Four of the best dog-friendly places to eat in London

We have the lead in one hand and a city’s worth of lunch to consider. In Islington, the bread comes with beef dripping and the butchering happens downstairs. On Bermondsey Street, a Spanish restaurant puts octopus over paprika potatoes and lets the dog join us inside. Further north, we can recover from Hampstead Heath in a pub whose Victorian glass partitions have survived far better than most Victorian ideas about drinking. Paddington supplies the unlikely option of breakfast on a barge decorated by Peter Blake.

These are four quite different days out with a dog. The distinction matters: a place for a long restaurant lunch need not suit a quick stop after a walk, and a boat’s welcome may end before dinner begins. We take a table at each, keep the dog beside us and look beyond permission to enter. There should be something worth ordering once we get there.

1. The Pig & Butcher, Islington

We begin with bread, butter and beef dripping. At the Pig & Butcher, even something to occupy us while reading the menu introduces the kitchen’s principal interest. The sourdough comes from Quince Bakery; the dripping supplies a reason to resist finishing it before lunch. We break off another piece, gather the lead under the table and try to concentrate on a menu in which the steak’s age is almost as prominent as its price. Dogs are welcome here, inside a mid-nineteenth-century pub on Liverpool Road. An affection for meat is useful for the humans accompanying them.

There is some geographical sense to the name. The pub stands in an area once used to rest livestock on its way to Smithfield, and its present-day butchery room is downstairs. The team butchers its meat here each day, while fruit and vegetables are collected from New Spitalfields Market. Buying and preparation receive attention before we have begun comparing cuts. The menu changes regularly; the expensive cut that caught our eye online cannot be the sole reason for crossing London.

The grilled Ibérico–Duroc pork with apricot, bacon jam and celeriac jus, £34, takes us beyond the steaks. The double appearance of pork is the interesting part: the main cut has bacon working beside it, while apricot brings the fruit-and-pig partnership away from the familiar spoonful of apple sauce. We cut a piece and bring the accompaniments into the same forkful. This is an assertive arrangement, with sweetness written into both the fruit and the jam; someone who wants their meat left largely to its own devices has a good reason to look towards the steaks. Our choice makes sense because we want to see what the kitchen does beyond buying and grilling a handsome piece of beef.

Across the table, the 60-day-aged côte de bœuf is a temptation at £85 for two, with chips and peppercorn sauce. We resist ordering a second lunch. The sharing cuts give the butcher’s work its grandest presentation, but they can obscure the more accessible way into this pub: a weekday set menu at £24 for two courses or £28 for three. Braised lamb shoulder and barbecued courgette appear among its main-course choices. The gap between that bill and a steak dinner is large enough to influence which day we bring the dog. Sunday has its own terms, including Tamworth porchetta with Bramley apple sauce at £25; the sharing côte de bœuf then costs £95. A roast menu deserves to be read as a separate proposition.

Our wine is a half-carafe of Amalaya Gran Corte Malbec from Salta, £17 for 375ml. Half-carafes allow two people to share wine with lunch without making a bottle the default unit of consumption. A chilled Morgon from Jean-Marc Burgaud offers a different route through the reds. There is enough thought here to keep a wine drinker occupied while a companion debates the meat. We move the carafe away from the edge of the table as the dog changes position beneath it; good glassware benefits from a little advance planning.

Michelin singles out the dripping served with the bread, a small detail that gives us more confidence in the pub’s priorities than the longest recital of steak weights. We have reasons to come at both spending levels: the set lunch makes the kitchen approachable; the à la carte menu gives a hungry pair considerable scope. It is less compelling as a destination for someone determined to avoid meat, despite the vegetable dishes. Book for a meal, mention the dog and plan around the weekday kitchen break between 3pm and 6pm. The pub does not reserve tables for drinks alone. The last of our wine confirms which sort of visit this has been: a proper lunch, with the dog included in the arrangements and the butcher included in nearly everything else.

80 Liverpool Road, Islington N1 0QD.

2. Pizarro, Bermondsey

We bring the dog through the door at Pizarro and settle inside, with the open kitchen supplying something more absorbing than the traffic on Bermondsey Street. There is a terrace, but our lunch does not depend on the weather agreeing to it. The restaurant explicitly welcomes dogs. We mention ours when booking and arrange the lead close to the table; this is a room for sitting down to eat, and our companion needs to be comfortable staying put as another dish catches our interest.

José Pizarro grew up in Talaván, a village near Cáceres in Extremadura, and worked at Eyre Brothers and Brindisa before opening his own José tapas bar on this street in 2011. Pizarro gives his Spanish cooking more room to become a meal. We can begin with the things that make a bar difficult to leave—croquetas, anchovies, peppers—and continue to chicken rice or a substantial piece of fish. That progression is particularly attractive with a dog. We have a table, a place for the animal to lie and no need to relocate halfway through the afternoon because we have outgrown our original order.

The octopus catches our attention through the potatoes beneath it. We order it with patata revolcona and sobrasada, £19. Revolconas are the paprika-seasoned, roughly mashed potatoes associated with parts of Castile and Extremadura, often accompanied by crisp pieces of pork. They belong to the robust cooking of Spain’s interior. Here the pork appears as sobrasada, the soft, paprika-rich cured sausage associated with Mallorca, and the octopus brings the sea into the arrangement. We take potato with a piece of tentacle. Knowing the potato’s history makes the combination more intelligible: paprika and pork already belong together here, before the kitchen adds anything from the water.

Beside it, our Tío Pepe fino, £8 for 100ml, needs neither a special occasion nor the end of dinner. Fino is dry; its place here is with food. The list offers several quite different sherries, including oloroso and palo cortado, so ordering simply “a sherry” leaves rather a lot undecided. Anyone avoiding that discussion can choose from Spanish wines in 125ml glasses or 375ml carafes. The smaller glass measure is worth noticing when comparing prices with a pub. We take a little fino between forkfuls, keeping the food and the drink in the same conversation.

The roasted baby chicken paella is £35, with onion, chicken liver and alioli. The liver is what persuades us. Chicken and rice can make a gentle, familiar lunch; the addition of offal gives the dish a more particular appetite, and the garlic of the alioli has something substantial to accompany. We draw a little of it into the rice instead of spreading it indiscriminately over everything. Michelin’s inspectors also point diners towards this chicken dish in their account of the restaurant’s assured Spanish cooking. There is support for choosing a main course here, beyond the understandable instinct to keep ordering small plates.

The menu rewards attention before the plates arrive. Presa Ibérica, the shoulder cut from an Ibérico pig, is listed at £15 per 100g: that is a weight price, not a £15 main course. The discretionary service charge is 13.5 per cent. Neither makes the restaurant poor value, but both matter to a table that has wandered in expecting tapas-bar arithmetic. A vegetable-led meal is possible, including spinach cannelloni with raisins and Manchego, though the octopus and chicken are the more compelling reasons for our particular visit.

That is also the dog-friendly distinction Pizarro earns. We can bring our companion into a meal with a chef’s history, regional ideas and a drinks list worth reading. A dog that settles at a table is well suited to it; one that needs constant movement is asking for a different sort of stop. We come for a long lunch and order the chicken rice, leaving the afternoon loose enough to enjoy it.

194 Bermondsey Street, London SE1 3TQ.

3. The Flask, Hampstead

We leave the Heath with the dog and make our way down to Flask Walk, where the pub offers a useful change of scale after all that open ground. Inside are mahogany, etched glass, tiled walls and places in which to arrange ourselves around a table. We choose the front of the pub and draw the lead in close. The Flask welcomes dog walkers; the attraction for us is that the welcome takes place in rooms still shaped by the people who drank here in the nineteenth century.

Rebuilt in 1874 by Cumming and Nixon, the pub retains the substantial wood-and-glass partition between its two front bars. It is worth looking at while the dog settles. The screen contains five coloured lithographic prints after Victorian paintings, including John William Godward’s Wistful, in which a young woman looks out to sea. A chromolithograph is a colour print, so we are looking at the way a landlord furnished a drinking room with reproductions, rather than an inexplicable collection of original paintings. Above them, etched birds and ornamental glass carry the decoration upwards. CAMRA rates the interior among those of outstanding national historic importance. The interest is in what has survived ordinary use, down to the original mahogany counter.

From the glass, our interest turns to the smoked haddock and scallop pot pie, £22.50. Pitchfork cheddar mash forms the top, with braised hispi cabbage alongside. Calling it a pie tells us less than reading the next few words: there is no pastry lid to cut through, and the potato is already part of the dish. We work our forks down through the mash. Smoked fish and cheddar commit the filling and topping to a fairly forthright partnership; scallop adds a second kind of seafood rather than another layer of smoke. After a walk, a hot dish built around fish, potato and cheese is an easy thing to understand.

A pint of Young’s London Original, one of the pub’s regular cask beers, is our choice. The pale ale’s history runs back to Wandsworth in 1864, a decade before the Flask’s rebuilding. What recommends this choice with lunch is its position as a straightforward bitter alongside a rich main course. Anyone preferring a collection of smaller things can start with the ploughman’s board: Scotch egg, sausage roll, ham terrine, cheddar and the pickled, fruity accompaniments that make such a collection manageable. At £23 it is a substantial order, not an automatically cheaper alternative to a cooked lunch.

The better economy is the Pitchfork cheddar sandwich at £7.50, with fries another £3. That option appeals to us in a pub whose decorative scheme encourages lingering; enjoying the room need not turn every dog walk into a three-course occasion. Today we have already committed to the pie, and the apple and blackberry crumble, £7 with custard, begins to look plausible. We divide it between us. The decision is more about the day than culinary adventure: fish pie, a bitter and shared crumble supply exactly the sort of settled interval that an energetic walk makes attractive.

The old partitions create smaller rooms rather than an unrestricted floor for circulating dogs. We keep ours at the table, with the lead out of the route to the bar, and make room when we stand. There is a courtyard too, useful when an indoor pub is more enclosure than a particular dog enjoys. Food runs through the afternoon, from noon until 9.30pm Monday to Saturday and until 9pm on Sunday, so a longer walk need not end in a missed kitchen sitting. This is the Flask in Hampstead, not its namesake in Highgate. Come to the right one for the Victorian screen, a proper lunch and the uncommon pleasure of examining a historic interior with your walking companion asleep at your feet.

14 Flask Walk, Hampstead NW3 1HE.

4. Darcie & May Green, Paddington

Before stepping aboard, we establish whether there is a dog table available. That is the important preliminary at Darcie & May Green, the pair of brightly decorated barges moored at Paddington Central. Dogs are welcome before 5pm, at designated tables allocated on a first-come, first-served basis; outside seating may be possible if those inside are taken. A general restaurant reservation is therefore not the same thing as a guaranteed place for the dog. We come early enough to make breakfast a leisurely affair and take an indoor table, gathering the lead beneath our chair.

Peter Blake designed the barges’ decoration. If the name seems familiar without quite producing a picture, he co-designed the cover of the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band with Jann Haworth. His work here makes considerably more of a canal-side arrival than a restaurant sign could. We look out towards the water from a space whose colour is part of its purpose. The roof decks give the boats another level of sociability, but the presence of different levels also makes this a visit to discuss beforehand if either person or dog has difficulty with access. A floating restaurant asks different questions of its visitors from a café on the pavement.

The food belongs to Daisy Green, founded by Prue Freeman and Tom Onions in 2012. Its beginnings included two vintage ice-cream vans and the early KERB street-food collective; Freeman’s childhood on an Australian sheep farm is part of the group’s account of its cooking. At our table, the useful consequence is a breakfast menu unconcerned with keeping national borders around a plate. We order the Fancy Bacon Roll, £16.80, which places bacon, poached eggs and crispy shallots with chilli and hot-sauce hollandaise in paratha roti. The bread changes the meal before we reach the sauce. A paratha’s layered structure gives bacon and eggs a different setting from the usual soft roll, and there is no expectation that breakfast should avoid heat.

A knife and fork are needed for this breakfast. The name suggests something to carry in one hand, but poached eggs and hollandaise make it a meal to eat at the table. We leave the lead gathered under our chair and give it our attention. Across the table, the Dirty Daisy takes a different route through the same appetite: crisp potato tots, chorizo, Monterey Jack, chipotle sour cream, poached eggs and a green-tomato-and-avocado salsa, £16.40. Both dishes are rich. Someone wanting a quieter start has smashed avocado on sourdough at £11.70, but eggs cost an additional £4. That distinction makes it less of a bargain against the fully assembled breakfasts than a quick glance suggests.

Coffee suits us: a flat white is £4.50, and oat or coconut milk carries no extra charge. The drinks list is quite ready to move us towards a Sriracha Bloody Mary instead, with tomato consommé, vodka and the house chilli sauce, but we have dessert ambitions. The Golden Gaytime lamington, £6.90, needs a little translation for anyone who has not encountered the Australian ice cream. Golden Gaytime combines toffee and vanilla with a chocolate coating and biscuit crumbs. Here those ideas become toffee-and-vanilla sponge, chocolate ganache and honeycomb malt biscuit crumbs. We divide the cake. It is a more revealing choice than ordering something merely because it looks decorative: an Australian shop-freezer favourite has found its way into a London restaurant’s baking.

There is also the banana-bread sandwich with mascarpone, berries, almonds and honey, £14.40, a sweet course substantial enough to require some advance restraint with the savoury one. Time Out’s original review praised the banana bread and coffee, and saw past the conspicuous decoration to the brunch beneath it. The present menu still gives us that combination of exuberance and recognisable comfort. We prefer to choose our food and drinks individually. The £49.90 bottomless option includes a savoury dish, a sweet dish and 90 minutes of Daisy Fizz, but it makes a fairly specific demand on both appetite and how we want to spend the morning. The menu adds a discretionary 13.5 per cent service charge.

For us, the boats work as an early outing with a dog accustomed to sitting through a meal, with enough flexibility in the plan to cope if the allocated tables are full. They are a poor choice for an unplanned dinner with a pet: the welcome has a clear time limit. We finish our coffee with the dog beside the table and the canal outside, content to have made breakfast the occasion. Between Blake’s decorated barges and a cake with an Australian childhood behind it, there is quite enough to hold our attention before lunch.

Sheldon Square, Paddington Central, London W2 6DS.