When a chef builds a reputation on fire—real, visible, primal fire—stepping away from it feels almost heretical. Yet here is Jake Finn, the architect of Cinder's smoke-wreathed dining room, opening No. Forty Nine on a Wednesday in June with nary a live flame in sight. The shift is disarming and deliberate. This is not a side project or a franchise formula. It's a full philosophical pivot, executed with the kind of confidence that only comes from knowing exactly what you're walking away from.
Ella Williams, recently singled out by Time Out as one of London's best young chefs, presides over the kitchen as head chef—her first in that role. At Hausu in Peckham, she built a reputation for precise technique and an instinctive understanding of fermentation and preservation. Now she's applying that discipline to a concept that morphs with the clock: breakfast baker until mid-morning, Mediterranean-New York bistro through lunch and dinner, wine bar when the light fades. It's the kind of restless ambition that could easily collapse into confusion. Instead, it reads as coherent.
The menu announces itself clearly. Cornbread madeleines arrive with scotch bonnet honey butter, sweet heat in miniature. A plate of tagliolini arrives dressed with prawns and bisque—refined, not showy. Crab choux buns are feather-light vessels for briny filling. There's a Baby Guinness sundae that speaks to the bar's wit, and a pastrami pain suisse that nods to New York deli culture without genuflecting to it. These aren't dishes trying to justify their own existence. They simply taste good.
St John's Wood needed this. The neighbourhood has gentrified steadily without accumulating the kind of restaurant that makes you want to linger over coffee at 9am or steal a late table at 10pm. No. Forty Nine fills that gap with confidence and without apology. Finn and Williams have created something rare: an all-day spot that doesn't feel like it's trying to be all things to all people. It's just unapologetically good at what it does, whenever you arrive.