Five87 Bistro

Five87 Bistro takes its name from its address — 587 Oxford Street East, near the eastern edge of London's Old East Village. The number is the most fixed thing about it. The menu, by contrast, refuses to settle on a single country: French onion soup under melted Gruyère shares a page with butter chicken and a cilantro-lime Peruvian chicken, and none of it reads as novelty. What holds the breadth together is intent — a kitchen cooking across borders on purpose. The practical result is one address a London table can use for a weekday lunch, a weekend brunch, or a longer dinner with wine.

The cooking is most legible at the start of a meal. The Chilean Lobster Dip arrives warm and cheesy with flatbread for the table; the Burrata Platter sets creamy cheese against roasted cherry tomatoes, balsamic, and pine nuts on grilled focaccia; and the French onion soup comes capped with focaccia and Gruyère rather than the usual baguette. Pastas hold the bistro centre — Gruyère-and-bacon gnocchi finished with caramelized onion, lobster ravioli in a creamy garlic-herb sauce. From there the menu travels: grilled chicken thighs in spicy cilantro-lime sauce with wild rice, butter chicken with a tofu option, miso butter meatballs scattered with sesame and green onion, a falafel wrap built on hummus, feta, olives, and lemon-tahini. The Five87 Burger keeps a plainer lane open, stacked with smoked cheddar, bacon, and house sauce on brioche.

Breadth like this can scatter a kitchen, and on a weaker menu it would. Here the strongest plates pull in one direction — modern bistro with a wide passport — rather than fragmenting into a food court. The country names are not garnish. Peruvian chicken earns the label through its sauce; the cod is polenta-breaded and finished with pesto and Parmesan; the salmon rests on spinach cream. Each plate commits to its idea instead of gesturing at it, which is what keeps a menu this long from reading as indecision.

The two dayparts pull different weight. Lunch is the lower-commitment door — the Five87 Burger, a prosciutto chicken balsamic melt on sourdough, truffle fries under white truffle oil and Parmigiano-Reggiano, a seared halloumi salad with grapefruit and avocado. Dinner is where the kitchen spends: a creamy mushroom striploin with garlic-roasted baby potatoes, spinach cream salmon, pesto-Parmesan baked cod over broccolini, seafood pappardelle stacked with shrimp, lobster, and scallops. Vegetarians get more than a token plate — the burrata, the apple and goat cheese salad with candied pecans, the falafel wrap, the halloumi — and a table sorting out a shared appetizer can start on calamari with banana peppers or a charcuterie board.

Five87 opened in 2024 as a locally owned bistro, and the ownership shows in how the menu is built — wide enough to feel personal rather than corporate. Local reporting at the time framed the project around the partners' appetite for a little of everything, and the current menus bear that out. Fresh, seasonal ingredients anchor the kitchen, and reservations and a takeout menu both run alongside the dining room for the nights a table wants the lunch handhelds or pastas at home. The Oxford Street East address keeps it on the city's east side — easy to find for a London table planning across town rather than within one neighbourhood.

The drinks and the calendar reinforce the same flexibility. The menus split out separate lists for cocktails, wine, dessert, and specialty coffee alongside lunch, dinner, and brunch, so a visit can run from a single shared plate to a full evening that ends on espresso. Weekdays it opens for lunch; on weekends the kitchen holds back for dinner only. Seven menus out of one storefront is a wide range for a bistro barely two years old, and Five87 cooks the global half of it with the same attention it gives the onion soup.