Inside the DoubleTree by Hilton London Angel King’s Cross — the Steakhouse, Gin Bar and Skyline Hiding on Pentonville Road
Thousands of people walk past it every day on the way between Angel and King’s Cross. Almost none of them know there’s a Marco Pierre White steakhouse, a London-gin bar and a quietly spectacular skyline behind the doors. Our complete local guide to one of N1’s most overlooked spaces.
There is a particular kind of London secret that isn’t hidden at all. It sits on a main road. Thousands of people stream past it every single day, threading between Angel station and King’s Cross, and almost none of them have ever set foot inside. The DoubleTree by Hilton London Angel King’s Cross is exactly that sort of place — a 370-odd-room hotel on a long, traffic-heavy slab of Pentonville Road that most locals have mentally filed under “just a Hilton” and never thought about again.
Behind the unshowy frontage is a Marco Pierre White steakhouse, a cocktail bar built entirely around London dry gin, a breakfast café pouring beans from a Hackney roastery and pastries from a local bakery, an executive lounge that quietly outperforms its price bracket, an outdoor terrace, and a set of upper-floor rooms with one of the most underrated skyline views in the borough. You do not need to be a guest to enjoy most of it. You just need to know it is there — so here is the full guide.
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This stretch of Pentonville Road is the join between two very different bits of London. To the north and east lie the independent boutiques, theatres, restaurants and squares of Islington, Angel, Barnsbury and Canonbury. To the south and west lies the regenerated, design-led expanse of King’s Cross, Coal Drops Yard and Granary Square, with Clerkenwell a short walk down the other side. Very few places let you walk to all of that within fifteen minutes of the front door. This one does — and it does it without King’s Cross or Bloomsbury pricing.
It is also, quietly, one of the best-connected hotels in this part of London for anyone arriving by train. Eurostar passengers can be checked in and shoes-off within twenty minutes of stepping off at St Pancras, which is a genuinely rare thing to be able to say in this city.
Marco Pierre White Steakhouse Bar & Grill: the table most locals don’t know they can book
The single most under-the-radar thing about this hotel is its restaurant. The on-site dining room is Marco Pierre White Steakhouse Bar & Grill — a name that would have a permanent queue if it had its own shopfront on Upper Street, but which stays quietly busy precisely because it is folded inside a hotel most locals never enter. You do not need to be staying the night to book a table. That is the single most useful sentence in this entire guide, so it is worth repeating: anyone can walk in and eat here.
The concept is classic Marco — traditional British dishes built on French technique, served in a glossy, grown-up room with a cocktail bar attached. Expect 28-day aged native-breed steaks alongside the signature plates the brand is known for: French onion soup, the beetroot and goats’ cheese salad, fried haddock with triple-cooked chips, Chicken Kiev, and a Cambridge burnt cream to finish. It is not avant-garde cooking and it does not pretend to be; the pitch is good, recognisable food in a glamorous setting at prices that undercut the destination steakhouses across town.
Where it really earns its place in a local’s mental map is occasion dining. It works as a pre-theatre dinner before a show at the Almeida or Sadler’s Wells, as the unhurried birthday meal where you actually want to hear the person opposite you, or as a private dining room for the kind of milestone that needs a real room rather than a corner of a gastropub. For an area where genuinely good steak is thinner on the ground than its restaurant reputation suggests, a serious one hiding behind a hotel lobby is a quietly powerful piece of local knowledge.
The honest caveat on the food
We don’t do uncritical write-ups, so here is the straight version: reviews for this restaurant are genuinely mixed. At its best it delivers exactly the confident, classic cooking the name promises; on an off night, regulars report the value can feel stretched and service can lag, as it can in any large hotel kitchen feeding several hundred rooms. Go in with the right expectation — a reliable, handsome classic rather than a fireworks-display tasting menu — and it consistently delivers. Treat the signature dishes and the steaks as the safe, smart order.
Bar60: the gin bar worth a detour on a wet Tuesday
Attached to the restaurant is Bar60, and it is more considered than the phrase “hotel bar” usually warrants. The entire concept is built around gin, with a deliberate focus on London distilleries and the dry style — the team specialise in the perfect G&T, served with a bespoke Fentimans botanical tonic, plus a rotating list of seasonal gin cocktails and a proper bar-food menu rather than the sad bowl of crisps you get elsewhere.
This is a room that does its best work on a wet Tuesday in November, when the lobby fireplace is lit and Upper Street’s busier bars feel like more effort than they’re worth. Order something built on a London dry base, take the seat near the fire, and you have found one of the more civilised quiet drinks in N1 — with the bonus that almost nobody you know will think to look for you there. For a low-key first date, a one-on-one work catch-up, or simply a drink that doesn’t require shouting, it is a genuinely useful address to have filed away.
Café Bloom: the local-business detail nobody mentions
Here is the part that earns the hotel real local credit, and that the chain itself barely promotes. The breakfast and daytime café, Café Bloom, doesn’t default to anonymous hotel-contract supplies. It serves pastries from a local bakery and pours locally roasted coffee — the sort of independent-supplier choice this publication actively champions, and exactly the kind of detail that distinguishes a hotel that engages with its neighbourhood from one that merely occupies a postcode.
It also makes the café a perfectly reasonable stop in its own right. You don’t have to be a resident to sit down with a coffee and a pastry on the way between Angel and King’s Cross, and as a neutral, quiet, central spot for an early meeting it beats the queue at the chains around the station. Supporting independent bakeries and roasters by routing through a big hotel’s café is an unusual recommendation for us to make — but the supply chain here is the right one, and that deserves saying.
The view nobody talks about
Now the detail that genuinely earns the “secret London” billing. The higher rooms on the upper floors look out over a real slice of the skyline — on a clear evening St Paul’s, the Gherkin and the Shard line up across the glass. There is no marketed rooftop bar here and no Instagram queue, which is precisely the point. Book a high-floor city-view room for a night and you get a private, uncrowded version of a panorama that venues across town charge a premium and a two-week wait to see through a cocktail.
There is also an outdoor terrace used for summer barbecues and cocktail events — not an everyday walk-in space, but worth knowing about if you are ever weighing up somewhere to host a private summer gathering in this part of town, an option most people never realise exists on this stretch of road.
The smartest way for a local to use this place
If you live within walking distance, the cleverest move is the thing Londoners forget they are allowed to do in their own city: the one-night staycation. Dinner at the steakhouse, a gin in Bar60, a high-floor room with the skyline through the window, breakfast at Café Bloom, and a fifteen-minute walk home the next morning. It is a remarkably easy luxury to engineer when you already live in N1, and a far better birthday or anniversary plan than most people realise is sitting on their doorstep.
Who this is actually for
The honest verdict
This is a large hotel, not a boutique one. With several hundred rooms it has the occasional service lag and the standard chain-hotel rough edges, and at peak rates the value can feel debatable if you’re paying rack price rather than a deal. The executive lounge and the staff come out consistently well in reviews; the building itself is functional rather than charming, and the restaurant’s reputation is genuinely mixed. Come for the steak, the gin, the local-supplied café, the skyline and the location — not for design-hotel romance, because that is not what this is, and it doesn’t pretend to be.
But that is the nature of secret London. The best-kept local secrets are rarely the prettiest buildings. They are the ones everyone walks past without looking up — and this one has been quietly hiding a steakhouse, a gin bar, a neighbourhood-supplied café and a skyline behind its doors the entire time. Now you know. The only remaining question is which of the seven reasons above gets you through the door first.
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The essentials
Address: DoubleTree by Hilton London Angel King’s Cross, 60 Pentonville Road, London N1 9LA
Nearest tube: Angel (Northern line) — approx. 2 minutes’ walk
Nearest rail: King’s Cross St Pancras — approx. 15 minutes’ walk (Eurostar)
On site: Marco Pierre White Steakhouse Bar & Grill, Bar60 gin bar, Café Bloom, executive lounge, 24-hour fitness centre, outdoor terrace, private dining
Open to non-residents: The steakhouse, Bar60 and Café Bloom — you don’t need to be staying to visit
Insider tip: Request a high-floor city-view room for the St Paul’s–Gherkin–Shard skyline line-up; order the signature dishes or the aged steaks rather than going off-piste
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Part of our ongoing Secret London series — the spaces, tables and stays hiding in plain sight across Islington, Angel, King’s Cross, Clerkenwell and beyond. Got somewhere we should be writing about? Tell us.
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