At Evelyn’s Table, Seamus Sam Leads an Inventive 12-Seat Tasting Menu Beneath a London Pub
Down an alleyway in London’s Chinatown, discerning diners can venture into Evelyn’s Table, one of London’s most unassuming restaurants. It’s here that I find myself on St. Patrick’s Day—not exactly an evening typically associated with fine dining. But Evelyn’s Table, located in the basement of the Blue Posts pub, is an apt place to celebrate the impending arrival of spring, even if the bathroom queue is slightly longer than usual thanks to the drunken revelers congregating upstairs.
But thankfully, the restaurant, which opened in 2018, has a cocoon-like effect, insulating its 12 guests from everything other than the two-and-a-half-hour tasting menu. The dining experience is the vision of Seamus Sam, the third chef to helm Evelyn’s Table since its inception. Sam took over from James Goodyear in the fall of 2024, but it was the prior team—brothers Luke, Nat and Theo Selby—who earned Evelyn’s Table its Michelin star in 2022. Sam spent four years as the head chef at Muse by Tom Aikens, and previously worked at Restaurant Story and The Clove Club. He was ready to embrace an opportunity to showcase his own style. Taking over an established restaurant, especially one that already had a Michelin star, was a daunting prospect.
“You always have to believe in your own ability,” he tells Observer, speaking from Evelyn’s Table a few days after St. Patrick’s Day. “It takes a while until that feels natural when you come somewhere new. And it’s always evolving. I look at our menus, and there’s such a stark contrast to when I started. But sometimes you do need that fear to drive you.”
Sam has generally kept to the original menu format at Evelyn’s Table. It’s always been tasting menu only; the countertop holds a maximum of 12 diners per seating. Currently, the five-course dinner menu is £135, while the four-course Friday and Saturday lunch menu is £95. But Sam has also made the food his own. He introduced snacks ahead of the first course—an eel custard from his first menu is still served today—and developed the bread course. The sourdough is baked in-house daily and offered with three spreads: butter, cheese foam and a cashew nut parfait.
“At first, it was just the bread and the butter,” Sam recalls. “I was contemplating doing another bread, but that felt like too much. It becomes quite filling.”
Instead, he opted to make his own crackers and grissini. One of the crackers is shaped like a piece of wild garlic, allowing guests to enjoy all the accompaniments in different ways. The wild garlic-shaped cracker is dusted with actual dried wild garlic—a favorite ingredient for Sam. He dries and preserves the garlic every spring to use all year. He also forages for elderflower to ensure it’s always on hand.
“I’ll make oil from it, vinegar from it, cordial from it,” he says. “I always do enough so it lasts all year round. The elderflower vinegar and oil I actually bring home, because there’s just not space here. It’s on top of my bookshelf.”
The intimacy at Evelyn’s Table is part of its charm. The chefs prepare each course in front of the diners, many of whom become new friends during the meal. It requires a lot of preparation because there are two seatings every night and three seatings on Fridays and Saturdays, so the chefs can’t disappear into a back room during service. It has a dinner party vibe, which is bolstered by the location.
“It just creates a lovely atmosphere,” Sam says. “We take the food seriously, but the service feels more fun. The fact that we’re underneath a pub feels quite exciting and hidden. There’s a lot of attention to detail, and this is fine dining in that sense, but it has a vibrant feeling to it, as well. It’s great when people chat to each other, and those walls are broken down.”
That sense of whimsy comes through in the plating. The dishes are beautifully presented and exceptionally precise, but not all of the crockery is pristine. Instead of tossing out plates and bowls when they break or chip, Sam and his chefs use the Japanese art of kintsugi, a practice where broken crockery is repaired with gold, to mend them. When I dined, my friend and I playfully fought over who got the plate with more gold lacquer as if it were some kind of prize.
“Crockery is expensive,” Sam says. “This is a good way to preserve things. I do it sometimes myself. If it’s a Friday or Saturday, one person will deviate from doing the lunch service and spend the time up just to do the plates. The philosophy behind it is quite cool, but also, it’s very practical.”
Sam brought the technique with him from Muse, where Aikens enlisted him as head chef for its 2020 opening. Sam, who grew up in Luton and studied civil engineering in school, had previously worked for Aikens at the now-shuttered Restaurant Tom Aikens early in his career. It was his first fine-dining experience; he got his start in the kitchen at Hampstead pub the Bull & Last, where he learned the value of making things from scratch.
“It was a good learning curve and a good starting point because we basically did everything there,” he says. “We made our bread, we made our own charcuterie, we made our own terrines, our own ice cream, everything. And it was very busy. It was good to have that sense of urgency from the start, which is an important trait to have as a chef. I learned how to cook properly there.”
During his two years at the Bull & Last, Sam moved up the ranks quickly. He describes the job as a “baptism of fire,” but he also soaked up every piece of knowledge he could. He headed to Restaurant Tom Aikens in 2012, which was its own kind of baptism.
“He was very intimidating,” Sam says of Aikens. “I was very young, and he obviously saw something in me at the time. He’s one of the best chefs ever to come out of the U.K., so I had him on this pedestal. I managed to progress quite quickly there because I got on with it and was able to adapt in service quickly. It took a year for that relationship between us to really happen, and by the time I got to Muse, he had become an amazing mentor for me.”
Spending time working for other chefs helped Sam to define his own cooking style, which incorporates seasonal ingredients with global flavors. He’s inspired by whatever excites him at the time, whether it’s a new technique, a compelling ingredient or a type of cuisine he’s recently tried. Sam’s father is from Malaysia, and his interest in Asian seasonings comes in part from his heritage. But he draws inspiration from all around the world, even places he hasn’t visited just yet.
“I definitely have a fondness for Southeast Asia,” Sam says, adding that a recent visit to Malaysia excited him even more. “But a lot of it comes from living in London. It’s so eclectic here, and the food is so exciting. There are amazing Turkish restaurants, Mexican restaurants, Thai restaurants, Malaysian restaurants. I get inspiration from that, and it also depends how I’m feeling.”
When I dined at Evelyn’s Table, touches of Korean staples like kimchi and gochujang were apparent in several dishes, as was a Japanese influence. In the past, Sam has also looked to Mexico for inspiration simply because he found a British farm growing poblano chilies. “I found that fascinating, and it sparked the idea of using them,” he says. “We smoked and dried them in a similar fashion to how they do it in Mexico, and we made our own mole using British ingredients, which was served with pork. I love having that freedom and that flexibility.”
The demands of his job and a young child at home mean that it’s hard for Sam to find time to dine out himself. But he does his best to experience as much of London’s dining scene as possible. Some of his recent favorite experiences in the city include meals at Restaurant St. Barts, The Ritz Restaurant, BiBi, Wildflowers and Perilla. He’s watched the city’s culinary landscape evolve over the past 15 years and is enlivened by what’s around him.
“It’s a very exciting place to work, and it’s very inspiring to see all the great restaurants that are coming up,” Sam says. “It also means that you have to really shine and to stand out and to survive. Competition is good, and there’s a great camaraderie between restaurants and chefs now. It’s a really nice place to be as a chef.”
Sam hopes to keep improving at Evelyn’s Table, too. There are plans for a kitchen revamp and, hopefully, the introduction of a bathroom attendant to clean up after the pub goers. Sam describes himself as someone who wants to “get better and better and better,” and he’s always looking for new ways to do that.
“I want to create as good of an experience as possible for the guests,” he says. “I’ve never stopped to admire what we do and say, ‘This is good enough.’ It’s always got to get better, whether it’s small details like different glassware or a new chicken supplier. It can be anything. We’re blessed that we are busy at the moment, but you can’t rely on that or previous accolades. In a small restaurant like ours, every seat counts, and we can’t take things for granted because the industry is struggling. I want us to keep continuing being busy. And in order to do that, we need to keep our eyes on the ball.”
If my recent meal is anything to go by, Sam and his team haven’t lost sight of that goal. Stepping outside into the fray of St. Patrick’s Day drinkers was jarring, but also a sign that dining at Evelyn’s Table is all you need for a brief respite from the real world.