At The Chalk Freehouse in Chelsea, Tom Kerridge has decided that simply letting the dog into the pub is no longer enough: now it gets its own Sunday lunch.
“The Dog’s Dinner”, launched at the end of August and running every Sunday through autumn, is a complimentary roast for dogs whose owners are eating from the pub’s Sunday menu. Developed with fresh dog food brand Butternut Box, it includes pork, dog-friendly roast potatoes, crushed carrot and Yorkshire pudding. The human sitting opposite is likely to be eating 30-day dry-aged rib-eye. Nobody, human or otherwise, needs to suffer the indignity of looking longingly at anybody else’s plate.
The small print adds that “cats and rabbits are subject to the manager’s discretion”, although the pub says none has yet tested the policy.
It would once have been enough for a restaurant to describe itself as dog-friendly, which generally meant a bowl of water and an understanding waiter. Perhaps a biscuit. Now the dog is not merely welcome; the dog has a menu.
At Los Mochis, the Japanese-Mexican restaurant in Notting Hill and the City, every August is dog month. This year’s menu included treats devised especially for canine customers, among them chef Leo’s signature “doggy caviar”, kibble made from sturgeon caviar oil but without the added salt. Everything is made in-house, gluten and nut-free and, according to the restaurant, takes months to develop.
At Roe in Canary Wharf, dogs can order from a “Dogtail List”: an £8 canine steak, £5 rosé “wine” made with elderflower, linden blossom and ginseng and £5 British-brewed dog “beer”. Should the evening have run away with them, there is also a £3 puppuccino listed, naturally, under “digestif”.
Knightsbridge goes further. At the Egerton House Hotel, £30 buys the dog an afternoon tea of chicken and beef meatloaf, homemade biscuits and carrot cupcake, all prepared to order. For £550, afternoon tea can be followed by a three-hour portrait sitting and an A4 watercolour to take home.
There are two ways of responding to all of this. The first is to conclude that society has finally lost its mind. The second is to bring your dog along, if you have one.
I do, which makes it harder to summon much outrage at the prospect of someone cooking him lunch. Besides, beneath the doggy caviar and faux wine is a straightforward calculation. Britain has a lot of dogs. Their owners like going out. They’d rather not choose between the two.
There are now an estimated 15.5 million dogs in the UK, 3 million more than in 2021. Some 41 per cent of households have one, rising to 58 per cent among 25- to 34-year-olds. In London, 49 per cent of households have a dog.
They increasingly come with us. PDSA research found that 48 per cent of pet owners like taking their animal on days out, 38 per cent take them on holiday and 36 per cent take them along when socialising. Restaurants, which have seldom allowed a large pool of potential customers to go unmonetised for long, have noticed.
At The Cavendish in Marylebone, they added a dog menu five years ago, when customers began ordering from the human menu for their canine guests.
“There were a couple of guests ordering plain burger patties or plain steak for their dogs,” they told me. “We felt that we could do something specific like a canine menu, to create a full experience for guests who would like to bring their dogs to the pub – and our crowd are totally dog people.”
There was another motivation. Staff wanted dogs themselves but the hours made ownership difficult. “So we introduced something that could let us pet dogs more.”
The menu is not a case of emptying a tin into one of the restaurant’s nicer bowls. The Cavendish uses meat left from its roasts, boiling or roasting it separately, and says it follows veterinary guidelines on macronutrients. There are chicken and beef dishes, plus a frozen banana and natural yoghurt treat in summer.
“The feeling of using whole ingredients to cook for dogs is more special than something that a pet owner can just buy at home,” they said. “It’s like, why would I go to a restaurant to eat a meal deal? We want the dining experience to be as special for dogs.”
Los Mochis has arrived at much the same place from a glossier direction. Dogs were not retrofitted to the brand: the restaurant was named after founder Markus Thesleff’s dog Mochi, whose likeness appears in a mural at its Notting Hill site.
“It felt very natural for us that a restaurant named after a dog should be somewhere that dogs themselves feel completely at home,” says Thesleff.
For Dog Month, all money raised goes to Silver Fox Rescue.
“But, more importantly, we wanted to create something that felt genuinely special rather than an afterthought,” it says. “The team spends months developing and perfecting the menu, making sure that every element is both appropriate for dogs and as delicious as we can possibly make it.”
It felt very natural for us that a restaurant named after a dog should be somewhere that dogs themselves feel completely at home
Markus Thesleff, owner of Los Mochis
Still, dismiss this entirely as branding and you miss what the restaurants are seeing. Los Mochis says customers increasingly choose it because dogs can come too. The Cavendish says walk-ins surprised by the dog menu often return so the dog can eat properly next time. Some arrive for grander occasions.
“We see around more than a dozen birthdays for dogs a month,” Thesleff says, adding that owners specify the breed when booking so staff can allocate a suitable table.
The Cavendish was recently named one of six finalists in the Great British Pub Awards’ best pub for dogs category (yes, that’s actually a thing) and says it is the only London pub on the shortlist. More revealing are the regulars.
One was Winston, an enormous Bernedoodle whose American owners lived for a time in Marylebone. “Winston would somehow only be able to eat food from our dog menu” because of an appetite issue, they said. “We’ve even opened the venue early in order to feed Winston and chat with his owners.”
The dogs themselves soon learn the arrangement. “We’ve had dogs pull their unknowing dog walkers into the pub for pets with the staff who they recognise, as their owners bring them here regularly – our definition of a dog-regular!”
Restaurants have always survived on regulars. Apparently nobody stipulated that they needed credit cards or opposable thumbs.
The financial equation is more interesting than the price of a bowl of chicken. The Cavendish admits its dog food does not make the pub much money, but somebody celebrating their Cockapoo’s third birthday rarely orders the dog a £6 dinner and sits soberly beside it with tap water.
The dog, then, is not really the customer. Or at least not the only one. For neighbourhood restaurants and pubs, becoming the place somebody can walk into after the park, dog still attached, is worth rather more than the margin on canine ice cream. The owner stays for a drink, comes back for dinner and the dog learns where the treats are kept.
The feeling of using whole ingredients to cook for dogs is more special than something that a pet owner can just buy at home. It’s like, why would I go to a restaurant to eat a meal deal? We want the dining experience to be as special for dogs
The Cavendish
Dog-friendly restaurants are hardly new, either. Jeremy King was making the case years ago. Back when he was running Bellanger and Colbert, he told Country Life: “When it comes to dogs, I so envy the French and the way that they integrate them into city life, with all their foibles and idiosyncrasies.” His Cockapoo Teddy accompanied him to work; Bellanger baked dog biscuits in its kitchen every day.
Kerridge, too, has long wanted dogs in his pubs. When the Chelsea site was announced in its previous guise as The Butcher’s Tap & Grill, he said the ambition was for a “local’s local”, whether the locals had two legs or four. “We will also be dog-friendly, so well-behaved four-legged friends are very welcome too!”
What has changed is the ceremony. A biscuit from the kitchen has become a roast dinner. A water bowl has become a drinks list. At one hotel, the dog can eat afternoon tea before sitting for its portrait. The language of eating out – menus, courses, cocktails, birthdays, dietary requirements, specials – is being extended to an animal that would, given the opportunity, also eat half a kebab it found beside a bin.
There is something ridiculous about that. But dogs are ridiculous. It’s one of their better qualities.
The more interesting question is whether making space for them makes restaurants better at the thing they’re supposed to do. Plenty of places describe themselves as dog-friendly while seating you suspiciously close to the loo. The better ones understand that the point is not really to make a fuss of the dog. It is to make the person on the other end of the lead feel welcome.
The Cavendish says owners have written letters explaining what the pub has meant to them because of relationships formed around their pets. It wants people to be able to go out and socialise without wondering whether the dog is in the way. Occasionally, staff say, the dog gets its water before the humans do.
“You think you’re just serving dog food with someone’s pint, but really, you’re providing a much-needed space for people.”
Which perhaps explains why Britain’s newest fine diner is waiting patiently beneath the table, hoping someone remembered to book the roast.
