Down the road in London’s Chinatown, discerning diners can venture into Evelyn’s Table, one of London’s most extravagant restaurants. This is where I find myself on St. Patrick—not exactly a night usually associated with good food. But Evelyn’s Table, located in the basement of the Blue Posts pub, is the perfect place to celebrate the arrival of spring, even if the queue for the bathroom is a little longer than usual due to the drunks who gather upstairs.
But thankfully, the restaurant, which opened in 2018, has a cocoon-like effect, protecting its 12 guests from everything except the two-and-a-half-hour tasting menu. The dining experience is the vision of Seamus Sam, the third chef to manage Evelyn’s Table since its inception. Sam took over from James Goodyear in the fall of 2024, but it was the former team—brothers Luke, Nat and Theo Selby—that earned Evelyn’s Table its Michelin star in 2022. Sam spent four years as head chef A song by Tom Aikenand previously worked at Restaurant Story and The Clove Club. He was ready to accept the opportunity to express 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 abilities,” he told the Observer, speaking at Evelyn’s Table a few days after St. “It takes time until that feels natural when you come to a new place. And it keeps coming up. I look at our menus, and there’s a big difference from when I started. But sometimes you need that fear to drive you.”
Sam generally maintains the original menu format at Evelyn’s Table. It has only been a tasting of the menu; The countertop holds 12 diners at each place. Currently, the five-course dinner menu is £135, and the four-course Friday and Saturday menu is £95. But Sam has also made his own food. He introduced snacks before the first course—the eel custard from his first menu is still eaten today—and did a bread course. The sourdough is baked in-house daily and served in three spreads: butter, cheese foam and cashew nut parfait.
“In the beginning, it was just bread and butter,” Sam recalls. I was thinking of making another loaf, but that felt like too much.
Instead, he chose to make his own crackers and grissini. One of the crackers is shaped like a piece of wild garlic, allowing guests to enjoy the accompaniments in different ways. The wild garlic-shaped cracker is ground up with real dried garlic—Sam’s favorite ingredient. He dries and preserves garlic every spring for year-round use. He also searches for elderflower to make sure it is always there.
“I will make oil with it, vinegar with it, which is delicious,” he said. “I always make enough to last the year. I bring elderflower vinegar and oil home, because there’s no room here. It’s on my bookshelf.”
The intimacy at Evelyn’s Table is part of its beauty. The chefs prepare each course in front of the diners, many of whom become new friends during the meal. It needs a lot of preparation because there are two seats every night and three seats on Friday and Saturday, so the cooks can’t disappear into the back room during the service. It has a dinner party vibe, enhanced by the location.
“It creates a good atmosphere,” said Sam. “We take the food seriously, but the service feels more fun. The fact that we’re under the pub feels fun and hidden. There’s a lot of attention to detail, and this is fine dining in that sense, but there’s a vibrant feel to it, too. It’s nice when people are chatting, and those walls come down.”
That sense of irritation comes from the plating. The dishes are well presented and very accurate, but not all dishes are clean. Instead of throwing away plates and dishes when they break or break, Sam and his chefs use the Japanese art of kintsugi, a practice where broken dishes are repaired with gold, to repair them. At dinner, my friend and I playfully fought over who got the plate with the most gold lacquer as if it were some kind of prize.
“Dishes are expensive,” said Sam. “This is a great way to keep things. I do it myself sometimes. If it’s Friday or Saturday, one person will deviate from doing the lunch service and spend time doing the plates. The philosophy behind it is cool, but also, very practical.”
Sam came to the program from Muse, where Aikens tapped him as executive chef for its 2020 opening. Sam, who grew up in Luton and studied civil engineering at school, had worked for Aikens at the now-closed Tom Aikens restaurant earlier in his career. It was his first fine dining experience; he started in the kitchen at a Hampstead pub Bull & Lastwhere he learned the importance of doing things from scratch.
“It was a good opportunity to learn and a good start because we did everything there,” he said. “We made our own bread, we made our own charcuterie, we made our own places, our ice cream, and everything. And it was very busy. It was good to have that sense of urgency from the beginning, which is an important trait to have as a chef. I learned how to cook properly there.”
During his two years at Bull & Last, Sam rose quickly. He describes the job as a “baptism of fire,” but he also soaked up all the knowledge he had. He headed to Restaurant Tom Aikens in 2012, which was his baptism of sorts.
“He was very scary,” Sam said of Aikens. “I was very young, and he obviously saw something in me at that time. He is one of the best chefs ever to come out of the UK, so I had him in this chair. I was able to develop quickly there because I kept at it and I was able to adapt to the 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 man.”
Spending time working for other chefs helped Sam define his own cooking style, which combines seasonal ingredients with international spices. He’s inspired by whatever excites him at the time, whether it’s a new recipe, a compelling ingredient or a new type of food he’s just tried. Sam’s father is Malaysian, and his interest in Asian seasonings comes partly from his heritage. But he finds inspiration all over the world, even places he hasn’t visited yet.
“I definitely like Southeast Asia,” said Sam, adding that a recent visit to Malaysia made him even more excited. “But a lot of it comes from living in London. It’s so crowded 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 depends on how I feel.”
When I ate at Evelyn’s Table, touches of Korean staples like kimchi and gochujang were evident in several dishes, as was the Japanese influence. In the past, Sam also looked to Mexico for inspiration because he found a British farm that grows poblano peppers. “I found that interesting, and it got me thinking about using them,” he says. I love having that freedom and that flexibility.”
The demands of his job and a young child at home mean that it is difficult for Sam to find time to eat. But he does his best to experience the London restaurant scene as much as possible. Some of his favorite recent experiences in the city include dining at Restaurant St. Barts, The Ritz Restaurant, BiBi, Wildflowers and Perilla. He’s watched the city’s culinary scene change over the past 15 years and is fascinated by what’s around him.
“It’s a really fun place to work, and it’s very encouraging to see all the great restaurants coming up,” Sam said. “It also means you have to really stand out and stand out and live. The competition is good, and there’s a great relationship between restaurants and chefs now. It’s a really fun place to be a chef.”
Sam hopes to continue to improve at Evelyn’s Table, too. There are plans to refurbish the kitchen and, hopefully, the introduction of a toilet attendant to clean up bar patrons. Sam describes himself as someone who wants to “get better and get better and get better,” and is always looking for new ways to do that.
“I want to create the best possible experience for the guests,” he said. “I never stop praising what we do and saying, ‘This is enough.’ It should always be better, even if it’s small details like different glasses or a new chicken feeder. It could be anything. We’re blessed to be busy right now, 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 busy. And to do that, we have to keep our eyes on the ball.”
If my latest meal is anything to go by, Sam and his team haven’t lost sight of that goal. Stepping out of the St. Patrick’s Day was tough, but also a sign that eating at Evelyn’s Table is just what you need for a short break from the real world.
