Deciding to set your sights on becoming a destination restaurant is a risky business. It requires getting your name out there quickly and making sure your offering is unique enough to make people want to visit. When Patrick Powell first opened east London’s Allegra in 2019, Stratford was still very much an up-and-coming part of London off the back of the London Olympics – but his swanky restaurant quickly earnt such a reputation that it was serving to packed crowds of food lovers from all over.

Designed by world-renowned studio Space Copenhagen, Allegra is comprised of an impressive eighty-cover dining room accessed via a lift as well as a bar and an outdoor terrace, which has space for a further seventy diners and views across east London. Each area of the restaurant offers something different in terms of both atmosphere and food, yet the spaces flow naturally into one another. One of the most intriguing features of Allegra when compared to London’s many other sky-high restaurants is that the windows are deliberately covered to create an inward-looking, timeless feel.

This sense of timelessness is echoed by Patrick’s menu, which uses modern techniques such as fermentation to enhance the predominantly British produce, and is influenced by his time working under both Anthony Demetre and Nuno Mendes. In the main restaurant, you can expect classical yet contemporary dishes on the season-driven menu such as Tunworth cheese custard served with onion brioche, pickled walnut and thyme, or wild turbot cooked en papillote with Parmesan dumplings. Meanwhile, the food at the bar and on the terrace is a much more informal affair, with crowd-pleasers like fried chicken with aioli taking pride of place on the menu.

Plenty of emphasis is also placed on the drinks list at Allegra, starting with an intriguing selection of signature cocktails including a concoction called The Wrong Bianco, which features a house dry vermouth blend mixed with Luxardo Bianco, pet nat and bitters. That’s not forgetting the varied wine list which covers everything from old-world classics to some funkier low-intervention bottles.

Given its slightly out-of-the-way location and the timing of its launch (shortly before the first national Coronavirus lockdown), Allegra has quickly established itself as somewhere both worth going to for a really special meal and also for a casual bite to eat and a few drinks. The team set out to become a destination restaurant; they’re well on their way to achieving that.