Langosteria London: Milan's Most Glamorous Seafood Address Finds Its English Home
Inside the grandest surviving room of the Old War Office, Italy's most photographed seafood restaurant has arrived with travertine, silk-lined walls and a menu built for London's most fashionable crowd.
Photography, Langosteria, The Owo, London
Some restaurants take years to convince a city they belong there. Langosteria arrived at The OWO already convinced. Founded in Milan in 2007 by Enrico Buonocore, a former sommelier from the Amalfi Coast who now presides over a growing empire in tailored Italian suits, the brand spent almost two decades becoming the address where Milan's fashion and film crowd order langoustines before anything else. Its arrival on Whitehall Place, first announced back in 2023, is the kind of long-awaited debut that has London's Italian expats booking tables the way they would a Milan Fashion Week seat.
The setting does most of the early persuading. The OWO, built in 1906 as the Old War Office, once held Winston Churchill's desk and the offices where Ian Fleming is said to have first dreamed up James Bond. It now houses London's first Raffles hotel, eighty-five private residences and a run of nine restaurants and three bars, and Langosteria enters through its own dedicated door on Whitehall Place, close enough to Raffles to borrow its grandeur, separate enough to never feel like a hotel restaurant.
Restaurant Overivew
*Langosteria London is located at The OWO, Whitehall Place, London SW1A 2BD, with its own dedicated entrance
*The restaurant is the group's first UK location, following outposts in Milan, Paris, Porto Cervo, Paraggi and St Moritz.
*Langosteria was founded in Milan in 2007 by Enrico Buonocore
*The London menu is led by chef Michele Biassoni and includes a private dining room for up to 18 guests
A Room Designed to Outlast Its Architect
The interiors were the final project of Carlo Samarati, the Italian architect behind the Milan and Paraggi restaurants, who died before the London site was finished, a fact the group's founder still speaks about with visible feeling. What he left behind is unmistakably his: a low-lit bar built from travertine and Italian walnut, Verde Alpi marble underfoot, and a first dining room dressed in crimson curtains and red leather banquettes that read more like a private members' club than a seafood restaurant.
The real coup sits deeper inside, in what the group calls the Historical Room, once the Old War Office's own meeting chamber. Its original fireplaces and ceilings have been left largely untouched, then furnished with Venini glass lamps, Medea chairs and Molteni tables, alongside hand-crafted silk wallcoverings by Misha. It is maximalism handled with real confidence, the kind that assumes good bones don't need apologising for.
A Menu Adjusted for a London Crowd
Running the kitchen is Michele Biassoni, tasked with adapting a menu built for Milanese appetites into something that reads naturally in Whitehall. The signature dish, a saffron risotto piled with langoustines that the kitchen has nicknamed the yellow submarine risotto, sits alongside red tuna carpaccio, spaghetti with clams and sea urchin, and a cod and sage tempura built specifically for the London opening. An oyster bar and robata section round things out, the black grouper chateaubriand cooked over embers doing most of the theatrical heavy lifting tableside.
A Genuinely International Address
What makes Langosteria worth watching beyond its opening month is the company it already keeps. The original Milan restaurant on Via Savona has spent years drawing a roster that reads like a fashion week seating chart, Rihanna and Leonardo DiCaprio among the names regularly spotted at its tables, alongside Milan's own fashion establishment. London is not an experiment for Langosteria. It is the next stop on an itinerary its clientele already keep.
For a city that has watched more than one glamorous import fail to translate its charm across the Channel, Langosteria's advantage is that it has never really relied on charm alone. The room does the seducing, Samarati saw to that, and the kitchen simply has to keep up.
Where Else to Find Langosteria
London is Langosteria's eighth address, and the fastest way to understand the brand is to see where else it has chosen to land.
Langosteria Montenapoleone, Milan, Italy
St Barth. The group's newest outpost sits inside Cheval Blanc on the Baie des Flamands, a short walk from the kind of hushed Caribbean luxury we covered in our review of Rosewood Le Guanahani St Barth, another address built around the same quiet, moneyed confidence.
If you’re visiting St. Barth, read our FLUXX GUIDE to Rosewood Le Guanahani here
Paris. Langosteria's Left Bank site sits inside the Cheval Blanc Paris on Quai du Louvre, the Seine standing in for the Ligurian coastline the brand built its name on.
If you’re visiting Paris, read our FLUXX GUIDE to the city here
Italy. Beyond the Milan flagship on Via Savona, the group runs Langosteria Montenapoleone and Langosteria Bistrot in the city, plus a summer address in Porto Cervo on Sardinia and a Riviera outpost in Paraggi Bay, the same design-forward ambition we found running through Rome's own hotel renaissance.
Milan: langosteria-montenapoleone
St Moritz. A mountain restaurant that trades the Ligurian coast for altitude, sitting within easy reach of the design-led ski hotels we rounded up in The Eight Hotels Leading a New Era of Alpine Design.
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