Lume Review: The Shop-and-Bar Is the Best Value in London

Buy the bottle at retail, pay a small corkage, and save thirty pounds – and the only thing you surrender is a chair

Lume in Camden holds a 4.5 from two hundred and twenty people, charges forty to a hundred pounds, and it is a restaurant with a wine shop attached.

Which is the best arrangement in London drinking and we have said so in every postcode.

The markup

A restaurant buys a bottle and sells it at three to four times what it paid.

Which is not theft, and it is worth being fair about, because that multiple is paying for the rent, the staff, the glassware, the licensing, the storage, the sommelier, and the chair you are sitting in.

The wine is the vehicle. The room is the product.

But it does mean that a bottle costing the restaurant fifteen pounds arrives on your table at fifty-five, and that the thirty-something pounds of difference is not going into the glass.

The shop-and-bar

Which inverts it.

You buy the bottle at retail – on a thin shop margin – and you pay a small corkage to drink it there.

And the saving is comfortably twenty to thirty pounds on a decent bottle, and the wine is identical, and the glass is the same glass.

We have found them across every district. Bedford Street Wines. Humble Grape. Planet of the Grapes. Vinoteca. Top Cuvee. Vagabond, which does both.

And the only thing you have surrendered is the presumption that you are entitled to a chair.

Stand up

Which is the whole argument, and the Prat has come round to it entirely across seven postcodes.

The best drinking in Europe is done standing.

The Spanish at the bar. The Italians at eleven in the morning, at the counter, in thirty seconds. The Basques with a toothpick in one hand.

And the British, alone on the continent, believe that a chair is part of the wine – and pay thirty pounds a bottle for it without ever once asking what they are buying.

The other trick

Which is corkage in an ordinary restaurant, and which is worth knowing.

A great many restaurants will let you bring your own bottle for a corkage fee – frequently fifteen or twenty pounds.

Which means you can buy a genuinely excellent bottle for forty pounds, pay twenty in corkage, and drink for sixty something that the restaurant would have charged you a hundred and forty for.

They will not advertise this. You have to ask.

And a great many people will not ask, because asking makes you the person who asked – which is, we have now established across seven postcodes, the single most powerful force in British consumer behaviour.

Verdict

Excellent food, excellent list.

Buy the bottle off the shelf. It is the same bottle.

The second cheapest bottle

Which is what most British people order and which the trade knows perfectly well.

Nobody orders the cheapest, because ordering the cheapest is a statement about yourself in front of the table.

So they order the one above it.

And the restaurant, which has known this for a century, puts its highest margin there – which means the second cheapest bottle on a great many wine lists is the worst value on the page.

The best value is usually somewhere in the middle, and it is frequently a region nobody has heard of.

Ask. It is the single most profitable question available to any British person in a restaurant, and almost nobody asks it.

Caitlin Moran

Caitlin Moran is a 20-year-old satirical journalist at prat.uk, where she writes with a sharp eye for British absurdity, media nonsense, and the small national humiliations that somehow become public policy. Her experience comes from producing consistently funny, readable satire tailored to the outlet’s house style, with a focus on cultural commentary, deadpan reporting, and believable comic detail. She brings a young writer’s energy to stories about modern Britain while keeping the discipline of newsroom structure, topical relevance, and audience engagement. Her expertise lies in turning everyday frustrations, elite pretensions, and institutional silliness into clean, publishable satire. As a bylined writer for prat.uk, she contributes to the site’s editorial voice with originality, consistency, and a strong sense of what makes readers laugh, wince, and keep scrolling.