From Shanghai to the banks of the Thames.
Peacock London is the first London restaurant opened by Lin Jiang Yan Catering Group (临江宴), a Shanghai-founded restaurant group established in 2018 with upmarket Chinese restaurants across Shanghai, Chengdu and now London, several of which hold Michelin recognition.
The peacock, with its extravagant feathers and elegant bearing, is regarded in Chinese culture as the king of all birds — a stand-in for the mythical phoenix. Lin Jiang Yan Catering Group took that image and gave it a home on the south bank of the River Thames, in a dining room that looks directly across the water to Big Ben and the Houses of Parliament.
A kitchen trained in China, serving eight regions
Peacock London's kitchen team was trained in China and built around the ambition of bringing the most authentic flavours of regional Chinese cuisine into central London. Rather than a single regional style, the menu draws on cooking traditions from eight different regions of China, spanning an all-day dim sum menu and a more decadent evening menu built around premium ingredients — wagyu beef, Scottish dived scallops, Canadian crab and the restaurant's signature Forbidden City duck.
Part of a wider family of restaurants
Peacock is one restaurant within the Lin Jiang Yan Catering Group, which has opened a number of upmarket restaurants in Shanghai and Chengdu since the Group's founding in 2018. Several of the Group's restaurants have received Michelin recognition, and that same kitchen discipline and attention to ingredient sourcing carries through to the County Hall dining room in London.
Why County Hall
County Hall was, for most of the twentieth century, the seat of London's local government, sitting directly across the river from the Houses of Parliament. Today the building houses hotels, an aquarium and a handful of restaurants — and gives Peacock London one of the most recognisable dining views in the city, especially after dark, when Westminster is lit up across the Thames.