Faded glory can be a good thing, and French restaurant Oslo Court has the indisputable proof. From the bottom of its dusky rose tablecloths to the tips of its curly leaf parsley garnishes, this St. John’s Wood dining room wears its washed-out glamour like the badge of honour it is. The high camp pinnacle of any meal here is pudding. Sadly, time has not stood still: The famous dessert trolley has been decommissioned. But theatricals are still guaranteed, with beloved waiter Neil Heshmat always ready to flirt his way across the royal blue carpet with a flower-adorned plate of crepes suzette, profiteroles, or lemon meringue tart.

At Soho restaurant and private members’ club Quo Vadis, pudding is sovereign. Chef Jeremy Lee has a penchant for pudding proper: the kind that’s steamed, boiled, or baked, and drowsy with golden syrup. In the winter, it’s a Dickensian affair, with offerings of figgy pudding, sticky treacle and ginger, or marmalade and mincemeat almond tarts. For parties, there are the rumbunctious meringue towers for which Lee is renowned, preposterously gravity-defying and draped in lurid fruity cascades.

Marco Schiavetta would have made a brilliant conductor. From behind the counter at Regency Café, he keeps perfect rhythm, moving an endless stream of customers along, foisting hot plates and piles of margarine-slicked fluffy bread into their hands, and trumpeting cries of “sauce?” and “don’t be shy” to the slow-movers. Even before the eating, a visit to this white-tiled Pimlico café is an intoxicating experience. There is just one dessert on the fry-up and pie focused chalkboard, but for customers looking to bide a little more time inside the Regency’s warm walls, there could be nothing better than a big bowl of bread-and-butter pudding with custard. It’s the culinary equivalent of spending just five more minutes under the bedcovers, and will make the bracing bitterness outside easier to face.

The menu at London’s oldest restaurant Rules embraces the linguistic helter-skelter of traditional British cooking. There are both savoury puddings — steak-and-kidney with an optional oyster, and “savouries” for pudding — if anyone fancies a healthy dose of Welsh rarebit to top off a whole roast grouse or a pie in a paper ruff. Otherwise, it’s time to sink deeper into the blood velvet banquettes with sticky toffee pudding draped in walnut praline, or a sandcastle of golden syrup sponge.

Rules may claim to be London’s oldest restaurant, but 19th century seafood restaurant Sweetings is its superior in all but longevity. True luxury is here, where napkins are tucked into collars for long weekday lunches of crab, caviar, and Dover sole; and where lobster mash comes under the listing for vegetables. The dessert menu doesn’t miss a note. There are crumbles, steamed ginger, sticky toffee, jam roll, steamed syrup, bread-and-butter, and best of all: Spotted dick. That’s not an insult, but a contraction of the old term for pudding, puddick, and a reference to the fact this steamed suet dessert is studded with dried fruits. The Sweetings version has been on offer for well over a century.

St John Bread and Wine bravely goes where other modern British restaurants dare not: tapioca. Though it’s widely used in South American and Asian cuisine, in the context of British puddings tapioca is more often seen as trypobhobic pondwater. At Bread and Wine, it’s transformed into pearls of pale winter sun and bejeweled with pink rhubarb. It still might not be a crowd pleaser, but that’s the preserve of crumble, Eton Mess, and even Queen of Puddings, its breadcrumbs cloaked in custard and raspberry jam and piped with pert meringue kisses, on a pudding menu that manages to be just as engaging as the offerings of snails, liver, tripe, faggots, and pheasant for which the restaurant is reputed.

For those seeking solace on a bleak, grey day, there is nowhere better than the dining room at E Pellicci, London’s most exquisite Italian café. Customers at this perfectly formed Art Deco chocolate box are guaranteed warmth, good humour, and a meal that makes them feel like royalty (the heir, not the spare.) Vast platters of fry-ups, blankets of chicken escalope, and cavernous bowls of spaghetti Bolognese take centre stage, but dessert refuses to be overlooked. Lattice-work jam tart, burnished apple crumble, or chocolate roly poly in a 2:1 ratio of Nutella to sponge, are cheek-brightening sugar explosions worth an after-school- or after-work-detour in-and-of themselves.

Café Cecilia may have only opened its doors in 2021, but it already has the feel of somewhere time-honoured. Partly, that’s the work of the few regulars with big hair and bigger sunglasses that are so often the mark of a more storied establishment. But it’s also because Max Rocha’s restaurant serves up dishes that immediately feel like old friends. Chief among them is the bread-and-butter-pudding. The doughy comfort is pressed overnight, then carved up into dense slabs and deep-fried. Served with cold custard, it’s the kind of innovation that rings immediately true — sitting somewhere in the fertile territory between bread and butter, French toast, and a deep-fried Mars bar.