Mildred’s
London’s pioneering Mildreds serves colourful, globally inspired plant-based comfort food from Soho and its wider city family.
Mildreds was doing the work long before plant-based London became a genre. The first restaurant opened in Soho in 1988, and that history matters: this is not a trend-chasing room with one clever cauliflower dish, but a proper London institution that learned how to feed vegetarians, vegans and the merely curious with equal generosity.
The essential Mildreds problem is that the menu makes choosing almost unfair: Korean fried chick’n, tamarind pad Thai, hummus with heat and sweetness, comfort food that still knows what colour is for. The group went fully plant-based in 2021 and now reaches beyond Soho to Covent Garden, Camden Town, King’s Cross and Victoria.
The flagship on Lexington Street remains the spiritual address. It is unpretentious, busy, cheerful and reliably satisfying, with globally inspired cooking that treats vegan food as a pleasure principle rather than a restriction.
Mildreds is also quietly democratic. It works for a quick lunch, a pre-theatre plate, a weekend brunch, or the friend group where nobody wants to negotiate dietary politics before ordering. The food arrives with enough punch to stop the conversation turning into a debate.
London’s vegan scene has become more polished and more experimental. Mildreds still earns its place because it remembers the oldest restaurant rule: feed people well, and they come back.
