Great grills for British grub

Fancy a traditional British meal?

SIMPSON'S TAVERN, 38 Cornhill, EC3 (020 7626 9985) £25. Founded in 1757, this bastion of male meat-eating only admitted women in 1916. The fair sex are still in the minority, perhaps because they are not so keen on steaks, mixed grill, liver-and-bacon, rhubarb crumble, stewed cheese, red wine by the litre and port by the bottle. I can't think why.

GUINEA GRILL, 30 Bruton Place, W1 (020 7499 1210) £44. With fewer tourists around, Londoners can reclaim the excellent steaks and "award-winning" steak-and-kidney pies at this old-world pub that occupies a site on which there has been a pub since the early 1400s. Oysters to start and then maybe the mixed grill, which includes sausage, bacon, steak, lamb cutlet and kidney.

MANGAL OCAKBASI, 10 Arcola Street, E8 (020 7275 8981) £25. Dalston and Stoke Newington are the areas for Turkish restaurants with open grills (the meaning of ocakbasi) which offer some of the best inexpensive meateating in town. Here there is no menu. Just point at the cuts and kebabs you fancy and supplement them with hot flat bread and an onion-laced salad.

BUTLER'S WHARF CHOP HOUSE, 36e Shad Thames, SE1 (020 7403 3403) £45. Spit-roasts as well as grills are a feature of this Conran operation designed to prove that as well as being an honorary Frenchman, the Blessed Tel is proud to be British. The meats are carefully sourced, as are indigenous cheeses which would be my choice in preference to jam roly-poly.

THE DORCHESTER GRILL, 53 Park Lane, W1 (020 7629 8888) £65. Known as The Spanish Grill when it opened in 1931, the interior still resembles a Moorish guildhall. But the culinary emphasis now is on fine, British produce and, happily, trolleys still roll with upstanding beef and often at lunchtime another roast or braise. Salads, cheeses, breads and desserts are also trolley-borne.

Note: prices above estimate the cost of a meal with wine for one.