Where to Stay and Eat in London’s Renewed King’s Cross Neighborhood
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The pedestrian walkways north of King’s Cross Station in London are full of people who haven’t been there in a while, looking puzzled. For decades, the neighborhood was known for Victorian industrial rot and the thump of acid house after dark. Now joggers trot around the 19th century gasworks whose frames have been filled with sleek cylindrical apartment buildings, and food trucks assemble on an orderly roster. New public parks have been landscaped to host outdoor concerts and community gardens, and the foundation has been laid for Google’s one million square foot campus (Facebook has applied to build their own headquarters a stone’s throw away). Here’s where to go in the second coming of King’s Cross.
Where to Stay
Last month the US-based juggernaut The Standard opened their first international hotel on Argyle Street, shrewdly bringing out the best in a brutalist building that used to be stuffed with offices for Camden council. Most of the bedrooms are sleek and efficient in a way that pleasantly evokes a bunk on a spaceship, but a handful of suites have terraces overlooking the chimney pots and clock tower of St Pancras Station, an unusually stirring prospect (also on those terraces: outdoor bathtubs, so you can soak with a view). On the opposite side of the street, the St. Pancras Renaissance Hotel is folded into the grand old bones of the red-brick Victorian train station, a neo-Gothic wonder of vaulted ceilings and limestone gargoyles. Some of the rooms have windows directly into the soaring train terminal, so you can watch the Eurostar coming and going. You couldn’t be quicker off the mark for your 7 a.m. departure to Amsterdam.
Where to Eat
From a narrow building along Regent’s Canal that once housed administrators for the Great Northern Railway, Coal Office serves first-rate Middle Eastern food in a sleek dining room designed by Tom Dixon. Order the wildly elegant kebab and the brioche-like clouds of kubalah, which come with puddles of labaneh and fresh tomatoes. At Hicce, chef Pip Lacey masterminds lots of impeccably sourced, small dishes (platters of comte and hazelnut saucisson; sharing plates of pork ribs with pistachio), while just across the cavern in the scrubbed-up Coal Drops Yard development (where shops and cafes are now filling the arches of—you guessed it—former coal storage units), the open-air terrace restaurant Parillian lets diners grill their own red prawns and Spanish sausages. There are some unassuming, excellent wine bars in the arches too—ask about the plat du jour and of course the vermouth, at Vermuteria, then move along for a glass of petit manseng and a slice of olive cake with cherry compote at The Drop. For silver-salt-shaker fine dining, make a reservation at The Gilbert Scott, run by chef Marcus Wareing in St Pancras Station, where the 19th century dining room evokes the golden age of train travel.
There are some aesthetically-pleasing versions of popular London mini-chains in the area: the Indian restaurant Dishoom has a heaving outpost on Stable Street in a converted railway transit shed (go for breakfast and order the perfectly spiced chai tea, which comes with bottomless refills like coffee in an American diner), and Caravan, with its dependably satisfying, veg-heavy sharing plates (whatever else you eat, get an extra dish of the cauliflower with harissa), has a prime spot with outdoor tables in a former granary. Barrafina, the Spanish tapas stalwart whose locations in Soho and Covent Garden routinely have hour-long waits, is less relentlessly overrun and every bit as charming in Kings Cross. In any case, the suckling pig empanadillas, which are only served at this location, are worth any amount of thumb twiddling.
If you’re picking up sandwiches for lunch along Regent’s Canal, it’s hard to top the deviled egg salad with sesame and cress from Bodega Rita’s], a slip of a place on the same pedestrian path as Morty Bobs, the grilled cheese shop that got its start as a pop-up stand at music festivals. The reigning cheap eat in the neighborhood, however, is Roti King, which serves flaky Malaysian flatbread with various fillings (go for the lamb curry) from basement digs near Euston station. It’s delicious, very fairly priced, and not a secret—expect to wait in line for half an hour or more.
