The Drift

City
Modern European

Finding The Drift was easy. It’s housed within Heron Tower and there is good signage to guide you. Finding a parking space however, is not so easy. If you somehow manage to navigate yourself through the many traumatic road blocks and irritating diversions found within the City of London, then we congratulate you. But we’re pretty certain you won’t find a parking space, there simply aren’t any.

 The Drift is an ultra-modern restaurant/bar which takes inspiration from its location. Expect a lot of glass, and punchy purples and zesty limes decorating the furniture. It’s light and airy and extremely welcoming. We chose to meet friends here for Saturday lunch and, in a part of town which is normally eerily quiet at weekends, The Drift is a fairly safe choice. Although the restaurant had only a few tables occupied, it still managed to feel atmospheric and occupied.

The menu is vast, and we mean vast. A huge A3 sheet forms the basic food menu, with another brunch menu available at weekends. We normally find this type of offering daunting but with mostly everything on the menu catching our eyes, we were more than happy. Thick juicy burgers, fish pies, surf and turf, healthy salads, steaks, risottos, linguini, sharing boards and sausages to name but a few.

We opted for a bread board and a couple of the nibbles to start (crispy squid and the Old Spot pork sausages) which were along the ‘gastro pub’ style of cooking and presentation. Perfectly pleasant and served on an oh-so-stylish wooden board.

Amongst our mains were a couple of burgers (with cheese, obviously), the duck noodle salad, which was more crispy then chewy, and the butternut squash and manchego cheese salad which was huge, served in a large wooden salad bowl enough to feed three. One thing that we were simply in awe of was the selection of ‘from the earth’ sides, or to put it simply, different types of chips. So from the list we went with fries with parmesan and truffle (not bad), sweet potato wedges (good, but a little too thickly cut) and the star of the show: Cowboy fries, amazing fries slathered in BBQ sauce. Calorific, over indulgent, but definitely worth it!

Overall, The Drift makes a good weekend venue to catch up with friends and, we imagine, a heaving mid-week venue for the after work crowd. Best of all, its unlimited prosecco (with the purchase of one glass) on Saturdays and Sundays. Now that’s even more reason not to take the car!


Heron Tower, 110 Bishopsgate, EC2N 4AY

Average price for main meal: £10
Average price for a glass of wine: £5
Food/Drink: 3/5
Service: 3/5
Value: 4/5

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