CORE to be: not the cold, slightly intimidating formality that fine dining had acquired in the decade preceding the restaurant's opening. She removed that formality deliberately — informative but unpretentious menus, a wine list full of drawings and brief descriptions rather than the technical apparatus of a traditional fine-dining list, service that is well-drilled and technically impeccable but warm and individual in character. The effect, which the Michelin inspector noted on a recent visit as the thing that pleased them most, is a room in which the relaxed atmosphere and the three-star cooking are not in tension but are aspects of the same coherent vision.

The Chef


Country Antrim farm. Left at sixteen. The first British woman to own a three-star restaurant.


Clare Smyth was born in 1978 and grew up on a farm in County Antrim, Northern Ireland. The farm is not incidental to the cooking: the potato dish that has become the restaurant's signature, the carrot dish that is its second most celebrated preparation, the consistent intelligence about vegetables and about the specific qualities of British produce — all of it traces back to a childhood in which food was not a restaurant category but an agricultural fact. Smyth has said that as a girl she was always interested in food, was cooking at local restaurants as a teenager, and understood early that cooking in the best kitchens was where she wanted to be. At sixteen she left Northern Ireland for England to study at catering college in Portsmouth, and the departure was understood by both her and the people around her as permanent in its direction: she was going toward something, and the farm and the coast of County Antrim would follow her, as they have, in the food she makes.


The formation that followed the college years was one of the most complete available in British and French cuisine. She staged at The Waterside Inn — the Roux Brothers' Thames-side restaurant in Bray, which held three Michelin stars for decades and whose French classical cooking is the most rigorous expression of the tradition available in England. She worked at Gidleigh Park, the country house hotel in Devon that produced some of Britain's most serious cooking. She worked with Heston Blumenthal at The Fat Duck during the period when that kitchen was reinventing the English fine dining canon from first principles. She spent time in Australia, broadening her reference. And then, in 2002, Gordon Ramsay offered her a position at Restaurant Gordon Ramsay on Royal Hospital Road — the three-star Chelsea restaurant that was, at the time, the benchmark of French fine dining in Britain.


  • (County Antrim) Grew up on a farm. Left at sixteen — The agricultural foundation that informs the cooking's specific reverence for British produce — the potato, the carrot, the vegetables of the home landscape understood not as supporting ingredients but as worthy of the highest treatment. The farm does not appear in the restaurant as nostalgia. It appears as knowledge.


  • (Bray / Devon) Waterside Inn, Gidleigh Park — The rigorous French classical tradition as practised in England — Michel Roux's insistence on technique, on the quality of the ingredient, on the standard that three stars requires and that nothing below it is acceptable. The foundational discipline from which everything else departs but to which the cooking always returns.


  • (Bray) The Fat Duck, Heston Blumenthal — The kitchen that spent the 2000s dismantling and rebuilding the English fine dining canon, that made formal the question of what food can be when it treats itself as a medium for memory and experience rather than simply as a sequence of excellent ingredients. An education in what is possible when the conventional limits of a cuisine are interrogated rather than accepted.


  • (Monaco) Alain Ducasse, Le Loius XV — Eighteen months in one of the most decorated dining rooms in the world, working under the chef who has accumulated more Michelin stars than anyone in history. The Monaco formation added the specific register of the Mediterranean — the produce of the French Riviera at its peak, the luxury ingredients of the highest French table, the management of a kitchen operating at the very top of the international hierarchy.


  • (London) Restaurant Gordon Ramsay, 2002-2016 — Thirteen years. Head chef from 2007, the first female chef in the UK to run a restaurant with three Michelin stars. Chef patron from 2012, a perfect ten score in the Good Food Guide in 2015, the MBE in 2013. The period in which the technical authority, the management capability, and the specific knowledge of what three-star cooking requires were not acquired as a student but exercised as the person responsible for their maintenance. Left in 2016 to open her own restaurant.


The story of what happened at Restaurant Gordon Ramsay between 2007 and 2016 is the story of a chef who inherited someone else's standards and maintained them as her own — who ran a three-star kitchen not in the reflected light of the person whose name was on the door, but through her own precision, discipline, and authority. Ramsay himself has credited Smyth as a chef of the first order. The question of what her cooking would look like when the kitchen was hers, when the name on the door was her own and the ingredients were the ones she had always wanted to cook with, was answered in August 2017 when CORE opened. The answer was: a potato, a carrot, a whiskey made with seaweed, and a dining room that feels like being looked after by someone who is genuinely happy to see you.

The Cuisine


British produce, no exceptions — and the argument that the humble ingredient done with mastery is the point.


The philosophical core of the cooking at CORE is a refusal that took courage to make. Smyth opened a three-star French-technique restaurant in 2017 and committed to sourcing almost entirely from British producers — not as a trend, not as a marketing proposition, but as the genuine expression of where she is from and what she believes about the relationship between a chef and the landscape that produced her. The British climate and the British agricultural tradition do not produce truffles in the quantities that the Périgord provides, or the seafood diversity of the Mediterranean, or the game birds of the Hungarian plains. What they produce is a specific range of vegetables, fish from the coasts of Cornwall and Scotland and Northern Ireland, beef and lamb and game from the British uplands, and a dairy culture of genuine distinction. Smyth's argument is that these ingredients, at the standard available from the producers she has worked with carefully over years, are the equal of anything the continent can offer — not despite their simplicity but through it.


The potato is the clearest statement of this argument. Charlotte potatoes from Britain, cooked overnight confit-style with dulse seaweed and butter until they achieve a texture that no quicker method produces — waxy, soft, and intensely flavoured, carrying the minerality of the soil and the salt of the seaweed at the same time — served with herring and trout roe, a dulse beurre blanc, and tiny salt-and-vinegar crisps that add the acidity and crunch that the richness of everything else needs. The dish takes approximately twenty-five hours to make. It is the most discussed single preparation at the restaurant. Multiple visitors describe it as the best potato they have ever eaten. Smyth's point — that the potato, properly understood and properly treated, can be the subject of a three-star dish — is made clearly and irrefutably by this one preparation.


"We don't always need luxury ingredients to make a fantastic dish. We know we need to eat less meat and fish and eat more vegetables, so at CORE we take humble ingredients and try to use them to create something just as satisfying as something that is very luxury."

CLARE SMYTH, CHEF PATRON, CORE BY CLARE SMYTH


The approach extends across the menu. The carrot that is confited in lamb fat until it absorbs the cooking juices of the braised lamb and becomes, in Smyth's formulation, the best bit of the dish. The turnip, the kohlrabi, the seasonal British fish — cod from Cornish waters, turbot with its specific reference to the coastline of the chef's Northern Irish childhood, sea bass with bivalves and lovage. The cooking is classical in its technique — the French formation is present in every sauce, every braise, every poach — and British in its ingredients and its emotional register. It does not announce either influence. It simply works, at a level that two menus' worth of signature dishes demonstrate over and over, in a way that makes the argument for British produce without ever needing to state it directly.

The Dishes


What arrives — and what each preparation has been quietly arguing all along.


Two tasting menus — Core Classics and Core Seasons — plus an à la carte. The following represent the preparations most consistently identified by guests and critics as the clearest expressions of what CORE believes.


The Signature — Potato and Roe — dulse beurre blanc, herring and trout roe, salt-and-vinegar crisps


The most discussed dish in the restaurant's history, and the one that most directly states the kitchen's philosophical position. Charlotte potatoes cooked overnight confit-style with dulse seaweed and butter — a twenty-five-hour preparation for a single ingredient — served in their skins with a dulse beurre blanc, a spoonful each of herring roe (briny, sharp, with a distinctive crunch) and trout roe (subtler, softer), and tiny homemade salt-and-vinegar crisps that provide the acidity the dish needs to balance its richness. The preparation is inspired by Smyth's childhood in County Antrim, where potatoes were eaten daily and the soil near the North Antrim coast is enriched by the ocean's minerality. The dish takes an everyday ingredient and applies the full vocabulary of classical French technique to produce a preparation that multiple visitors describe as the best potato of their lives. The argument it makes — that humble ingredients, properly understood, are the equal of any luxury — is the kitchen's defining statement.


The Story — Lamb Carrot — carrot confited in lamb fat, braised lamb neck, sheep's milk yoghurt, carrot-top pesto


CORE's second most celebrated signature: a dish born from a kitchen habit that Smyth converted into a philosophical act. When braising lamb, the carrots cooked alongside absorb the stock and meat juices and become, as she has said, the best bits of the pot — the element she would always steal for herself before the dish was plated. The Lamb Carrot makes that stolen moment the subject of the dish. A single English carrot from Sussex, slowly confited in lamb fat until tender and intensely flavoured, topped with braised lamb neck (pressure-cooked to concentrate flavour), finished with sheep's milk yoghurt for freshness and balance, a pesto made from the carrot tops, and a small lamb bun served alongside. The dish uses the whole carrot — tops included — and the lamb's fat as the cooking medium, so that no ingredient is wasted and every element of what the kitchen had available becomes part of what the guest receives. A vegetable as the title of a dish, at a restaurant with three Michelin stars. The carrot is the star, and the carrot earns it.


The Childhood — Cornish turbot — mussels, leeks, fennel and pepper dulse — a homage to the chef's coastal upbringing


The turbot course is an explicit autobiographical reference: a dish built from the flavours of the Cornish coast where Smyth worked early in her career and won the title of Young Cornish Fish Chef of the Year. The combination of turbot — one of the finest flatfish in British waters, firm and sweet-fleshed — with the briny, smoky quality of grilled mussels, the anise notes of fennel, and the specific sea-flavour of pepper dulse (a seaweed used in both Irish and British coastal cooking for centuries) is a flavour combination that tastes, as multiple guests have described it, of the sea from a specific direction. These are not luxury ingredients in the conventional fine-dining sense. They are ingredients from a specific coastline, cooked by someone who spent formative years on it, in a restaurant that treats provenance as personal rather than merely geographical.


The Surf and Turf — Beef and Oysters — Highland wagyu, native oysters from Porthilly Cornwall, a study in British terroir


The beef and oyster preparation is CORE's most direct statement about British terroir as a culinary argument: wagyu cattle raised in the Scottish Highlands whose specific quality the landscape and climate produce, combined with native oysters from Porthilly in Cornwall, where the specific salinity and temperature of the estuary produces a shellfish of particular character. The combination of beef and oyster is an old British tradition — oyster steak, a Victorian pub dish — elevated into a three-star composition that traces the specific geography and food culture of the island from north to south in a single course. The conceptual argument (that British ingredients can meet the ambition of French three-star technique) is made here as directly as it is anywhere in the menu.


The Snack — The roast dinner canapé — an entire Sunday roast in a single bite, which makes you smile


The opening snack sequence at CORE includes a preparation that guests consistently name as the moment they understood what the restaurant was doing: a single-bite canapé that contains all the flavours of a British Sunday roast — the meat, the roasting juices, the herbs, the specific comfort of a meal that is the most deeply encoded food memory in British culture — compressed into a morsel that is technically precise and emotionally immediate at the same time. It is a dish about memory and recognition as much as it is about flavour. The Michelin inspector noted it specifically. Multiple guests describe laughing out loud when they receive it, which is not the usual response to a canapé at a three-star restaurant and is exactly what the kitchen intends. This is what Smyth means when she talks about evoking emotion and nostalgia. The Sunday roast in one bite is the purest possible expression of that intention.


The Isle of Harris — Scallop tartare — sea vegetable consommé, served as a closed shell opened at the table


The scallop tartare is CORE's most theatrically presented preparation — a closed scallop shell placed before the guest, the top removed at the table to reveal the tartare within and allow the consommé made from sea vegetables to be poured over it. The Isle of Harris scallop is among the finest in British waters, diver-caught in the cold, clean Atlantic off the Scottish island's western coast, with the specific sweetness and density of texture that the cold temperature produces. The sea vegetable consommé — made from seaweeds that the Scottish coast provides in abundance — provides a broth of oceanic depth and clarity that the tartare sits within. The presentation communicates theatrically something the kitchen's approach everywhere else communicates quietly: that the British coastline is capable of producing ingredients that justify this level of care and this register of treatment.


The Dessert — CORE-teser — a Malteser in three-star form, the best-known dessert in the restaurant


The CORE-teser is the restaurant's most famous dessert: a playful and technically accomplished recreation of the Malteser — the British malted milk chocolate confectionery that has been a childhood fixture since the 1930s — in three-star form. Light chocolate sponge, smooth hazelnut ice cream, and aerated malt that dissolves on the palate: the flavour combination is precise and unmistakeable, and the technical execution — the lightness of the sponge, the specific malt quality, the temperature contrast — is beyond what the source material would lead you to expect. It is a dish about British confectionery the way that Potato and Roe is a dish about British vegetables: respectful of the original, transformed by skill and understanding into something that justifies its presence on a three-star menu while remaining entirely recognisable as what it started from. The name is the best pun in London fine dining and is delivered without apology.


The Drink — Whiskey and Seaweed cocktail — Irish whiskey, kelp, sea lettuce, black cardamom, in the bar that carries its name


The Whiskey and Seaweed cocktail predates the bar of the same name and is the restaurant's most direct distillation of Smyth's cooking philosophy into a glass: Irish whiskey — from the country she left at sixteen — combined with kelp, sea lettuce, and black cardamom to produce a cocktail that tastes of the North Antrim coast by a specific and deliberate route. The cocktail uses the same flavour combination that informs the Potato and Roe dish — the relationship between dulse seaweed and the specific minerality it imparts — transposed from the kitchen to the bar. The bar itself, renovated in recent years and now a destination in its own right, carries a significant global whiskey collection and a cocktail menu that reflects the same intelligence and the same biographical specificity as the food. Begin the evening here. It is the correct way into the restaurant.

Things Worth Knowing


The details that make this the most personal three-star table in London.


The First and Only — What the Three Stars Mean In Context


CORE received its third Michelin star in the 2021 Guide, making Clare Smyth the first British woman to hold three Michelin stars at her own restaurant. The significance of this is not diminished by the fact that Smyth had previously run a three-star kitchen as Chef Patron at Restaurant Gordon Ramsay — those were someone else's stars, at someone else's restaurant. The stars at CORE are hers: earned at a restaurant she built from scratch, in a room she designed, with ingredients she chose, cooking she conceived, and a philosophy that is the distillation of everything her career produced. As of 2026 she remains the only British woman to hold this distinction. The three stars are the formal acknowledgment of something that the two stars had been communicating since 2019: this is a kitchen that deserves to be ranked with the best in the world.


Two Tasting Menus and an À La Carte — Choose Classics for a First Visit


CORE offers two tasting menus — Core Classics, built around the restaurant's most celebrated dishes including Potato and Roe, Lamb Carrot, and CORE-teser; and Core Seasons, featuring more recent and seasonal preparations that change with the British agricultural calendar. An à la carte is also available, offering greater flexibility for those who prefer not to commit to a full tasting progression. For a first visit, the Classics menu is the stronger choice: it contains the preparations that most directly state the kitchen's philosophy and most completely communicate what CORE is. The Seasons menu is stronger on a return visit, when the signatures have already been received and the seasonal range of the cooking becomes the primary point of interest.


Arrive Thirty Minutes Early and Use the Whiskey and Seaweed Bar


The Whiskey and Seaweed bar — renovated and expanded in recent years, now one of the finest bar spaces in Notting Hill in its own right — carries one of the most serious global whiskey collections in London, a cocktail programme that reflects the same intelligence as the kitchen, and the specific pleasure of the restaurant's signature cocktail (Irish whiskey, kelp, sea lettuce, black cardamom) as an aperitif. The bar is the correct beginning for an evening at CORE. It provides the transition from the street to the dining room, introduces the flavour vocabulary of the kitchen, and communicates immediately that the restaurant takes pleasure seriously. Arrive thirty minutes before the reservation. Order the Whiskey and Seaweed. The food will follow.


The British Produce Commitment Is Total — Come Prepared to Be Convinced


CORE's sourcing philosophy — British produce, from dedicated farmers and food producers, with no exceptions for the luxury ingredients that other restaurants of this level routinely import — is the most demanding and the most distinctive commitment in London fine dining. Visitors accustomed to the conventional fine-dining register of Périgord truffle, French butter, Japanese A5, and Breton langoustine will find at CORE a menu in which the same technical authority is applied to Charlotte potatoes, Sussex carrots, Cornish turbot, and Isle of Harris scallops. Whether the specific quality of British produce at its best equals the best of what the continent offers is a question the menu answers dish by dish. The consistent testimony of serious eaters who have dined at CORE is that the answer, often to their surprise, is yes.


The Chef Is Usually in the Room — This Is Not Common at Three-Star Level


Clare Smyth is present at CORE most evenings: greeting guests at the door when she can, visible in the kitchen during service through the pass window that guests encounter on their way out of the dining room, engaged with the restaurant in the specific way that a chef patron who built it with her own hands and runs it with her own name on the door is engaged. At Restaurant Gordon Ramsay — where she spent thirteen years — she ran a kitchen at the highest level for someone else. At CORE she runs it for herself, and the difference in presence and investment is perceptible. Guests who see her at the door and then at the pass as they leave describe the specific warmth that her presence gives to an evening: not performance, not ceremony, but the natural consequence of a chef who is genuinely interested in whether the people who came to eat her food had a good time.


The Wine List Is Approachable by Design — Trust the Sommelier


CORE's wine list is curated with the same philosophy as the food: quality without pretension, depth without intimidation. Smyth specifically designed the list to be navigable by people who do not have extensive wine knowledge — it uses drawings and brief narrative descriptions rather than the technical apparatus of a traditional fine-dining list, and the sommelier team is specifically trained to make the experience of wine selection as comfortable as the experience of the food. The list is predominantly European, with a particular strength in Burgundy and in the wines of Britain's emerging vineyards. The wine pairing, built around the seasonal tasting menu, is considered and generous and is recommended for a first visit as the most efficient way to access the list's range.


Smart Casual — The Room Is Elegant but Not Ceremonial


CORE's dress code reflects the room's character: smart and considered, but not the enforced formality of a more traditional fine-dining establishment. Jackets are preferred for gentlemen at dinner but not imposed; the team at OpenTable describes the standard as smart casual, which in practice means clothes that communicate an understanding of the occasion without requiring a tie. The specific character of the room — warm, personal, townhouse-elegant rather than ceremonial — means that overdressing slightly feels correct and underdressing slightly feels slightly off-register. The restaurant does not want you to be uncomfortable. It wants you to feel that you made an effort appropriate to an evening of this quality.


Notting Hill Is Worth the Afternoon Before Dinner


CORE is at the northern end of the Portobello Road Market area, in the part of Notting Hill where the stalls and the Saturday market give way to the residential streets of white stucco terraces and independent cafés that define the neighbourhood's character for the people who live in it. Arriving an hour before the reservation to walk the Portobello Road, visit the bookshops and antique dealers on the side streets, or have a coffee at one of the neighbourhood's independent cafés is the correct way to arrive at CORE: through the neighbourhood rather than past it, with an understanding of the specific London village that the restaurant is embedded in. The walk from Notting Hill Gate tube station takes approximately eight minutes.

The Place


Notting Hill — and what it means to cook British food in London's most beautiful neighborhood.


Notting Hill is London's most photographed neighbourhood and one of its most genuinely distinctive: a concentration of white stucco Victorian terraces, independent shops, the Portobello Road antiques and food market (Saturday being its most fully expressed day), and a community that is simultaneously one of the city's most expensive and one of its most lived-in. The neighbourhood became the defining image of a certain kind of London in the 1990s and has maintained that association through the subsequent decades — the film, the annual Carnival in August, the Portobello Road on a Saturday morning that still draws food-serious Londoners from across the city to the stalls selling vegetables, cheese, and specialist ingredients that the area has sustained as a market culture for generations.


Kensington Park Road, where CORE sits at number 92, is one of the most desirable residential streets in the neighbourhood — a wide, tree-lined street of perfect white townhouses that runs between the Portobello Road and Ladbroke Grove. The restaurant is on the ground floor of one of these townhouses, with no street-level announcement beyond its small sign, in a location that communicates everything about the neighbourhood it inhabits: this is a place for people who know where they are going, in a street that does not need to advertise itself. The Notting Hill character — beautiful, residential, privately confident, with a specific form of London elegance that is less formal than Mayfair and less bohemian than Soho — is the character that CORE itself projects. The restaurant is, in this sense, the neighbourhood's most accurate culinary expression.


The relationship between CORE's cooking and its London geography is less immediately obvious than the relationship between, say, a Kyoto kaiseki restaurant and its temple district. But it is present. CORE is a British restaurant in the fullest sense — not merely in the sourcing of its ingredients but in the specific way it understands hospitality, in the warmth and informality of its service, in the refusal of continental pretension, in the conviction that the potato and the carrot, done with mastery, are what a three-star restaurant should be proud to serve. London has produced many great chefs and many great restaurants. Not many of them have been willing to argue — seriously, technically, at the highest level — that Britain itself, its farms and its coasts and its specific agricultural tradition, is the sufficient subject of a kitchen aspiring to be among the best in the world. CORE makes this argument in a building in Notting Hill, every service, and makes it persuasively.

Before you Arrive


Everything practical, plainly told


  • Address: 92 Kensington Park Road, Notting Hill, London W11 2PN. The restaurant is on the ground floor of a white townhouse on the east side of Kensington Park Road, near its junction with Westbourne Park Road. Small signage at street level. The Whiskey and Seaweed bar entrance is adjacent to the main restaurant entrance.


  • Getting There: Notting Hill Gate station (Central, District, Circle lines): approximately 8-minute walk east along Notting Hill Gate and north up Kensington Park Road. Ladbroke Grove station (Hammersmith & City, Circle lines): approximately 10-minute walk. Bus: several routes along Ladbroke Grove and Portobello Road. Taxi or rideshare from Central London: approximately 20–30 minutes depending on traffic. No parking on Kensington Park Road during restricted hours — arrive by public transport or be dropped off.


  • Reservations: Book via the restaurant's own website (corebyclaresmyth.com) or by phone (+44 20 3937 5086). CORE is also listed on OpenTable. Dinner reservations are highly competitive — book a minimum of four to six weeks in advance, longer for Fridays and Saturdays. Lunch (Thursday to Saturday) is somewhat more accessible. Cancellations do occur; checking OpenTable for released slots is worthwhile if preferred dates are unavailable. Communicate dietary requirements at the time of booking.


  • Opening Hours: Dinner: Tuesday to Saturday, from 18:00. Lunch: Thursday to Saturday, from 12:00. Closed Sunday and Monday. Confirm current hours directly with the restaurant as schedules may vary by season and for private events.


  • The Menus: Core Classics tasting menu: the restaurant's signature dishes, including Potato and Roe, Lamb Carrot, and CORE-teser. Core Seasons tasting menu: more recent and seasonal creations, changing with the British agricultural calendar. À la carte available for those who prefer to compose their own meal. Tasting menus are approximately £195–£250 per person for food; confirm current pricing when booking. Wine pairing available and recommended.


  • Payment: All major credit cards accepted. Budget approximately £280–£380 per person for dinner including wine pairing; approximately £200–£250 without. Lunch is more accessible — approximately £110–£140 per person for the tasting menu at lunch. Prices have increased since opening; confirm current pricing at the time of booking. A 12.5% discretionary service charge is added to the bill.


  • Dress Code: Smart casual. Jackets preferred for gentlemen at dinner but not required. The room's character is elegant and residential rather than ceremonial — clothes that communicate an understanding of the occasion without requiring formal attire. The restaurant explicitly designed its atmosphere to feel welcoming and relaxed rather than intimidating; the dress code reflects this. Avoid gym wear, shorts, and very casual clothing at dinner; anything beyond smart casual is entirely appropriate.


  • Combining with London: Build a day in W11 around the dinner. Morning: Portobello Road Market (Saturday is best for food and antiques; the vegetable and fruit section runs most days). Lunch: any of the neighbourhood's cafés and restaurants along Westbourne Grove or Portobello Road. Pre-dinner: walk Kensington Park Road and Ladbroke Grove for the neighbourhood's domestic architecture; the Electric Cinema on Portobello Road is one of the oldest and most beautiful in London. After dinner: the Notting Hill Arts Club or any of the neighbourhood's bars for the kind of evening that the village character of the neighbourhood makes possible.
Things Worth Knowing Before You GO


The notes that belong in no other section


  • Order the Classics menu for a first visit — the signatures are the fullest expression of the kitchen's philosophy —
The Core Classics menu contains the dishes that have made CORE what it is: Potato and Roe, Lamb Carrot, the scallop tartare, CORE-teser, and the other preparations that guests and critics have consistently identified as the most complete expressions of Smyth's culinary thinking. The Core Seasons menu is excellent and is the stronger choice for a return visit, when the signature dishes have already been received and the seasonal range becomes the primary interest. For a first visit, there is no argument for choosing the Seasons menu over the Classics. The Classics contain the dishes you came for. Order them. 




  • Give the potato the attention it deserves — this is the most important dish on the menu —The Potato and Roe is the restaurant's most celebrated single preparation and the one that most completely states what CORE believes. It has been described by multiple serious eaters as the best potato they have encountered at any table anywhere. This is a claim that benefits from arriving at the dish with sufficient attention to evaluate it rather than receive it passively. The specific texture that the overnight confit produces, the minerality of the dulse beurre blanc, the contrast between the herring roe's intensity and the trout roe's subtlety, the acidity of the crisps — these are worth noticing individually and together. The dish rewards the attention in direct proportion to the attention it receives. 



  • Arrive expecting warmth, not grandeur — this is not the kind of three-star that intimidates — CORE was designed explicitly against the cold formality that fine dining had acquired by 2017. The welcome is warm, the service is relaxed and individual, the room feels like a very good townhouse rather than an institution. Guests who arrive prepared for the atmosphere of formality and ceremony that other three-star restaurants project will be disarmed by what they find, which is the specific pleasure of being genuinely looked after in a place that the person who created it cares about. The three stars are not displayed on the wall. The quality is present in everything and announced in nothing. This is the restaurant Smyth wanted to build. 



  • Go out through the kitchen — the pass window at the exit is part of the experience —
The exit from the dining room at CORE passes a window into the kitchen where Smyth and her team are working. This is not an incidental detail of the building's layout. It is a designed element of the evening: the guest who entered through the front door, was welcomed by the chef if she was available, ate dishes made in that kitchen, and exits past a view of the people who made them, with the opportunity to thank them directly. Multiple guests describe this moment as unexpectedly affecting — the sight of the kitchen team at work, the ability to acknowledge them through the glass, the specific closing of the circle of hospitality that the design makes possible. Look into the kitchen as you leave. It is worth the moment. 



  • Come with an open mind about British ingredients — and leave with a changed one —
The specific argument CORE is making — that British produce, at the quality available from the producers Smyth has worked with for years, is the sufficient subject of a restaurant aspiring to be among the world's best — is not universally accepted in advance. Visitors accustomed to thinking of British ingredients as the supporting cast of a French-technique kitchen, rather than its primary subject, will encounter at CORE a body of evidence that consistently surprises people who hold that view. The carrot confited in lamb fat. The potato that takes twenty-five hours to make. The scallop from the cold Atlantic off the Isle of Harris. These are not ingredients that require apology or qualification. They are the subject of the meal, argued without reservation, at the highest technical level. The argument is persuasive. Arrive prepared to be persuaded. 



  • Visit the restaurant at lunch if dinner is unavailable — the cooking is the same kitchen —
CORE offers lunch service on Thursdays, Fridays, and Saturdays, at a price point that is more accessible than the dinner tasting menus and at a pace that some visitors find more comfortable for a first experience. The lunch menus offer access to the same kitchen, the same team, and many of the same signature preparations as the evening service. For visitors who cannot secure a dinner reservation within their travel window — or who prefer the specific quality of light that the Notting Hill location offers at midday — the lunch is not a compromise. It is the same argument, made in different light. 



  • This restaurant is best understood as a homecoming, not as a restaurant —
Clare Smyth left County Antrim at sixteen and spent the following twenty-one years working in kitchens — in Surrey, in London, in Bray, in Devon, in Australia, in Monaco, at Royal Hospital Road — building the technical authority and the professional standing that would allow her to open a restaurant under her own name, on her own terms, with her own ideas. When CORE opened in August 2017, the first dish on the menu was a potato from British soil, dressed with the seaweed of the coast she grew up beside. The restaurant is the point at which everything she learned came home to the place it started. The potato is where it all leads — not despite being a potato, but because of it.
Why This REstaurant


What CORE actually is.


London has more Michelin stars than any other city in the United Kingdom and is among the most competitive fine-dining cities in the world. In this context, holding three stars at a restaurant that opened in 2017 — receiving two within fifteen months, three within three years — is not the story of a slow accumulation. It is the story of a kitchen that arrived at the highest level already formed, led by a chef who had spent two decades learning exactly what that level required and who was ready to practise it on her own terms when the opportunity arrived.


The specific distinction of CORE within the London three-star landscape — which includes Alain Ducasse at The Dorchester, The Araki, and others — is the combination of the highest technical standard with the most specifically British culinary identity. Smyth did not open a French restaurant in London and call it British because the produce is sourced locally. She opened a restaurant whose philosophy — the argument that the ordinary done with complete mastery is the highest form of cooking — is itself a British idea, expressed through British ingredients, in a British neighbourhood, by a British chef who grew up on a British farm and carries that origin in every dish she sends from her kitchen.


Excellence is no accident. It is achieved through years of dedication, hard work, perseverance, learning, studying, and sacrifice. I believe in doing the ordinary extraordinarily well. Ultimately, excellence is a choice — a choice to be the best you can be, and then strive again to be even better tomorrow.

CLARE SMYTH MBE, CHEF PATRON, CORE BY CLARE SMYTH


The potato is the argument in its simplest form. It is also, as Smyth has said, a tribute to her homeland: Ireland and Northern Ireland, where the potato was for centuries the primary food of a people, where the soil carries the minerality of the ocean, where every table had potatoes on it every day as a fact of life rather than a culinary decision. The dish that takes twenty-five hours to make is an act of respect — for the ingredient, for the tradition, for the place — as much as it is a demonstration of technical mastery. Both are present. Both are necessary. The potato earns its place at a three-star table not because it has been disguised or elevated into something it is not, but because, handled with this level of knowledge and care, it is already everything it needs to be.


Come for the Potato and Roe. Come for the Lamb Carrot, which inverts the hierarchy between meat and vegetable and does it so naturally that you forget you were ever persuaded otherwise. Come because the warmth of the welcome is not a compensation for the formality of the cooking but an expression of the same conviction: that the best thing a restaurant can do is make you feel that the evening was worth it, that you were glad you came, and that the person who made your food is genuinely pleased that you were there to eat it. CORE by Clare Smyth does all of this. It does it, as its name suggests, at the centre of what a three-star restaurant can be.