One of the best pubs in the City, The Fox makes up for its lack of good looks with welcoming staff, a buzzy vibe, top drinks and cracking grub. Decent beers on tap include Sharp’s Doom Bar from Cornwall, and the cooking is textbook gastropub: starters of spiced chicken livers with green wheat and yoghurt or grilled sardines with sauce vierge could precede grilled lamb chops with red onion, cucumber, feta and mint or salmon and smoked haddock fishcakes with herb salad and hollandaise. Daily specials and tapas plates also get snapped up by eager, peckish punters. The genteel dining room upstairs is the place to go for a calmer meal, perhaps matched with one of the serious clarets from the wine list. Alternatively, a tenner on Tuesday nights gets you a bacon cheeseburger, thick-cut fries and a bottle of Sol beer.