Eurostar’s highest class of service is built around food and wine in a way that feels closer to a small restaurant than to mainstream train travel. The menus are seasonal, designed in collaboration with three names worth knowing, and the experience begins well before you board.
Premier passengers have access to a dedicated lounge at St Pancras, a quiet space tucked away from the main concourse, with brick walls, soft lighting, and a feel that has more in common with a members’ club than a station waiting room. Smoothies and ham and cheese croissants are served in the mornings, alongside coffee and tea. From 3pm on weekdays, the bar shifts into cocktail service, with a small list of properly made drinks for the late-afternoon and early-evening crowd. A fridge holds still and sparkling waters from London Essence, alongside a small selection of soft drinks. There is something quietly civilised about starting a journey this way, a glass of something cold in hand, the morning rush of the station held at bay. It is the kind of small detail that resets your expectations for what travelling between London and Paris can feel like.
The Paris lounge at Gare du Nord is its own pleasure. Set above the platforms in a high-ceilinged room with arched windows looking out over Haussmann rooftops, it has the feel of a salon. Herringbone parquet floors, low leather sofas, a long communal table for working or eating. The offering on the weekends in the evening is more pared back, self-serve snacks alongside a small bar where you can pour your own gin and tonic or pull a Two Tribes Nomad from the fridge. It suits the rhythm of the journey home, less ceremony, more autonomy, the kind of space you settle into for an hour with a drink and a view of the platforms below.
On board, the Premier carriage itself is part of the experience. The seats are wide and properly comfortable, the spacing between rows generous, and there is room to spread out with a book, a laptop, or simply a glass of wine and the window. It is a class designed to make a two-and-a-half-hour journey feel restorative rather than transactional.
The Premier menus are developed by Jeremy Chan, the British chef behind Ikoyi in London. Ikoyi holds two Michelin stars and is currently ranked among the World’s 50 Best Restaurants, which makes Chan one of the more interesting chefs in London right now and an unexpected name to find shaping the food on a train. Pastry is in the hands of Jessica Préalpato, the French pastry chef named World’s Best Pastry Chef in 2019, known for desserts that lean into natural flavours rather than added sugar. The wine list is curated by Honey Spencer, one of London’s most respected sommeliers and the co-owner of Sune in East London, named one of The Drinks Business’s 50 Most Powerful Sommeliers. Read more about our experience here.
The morning train opens with a smoothie and croissant, followed by a choice of three main courses: a homemade poppy seed and almond bircher muesli, a Montgomery cheddar rösti with maple bacon, portobello mushroom, creamed spinach and smoked beans, or a cinnamon apple with vanilla grapes, grapefruit, pumpkin seed cream and homemade oat and cashew granola. Coffee and tea are served in real cups, which sounds like a small thing until you are watching the rapeseed fields of northern France pass by with a proper mug in your hand. The countryside outside the window does its quiet work, fields of yellow rapeseed in bloom, small villages dotted with sheep and cows grazing, the kind of soft pastoral scene that makes you remember why people used to write letters about train journeys.
The return journey opens with an amuse-bouche, beetroot, ricotta, thyme and hazelnuts, before moving into a choice of three mains. Creative is a sustainably sourced almond and paprika salmon with five-spice rice, sumac green beans and caramelised onions. Classic is a French grass-fed roast beef with smoked aubergine and pepper cream, runner bean salad and pickled cucumbers. Aromatic is a Lorraine potato and celeriac salad with runner beans, salsa verde, free-range egg, radish and spinach. Cheese follows, a Bleu de Bresse with cherry and black cardamom chutney, and dessert. Dinner unfolds at the pace of the journey itself, the landscape gone dark outside the window, the cabin lit and quiet.
Honey’s list is concise and deliberate, built around low-intervention wines that still feel polished. Expect Champagne Fleury alongside a small run of European bottles: a Rolle from Pays d’Oc, a grenache-led rosé from Corbières, and easy reds like syrah or a Bergerac blend, often the one with the sheep-in-sunglasses label. All the still wines come in small formats, which makes it easy to try more than one.
This is what dining on Eurostar Premier looks like, in essence: three serious names shaping the menus, two cities connected by more than a tunnel, a pair of lounges that bookend the journey, and a pace of travel that makes a proper meal possible.
Note: Eurostar provided support for the reporting of this story.