London Restaurants That Actually Do Keto Well

Once you’re a few days into keto and the hard part is over, a new enemy appears: boredom. The fix isn’t more willpower — it’s knowing the places where eating low carb is genuinely enjoyable, not a sad undressed salad while everyone else has fun. These are the ones I actually go back to, collected across many keto phases in London.

Flat Iron

The easiest keto win in London. It’s a steak restaurant, so the star of the menu is already perfect: order your steak, add a side that isn’t chips — the creamed spinach is the move — and you have a meal that feels like a treat rather than a restriction. That’s the thing about keto in a steakhouse: you’re not the awkward one at the table. You’re just… ordering steak.

Five Guys

Yes, really — a burger chain. Five Guys will make any burger as a lettuce wrap: the whole burger, bunless, wrapped in crisp iceberg instead. Load it up — cheese, bacon, grilled onions, grilled mushrooms, jalapeños, mustard — and it’s a proper, satisfying, messy-in-a-good-way burger. Skip the fries (I know) and the shakes (obviously), and go easy on the ketchup and BBQ sauce, which are where the sugar hides.

Haidilao

My favourite of the lot, because hot pot might secretly be the perfect keto format. Haidilao gives you a bubbling broth and an enormous menu of things to cook in it: loads of protein cuts — sliced beef, lamb, seafood — plus practically every vegetable, mushrooms and tofu. You pick, you cook it in the broth yourself, you eat. It’s interactive, it takes ages in the best way, and nobody notices or cares that you haven’t ordered the noodles.

Two small notes from experience: choose a savoury broth rather than a sweet one, and at the DIY sauce bar build yours around sesame sauce, chilli and garlic — and skip the sweet, syrupy options.

Snowfall (Marylebone) — full disclosure: it’s mine

Am I allowed to include my own shop? It’s my blog, so yes. Snowfall is my frozen yogurt shop in Marylebone, and the reason it belongs on this list is the no-added-sugar kefir and Greek yogurt flavour I created precisely because I could never find a frozen dessert I’d eat on a low-carb phase. It started as homemade kefir and stevia in a home ice cream maker — a year of batches — before it graduated to the proper machine at the shop. It’s around four grams of naturally occurring sugar per hundred grams — the natural sugars have to stay, because they’re what keep the live probiotic cultures alive.

For toppings, skip the usual sugary suspects and go for the ones I added exactly for this: chia seeds, ground flax, pistachio dust, magnesium and blue spirulina powder. (A low-carb chocolate hard shell is in development — watch this space.) Dessert in London while low carb is nearly impossible; this is my answer to it.

The pattern

Notice what these three have in common: the low-carb version isn’t a compromise anyone has to accommodate. A steakhouse, a build-your-own burger, a cook-it-yourself hot pot — formats where you assemble the meal, so the carbs simply never arrive. That’s my rule for choosing restaurants on keto: pick places where you build the plate, and eating low carb stops being a negotiation.

Next level: keto by cuisine

Chains are the easy mode. The next level is knowing what to order in any Italian, Indian, Turkish or Japanese restaurant — and I’ve written that guide: Keto by Cuisine: What I Actually Order, tested the hard way (with a blood sugar meter — long story, it’s in there).