Dining near Regent’s Park: lunch, dinner & DJs at Aki
By four o’clock on a good day in Regent’s Park, the light turns gold over the boating lake, the roses in Queen Mary’s Gardens are at their most extravagant, and the Broad Walk fills with the particular, unhurried energy of people who have nowhere else to be. Somewhere near the bandstand, a picnic has run out of cold rosé. Near Primrose Hill, someone is regretting the second ice cream. This is Regent’s Park in summer: generous, a little overwhelming, and, by early evening, in need of somewhere to land.
Which raises the question every Londoner eventually asks on a warm Sunday: is there a good restaurant near Regent’s Park that doesn’t feel like a compromise?
Quick facts
Aki at a glance
- Distance from Regent’s Park: 10–12 minute walk (via Clarence Gate)
- Cuisine: Contemporary Japanese, with omakase, robata and certified Kobe beef
- Best for: post-park dinner plans, weekday business lunches, date nights, drinks and light bites at our cocktail bar Kiyori
- Nearest tube stations: Baker Street, Regent’s Park, Bond Street or Oxford Circus
The problem with “somewhere near the park”
London has no shortage of restaurants. It has a shortage of the right one, in the right place, at four in the afternoon when you are still in park clothes but would like the next two hours to feel like an occasion rather than a fallback. The park’s own cafés are fine for an ice cream or a flat white; they are not built for a proper lunch, let alone dinner. Camden feels like a detour. The West End is a twenty-minute walk into crowds, and most of what sits directly on the park’s edges leans towards the quick and the forgettable.
What the afternoon actually calls for is somewhere close enough to reach on foot, cool enough (in both senses) to feel like relief, and considered enough to turn a good day into a proper one.
Aki: South of Regent’s Park, into Marylebone
The answer is closer than it looks on a map. Leave the park by Clarence Gate or the top of Baker Street and Marylebone opens up within ten minutes on foot: townhouse terraces, independent shopfronts, the cheese counter and the bookshop on the high street, and a village pace that survives despite sitting in the centre of London.
Cut south through Marylebone Village towards Cavendish Square and the day’s second act begins — one that trades lawns and lakeside views for a restored Grade II former bank, and a kitchen built around precisely the kind of food a hot afternoon deserves.
Regent’s Park
London’s most composed green space, twelve minutes from your table
Designed by John Nash in 1811 as a royal hunting ground turned pleasure garden, Regent’s Park spans 410 acres across northwest London — larger than Hyde Park’s formal gardens combined, greener than St James’s, and more composed than Hampstead Heath. It is the most deliberately beautiful of the Royal Parks: every avenue, every planting bed, every sightline drawn with the same neoclassical confidence as the terraces that frame it.
What makes the park:
- Queen Mary’s Gardens: home to over 12,000 roses across 85 varieties, at their most extravagant from late May through July
- The Broad Walk: a pedestrian avenue lined with London planes, running from the boating lake to the southern edge of the park in a straight, sun-dappled line
- The boating lake: the largest water feature in central London’s parks, with hire boats, herons, and the kind of afternoon light that makes everyone reach for their phone
- Primrose Hill: at the park’s northern edge, a 63-metre summit with a protected view of the London skyline — best climbed for sunset, best followed by dinner
- London Zoo: the world’s oldest scientific zoo, tucked into the park’s northeast corner and still drawing families a century and a half after Darwin visited
The walk from the park’s southern gates to Aki takes twelve minutes. Follow Portland Place — a broad, tree-canopied avenue of Georgian townhouses and embassy flags — until you reach the Langham hotel. Turn right down Chandos Street and the noise of the city stays somewhere behind you. Cavendish Square opens up a minute later: a garden square in miniature, and at number one, a Grade II listed former bank. You never really lose the park. You simply trade lawns for limestone, and a picnic blanket for a table.
Why Aki is the answer
Location
Ten minutes from the park
Leave via Clarence Gate or the top of Baker Street and Aki is a short, straightforward walk south through Marylebone Village — close enough that the day doesn’t need a second commute.
Atmosphere
Quiet enough to keep the mood
Inside the former bank’s high ceilings and thick stone walls, the pace stays unhurried — the same slow, easy feeling as the park, just with a table and a menu.
The menu
A cool room, a cool menu
Chilled sashimi, citrus, fresh herbs and light Japanese dishes built for exactly this kind of afternoon — nothing that asks too much of a warm day.
Drinks
A proper drink to go with it
A considered wine list and cocktail menu mean the table doesn’t have to settle — whether that’s a glass with dinner or a full evening at Kiyori downstairs.
How to spend the rest of your day at Aki
There is no single right way to follow a day in the park with dinner in Marylebone. Aki works equally well as a quick reset before the walk home, or as the main event the afternoon was quietly building towards.
À la carte
A light lunch or early dinner
For those still in park clothes, à la carte is the natural order: a seaweed or herb salad, hand-picked Cornish crab, a few pieces of sashimi.
Weekday midday
The business lunch
£36.50
Three courses · Monday to Friday, 12pm–3pm
A fast, complete three courses without losing any of the kitchen’s precision — ideal before heading back into the afternoon.
Signature Menu
Nine courses, £95
£95
Served seven days a week
Omakase sashimi and nigiri, koji den miso black cod, wagyu gyoza, AA8-9 wagyu Denver cut and Hokkaido millefeuille.
After dark
Drinks at Kiyori
Cocktails and light bites in Aki’s former bank vault, with resident DJs setting the soundscape every Saturday night.
“Exquisite lunch today; food divine; atmosphere totally relaxing and the venue impressive; what a perfect jewel of a place in central London.”
Reserve Your Table
A restaurant near Regent’s Park, ten minutes from the gates
Chilled sashimi, fresh wasabi, 30-year soya and a nine-course Signature Menu — all a short walk from Regent’s Park, at 1 Cavendish Square, Marylebone.
Back to the park, another day
The roses in Queen Mary’s Gardens will still be there next weekend, and the boating lake will still fill with paddleboarders come the next warm Sunday. But for the walk south, out through Clarence Gate and into Marylebone, there is now a proper answer to where the day should end: a restaurant near Regent’s Park that was worth the short walk to find.
Aki is at 1 Cavendish Square, Marylebone, London W1G 0LA, a short walk from Regent’s Park via Baker Street. Open Thursday to Saturday from 12pm to 2am, and Sunday to Wednesday from 12pm to 11pm. Resident DJs play every Saturday evening across Aki and Kiyori. Advance booking is recommended, particularly on summer weekends.
Frequently asked questions
Restaurants near Regent’s Park: dining at Aki, Marylebone
