Restaurants With the Best Views in the World (Six Rooms We've Sat In, and Whether the Food Keeps Up)
Restaurants With the Best Views in the World (Six Rooms We've Sat In, and Whether the Food Keeps Up)
A restaurant with a good view has a built-in excuse to be lazy. If people will line up for the window, the kitchen doesn’t have to work as hard — and often you can taste it. We’ve been writing that warning into our own reviews for years.
“Time after time, we’ve been disappointed by the quality of food and drink by venues boasting impressive views. Quality is often lost when businesses don’t have to try too hard to get people through the door.
So: six rooms we’ve actually eaten or drunk in, where the setting was at least half the reason we booked — a bar 122 floors up, a glass dome on a hill, a bus that drives across London. For each one I’ve said where the view is doing the heavy lifting, where the kitchen carries its own weight, and what the catch is. There’s always a catch.
The highest one: At.mosphere, Dubai
At.mosphere is on the 122nd floor of the Burj Khalifa in Dubai — the world’s tallest building, so the world’s highest bar. The lift covers those 122 floors in exactly sixty seconds and opens into a polished foyer with floor-to-ceiling windows. Book a window seat rather than the bar; the price gap is small, and at about $20 a cocktail you may as well pay for what you came for.
This is the one that broke our own rule. We went in hesitant and the drinks turned out to be the highlight of the trip — bartender’s choice, name a spirit, and back came some of the best cocktails we’ve ever had. The snacks come from the same chef who runs the gourmet restaurant up there, so they’re several steps above peanuts and chips.
The catch is that you can’t be casual about it. Reservations are an absolute must; walk in and you’ll most likely be turned away. There’s a dress code — no beachwear, no flip flops, men in trousers or traditional dress — and you enter through the Armani Hotel at the base of the tower. For sunset, take the first seating, usually 5:30.
The one that turned: Perlan, Reykjavik
Perlan is a glass dome high on a hill above Reykjavik, the capital of Iceland. When we ate there the dining room revolved: you sat still and the room carried the city past you. We only went because my dad ate there around 1998 and never stopped talking about it — go even just for a cocktail in the bar, he said, and watch the view come round. Chefs and locals told us it was the best restaurant in the country.
The dining room was old-school luxury — white tablecloths, waiters in proper suits, the formality that has quietly gone out of newer places. I could picture my dad in my exact seat with a whiskey, getting excited about the meat. The four-course tasting menu: Jerusalem artichoke and arugula salad, ling fish under shiitake mushrooms, fennel and onion foam, then lamb filet and lamb shank with hazelnut and celeriac purée. The sous chef told us the kitchen thought of its own dishes as simple — good ingredients, not tricks — and vegetables got the same billing as the meat and fish.
That was February 2015, and it is the one room here you cannot book a dinner in today. The building is the Perlan nature museum now, and the restaurant under the glass is casual and daytime-only — no dinner service and no tasting menu. We have not eaten the new version, so we are not going to tell you what it is like. Go up for the view; just do not plan an evening around it.
The one that moves: Bustronome, London
Bustronome is a double-decker bus in London with a glass roof and a working kitchen downstairs — the only one here where the view changes while you eat. It has run since 2014. You sit on the deck above the kitchen while the bus drives across the city, pausing at Westminster Palace, Tower Bridge and Big Ben, all in under three hours. I found it stalking Instagram, working out how to show my mum London on her first visit while carrying a tired toddler around.
It behaves more like a restaurant than the word “bus” suggests. It glides to a stop, the velvet ropes come off and the maître d’ steps out to greet you. The tables have holders that stop the wine sliding around. You get a pen and a map, and pointing the pen at a monument plays you its history. Chef Sébastien Nicolleau runs the kitchen below; the standouts were a goat’s cheese cheesecake, a blackberry and strawberry compote, and off the vegetarian menu a grilled stuffed courgette — zucchini — in sweet pepper chutney.
Two catches. You can’t order wine on board: British rules mean you book your bottles when you reserve, so decide before you turn up. And there are no highchairs, so bring something to occupy a small child. Axel spent the whole ride glued to the glass watching cars and people go past, which is about the best outcome available.
The one where the view is doing all the work: Sky Pod Bar, London
Sky Pod Bar is a glass-enclosed cocktail bar on top of one of London’s tallest buildings, 155 metres up, with a 360-degree view of the city and a garden planted around the tables. We went before Big Ben or Buckingham Palace, on the theory that a city makes more sense once you’ve seen all of it at once. On a clear night much of London is lit up below you, and it does make you feel detached from everything.
Inside it’s dim, modern and very full — live music through the dining area, tropical plants around the tables, everyone dressed up for it. Once you’re in, it’s relaxed, and easy to fall into conversation with the next table.
This is also the venue that earns this page its opening line. The appeal is the view, and the cocktails were a bit sweet for my taste and just okay; the wine list makes up for them, and order the cheese tray. It’s hard to get in, too — the gardens are free to the public, but you may need to reserve a table days beforehand, and once you have one, prop the “reserved” sign on it every time you stand up. And the balcony that wraps around the restaurant was shut on our visit, too cold and too windy, so we never got out on it.
We stayed in the bar and skipped the restaurant, which I regret — the dover sole with scallop and shrimp mousse had me wishing I’d booked.
The one at water level: Bayview, Geneva
Bayview is inside the President Wilson Hotel in Geneva, Switzerland, facing Lake Geneva, and the dining room is built around the water: big windows, white as the base colour, the odd splash from an azure glass or the peacock feathers on the tables. Two things in there are worth walking in for on their own. The wine rack is polished metal in its own cold room behind glass walls, and it is enormous. The blue strips running floor to ceiling turn out to be aquariums, dozens of jellyfish drifting inside.
The chef when we ate there was Michel Roth, who cooked unashamedly French and did not mess about — no odd pairings, no statements, classic dishes done properly, which is what carried the place to a Michelin star and a grade of 18/20 at the Gault & Millau. He came up through kitchens in France, was named the country’s best apprentice in 1977, and ran the Parisian Palace before moving to Geneva in 2012. His pastry chef, Didier Steudler, came from the Ritz in Paris. The restaurant trades as Bayview by Danny Khezzar now — the room and the lake are as we found them, the name on the door is not.
The thing I’d go back for isn’t the lake. It’s the cheese cart, which you can smell from the door — the stinkiest, best French cheeses, and I could happily have sat there all day with a bottle of wine. Which is the catch, too: the tasting menu is long enough that by the time the cart came round we were too full to do it justice.
The odd one out: Ekstedt, Stockholm, where the room is the view
Ekstedt in Stockholm, Sweden, has no window worth writing about. The reason to book is what happens inside the room: everything on the menu is cooked over open Scandinavian wood fire and nothing else. Ask for the long bar in front of the kitchen — that was the seat when we went, though Ekstedt closed that room at Christmas 2022 and reopened in bigger premises in February 2023, so check the layout when you book. You watch the chefs lift meat out of what is essentially a campfire pit and plate it with the precision of surgeons.
It’s a brasserie with a Michelin star, and the food is strange in the best way. The welcome dish was cooked at our table: moose heart with spiced butter, parsley, mushrooms and lingonberries on a taco-like disk. Then oysters seared in beef fat. Then langoustine with shavings of dried deer meat and langoustine broth poured over. Dessert was a cheese plate with Löfstalund, a Swedish cheese, shaved over it and scooped up with bread pulled straight from the wood stove.
“I’ve heard the restaurant described as primal, and I get it. Meat grilled over a flame screams primal, masculine and strong, yet for me, every dish at this restaurant was beautiful and delicate and full of so much flavor.
Owner Niklas Ekstedt grew up in the forests of Jämtland, in Sweden’s Arctic north, and now lives in the capital; the restaurant is that split turned into a menu. He met us at the door — I was seven months pregnant, both of us soaked from a thunderstorm — put drinks straight into our hands, champagne for Chris and a convincing sparkling juice for me, and showed us videos of his sons. I had the juice pairing instead of wine and would recommend it either way: blackcurrant and pomegranate against birch-fired lamb loin tasted like a rich dark Burgundy.
The catch is getting in. When we booked, tables for one of Stockholm’s most popular restaurants went online six weeks ahead at midnight, closer to buying music festival tickets than reserving dinner — the restaurant has moved and grown since, so check how it releases them now. And it is meat first, second and third — if that isn’t how you eat, this one isn’t for you.
How we’d choose between them
If you only do one and you want the drama, it’s At.mosphere — 122 floors up, and the rare view venue where the drinks are as good as the window. If you want the best meal on the list, it’s Ekstedt, and start trying to book about six weeks out. Sky Pod Bar is the opposite lesson, and still worth going: turn up for the view, drink the wine rather than the cocktails, and reserve the table days ahead.
The other three are shaped by the trip rather than the food. Bustronome is what to book when the sightseeing itself is the problem, which it is with a small child or a first-time visitor. Bayview is the long lunch with nothing planned afterwards, so you still have room when the cheese cart comes round. And Perlan is the one to read rather than book — that dinner is not served any more, and its section above says why.
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