Best
These are still authentic family recipes, cooked with passion and without much finesse, served on pink Formica plates. This has long been one of Soho’s best restaurants, and now it’s making waves all over again. The last few years have been kind to Rogan and his team; in 2022, another of his restaurants, L’Enclume, was awarded a third Michelin star – the highest accolade in the Michelin guide.
A pint and packet of crisps downstairs, three courses, and good wine upstairs. There’s also an extensive vegan menu and a super-affordable daily special. The Tem Toh set menu includes unlimited sticky and jasmine rice for soaking up saucy prawn curries or cooling down spice-heavy pad pak. Lastly, it won’t take more than a glass of house red to convince you to order the banoffee pie, which feels like a delightfully nostalgic treat – and is worth the trip back for.
The sprawling building feels like a luxury hotel, and is a multi-space affair, featuring all-day cafe Romano’s, and two cocktail bars (Simpson’s Bar upstairs and Nellie’s in the basement). Pizzettas and flatbreads made using fermented koji and silken tofu get their own section of the menu – and rightly so. But this new outpost in Spitalfields is not vegan, with all manner of dairy- and/or egg-based wonders across the menu. At the original outpost in Portobello, head chef Daniel Watkins’s live fire cooking and ferment laboratory established Holy Carrot as one of London’s great pioneers of vegan cuisine. Try also ‘Gina’s Pasta’, which is simply a damn good plate of spaghetti in a rich and comforting marinara sauce.
Paradise Cove opened following a crowdfunding campaign after his original restaurant Sugarcane was forced to close. This deceptively spartan restaurant just off Broadway Market serves up springy hunks of Guinness bread as well as deliciously dense Guinness cake, and even ice cream suffused with that stouty goodness. At Café Cecilia, you can squeeze in more than the requisite amount of the black stuff before lunchtime and operate heavy machinery afterwards. Expect everything from Balkan barbecue to fried doughnut-esque mekici served with jam and cheese, sausage baps, stuffed cabbage sarma, loads of burek and baklava buns. With its distressed flooring, bright white tablecloths and net half-curtains, the trattoria has gone down in legend for its mountainous beef shin ragu pappardelle – though every corner of this menu jostles with greatness. But there’s something uniquely impressive about a restaurant that goes the distance simply by doing their chosen cuisine very well indeed.
I started with a cocktail – the 2210 rum punch – which tasted like a holiday and instantly made me crave summertime. Fortunately, you could never describe him as ‘all talk and no substance’; the food speaks for itself, and Natty knows it. The young chef has a dedicated social media following (on Instagram, he refers to himself as ‘your gyal’s favourite chef’), and it seems like he’s hit the nail on the head. The menu at Poon’s certainly serves as an invigorating example.
The Barbary
If you’ve no room for pudding, the hefty cocktail list does a good job of extending sittings. Don’t sleep on the Channa bhatura, a melty chickpea dish served with raita. Tender chunks of Indian cheese smothered in the rich masala sauce is best eaten scooped onto piles of sweet coconut pilau rice. The lobster pie comes with a googly-eyed crustacean peering out, the caviar is served with blinis and bubble and squeak, while the mid-18th century mock-turtle soup has been modernised in the form of a croquette. There’s so much to look at within the lowlit space you could easily sit and just take it all in. But you’d be advised to order a bottle of sherry – the fino en rama, perhaps – which goes well with everything on the menu.
Will you be crammed into this small space to an almost uncomfortable level? Order the deep fried feta with quince relish, and burnt leeks with escabeche sauce and walnut dukkah. You’d be forgiven for thinking that the food must have suffered in the face of such dedication to the sesh. Both dishes are less than a tenner. But there are also plenty of dishes unique to here. Which actually makes it feel more like a backstreet San Sebastian pintxos bar than any fancy refit ever could.
It’s industrial but warm – steel panelling, marble tabletops, and polished concrete floors are softened by canary-yellow booths and shelves stacked with pots and saucepans. At 9pm, a queue still snakes outside while inside, the space hums with life. Settle in with a 3-sip serve (a tiny cocktail made to cleanse the palate), like celeariac with rum or pear and vodka, and argue cheerfully with your dining companions about your must-orders.
When it opened, there wasn’t an empty seat in the house for weeks as the city’s most fashionable flocked to get a table. One Club Row is the kind of restaurant that gets Londoners talking. This diminutive Soho spot is still our favourite in the Bao family – and well worth the queue. The Wiri Wiri lamp rump comes with a delicious mint crust and a gorgeous artichoke puree, and I’ve heard great things about the pan-seared pimento duck, although we didn’t manage to stretch our stomachs that far this time.
Servers move around the tables as though performing a well-rehearsed dance, skilfully placing napkins over laps at one table before pouring wine – explaining every detail without spilling a drop – at our own. In a restaurant this grand, you might expect service to be stilted and stuffy – it couldn’t be further from the case. It takes a good few moments after stepping inside the grand dining room for your eyes to adjust and take in the spectacular surroundings. With a two-course lunch available for £23 and a service charge of just 10 per cent, it’s all attractively affordable. The current star of the show, however, is the potato sourdough with house gravy, the deep, rich aroma of which seems to rise up from the dish and do an impression of the famous Bisto advert.
Lanzhou Noodle Bar
Tender langoustine is paired with an intriguing smoked chilli and sea buckthorn which guests pile into corn tacos themselves, and seared lamb is chopped and served with a subtle guajillo mayonnaise. Things are split into a couple of tasting menus, but it doesn’t feel stiff and lots of the courses are designed to be pieced together at the table. Since then Lastra spent time foraging for the best ingredients, from the woodlands of Kent to the Scottish coastline. We first heard rumours that Santiago Lastra, the dashing chef who was handpicked by René Redzepi to lead the sell-out Noma pop-up in Tulum, was coming to London in 2018. This is a beautiful place to eat serving food that will make you smile. The short cocktail list leans into eastern spices, or, if you’re not drinking, order one of the cleverly curated selection of teas.
- At the original outpost in Portobello, head chef Daniel Watkins’s live fire cooking and ferment laboratory established Holy Carrot as one of London’s great pioneers of vegan cuisine.
- Every spot on this list has been independently reviewed by Leonie and our critics, and we regularly revisit favourites to make sure the list stays current.
- Now with offshoots in Soho and Mayfair, the original site – on lovely little Lamb’s Conduit Street – remains the best.
- This was followed by the freshest Irish oysters drizzled in a slap-in-the-face kind of hot fermented chilli sauce.
- At Café Cecilia, you can squeeze in more than the requisite amount of the black stuff before lunchtime and operate heavy machinery afterwards.
- It’s been years since London’s favourite Taiwanese bun house launched in Soho, and queues still snake outside the tiny space on Lexington Street.
In-between, you can knock back a series of perfectly formed small plates, from the devilish sage-and-anchovy fritti to juicy onglet swimming in intense, almost spicy chicken sauce. An immaculate all-day Hackney restaurant rooted in chef Max Rocha’s Dublin childhood and our London Restaurant of the Year 2023. The new project from chef Spasia Dinkovski of acclaimed British-Balkan bakehouse Mystic Burek. A glam, gallery-style space in South Kensington for posh seasonal food. Having wooed east Londoners for decades with ultra-casual kebabs, and hangover-friendly hummus and chips, the venue did an about-turn as an upmarket spot offering organic wines and fluffy sourdough pide.
Collectively, the couple have spent over 15 years working in London’s most acclaimed kitchens, but Ravneet is probably best known for her time judging on Junior Bake Off. In the depths of Queensway Market, behind a little doorway adorned with a laminated banner declaring the restaurant’s name, you’ll find a small room dotted with nondescript-looking tables and chairs. Extraordinary home-spun Malaysian restaurant in an unassuming setting which is currently under threat.
Then head to this grand Georgian townhouse in the shadow of the Natural History Museum for super seasonal, furiously fresh Med-inspired plates from former Toklas head chef Yohei Furuhashi. Chef-owner Abby Lee’s intensely flavoured dishes are served up in a welcoming, casual style and are so beautiful it’s impossible not to swoon over them. A sensational Greek-ish spot from David Carter, the brawny chef and restaurateur behind the live-fire restaurant forerunner Smokestak and show-stopping Manteca.
A Malaysian flavour powerhouse and our 2024 restaurant of the year. Head chef Jamie Thorneycroft honed his flair for fire and ferments over at Lagom and his menu here is potent stuff, with flavours more than capable of making themselves heard over nightly vinyl-only DJs. Less a ‘listening bar’ and more of a ‘dancing restaurant’. Elegant enough to parade the catwalk at London Fashion Week, it’s served with a bowl of tiny pink pickled onions, a deft, couture-worthy touch. A casual but indulgent spot in East Dulwich with the ex-head chef of Gymkhana in the kitchen. Like most things on the menu here, it’s spicier than a Gaspar Noé movie, but that’s why you’re here, right?
While Fisher’s can seem too much like a private member’s club at times, the wood-panelled Brat is more open, with all the atmosphere of an upstairs Spanish asador at 11pm. Tomos Parry is famously the chef behind Kitty Fisher’s, the celebrity hangout in Mayfair. Walking up the stairs, past rows of wine bottles, to be greeted by the soft, camp-fire wumpf of wood smoke, bright chatter across long tables… you’d be forgiven for wondering why you’d never stumbled across this place before. Brilliant value, and utterly deserving of a spot on our edit. But most Londoners in the know will make an exception for the buttery roti this spot is famous for – perfect for scooping up mouthfuls of curry (lamb, fish, chicken) or daal. The original Roti King is in a basement joint in Euston, a part of town most of us try to avoid at supper time unless we’re forced into catching a post-work train.
The space used to be a Finsbury Park fish-and-chip shop and still looks exactly like a Finsbury Park fish-and-chip shop, with tiled floors, old-school pine counters, and original signage intact. A trendy Spanish fish bar in a one-time chippy. If it’s available, do order it. Pasta, wine, and a non gamstop casinos waiter who might just get up in the middle of service and bash out a little light jazz on the piano – what more could you want? Plus there are at least ten salads on the menu each day – think mango, celery and walnut or fried, marinated courgette and aubergine.
The set menu (£55 at lunch, £105 at dinner) changes frequently – snacks every week, larger plates depending on what ingredients look good. Joké’s Nigerian heritage is at the forefront of her home-style cooking, and it’s hugely exciting – if not long overdue – to see a business run by a Black woman flourishing in London’s competitive restaurant scene. Although the anjou pigeon a la presse is quite the spectacle (prepared tableside by a team of three), it’s the Crêpes Suzette that steals the show, doused and flambéed in Grand Marnier before being gently placed onto our plates in a neatly folded triangle. Many restaurants have tried to emulate the industrial-chic St John design blueprint, but this is the original – an unbuttoned, always excellent place to come for a long, boozy lunch fit for 1994. When choosing restaurants, our editors consider both high end and affordable eateries that offer an authentic and insider experience of a destination. Every restaurant on this list has been selected independently by our editors and written by a London-based Condé Nast Traveller journalist who has eaten at that restaurant.
You can still order everything with mountains of hummus, albeit an extremely rich kind that speaks to a sense of tradition that remains at the heart of Mangal II. Sleek Turkish fare that remains steeped in tradition. They say ‘Malaysian heat plus juicy wines’, we say ‘the finest sambal in town’. Make a beeline for anything fish-based, such as charcoal-grilled sardines served with pomelo and fried shallot salad. The menu is not online, and changes regularly, but you can always rely on there being a couple of great pizzas and a couple of perfect pastas. What we do have though is thick and freshly hand-pulled noodles at Lanzhou Lamian, a joyfully cramped eatery that closes at 4.30am on weekends, staffed by chefs effortlessly stretching famously chewy, thick noodles.
Head chef Guirong Wei has five London restaurants, the latest is The Wei in Fulham. From freshly starred fine-dining rooms and hidden gems to neighbourhood favourites, these are the 50 restaurants we think you need to be eating out at in London right now. We’re constantly adding new restaurants to the list and taking away ones that no longer make the grade. Between 2010 and 2021, Noma was named the world’s best restaurant a record five times by the World’s 50 Best Restaurants organization. The khatti meethi cod was also perfectly flakey with a tamarind sweet-and-sour style sauce, and the goat chapli kebab is another exciting dish to add to your list. Chet Sharma’s career has taken him through some of Europe’s biggest restaurants – from Lancashire’s Moor Hall and Cumbria‘s L’Enclume to Mugaritz in Spain’s Basque Country – but at BiBi, his training and experience converge with passion and family influence.
And it’s ludicriously good value. Open as a wine bar on Friday evenings for the summer. There’s a Tesco with an ATM across the street if you forget. As of 2026, there’s a set four course menu for £50 and lunch lasts at least 2.5 hours. There are no bookings and walk-ins only at Agora, and as well as having a not-dissimilar menu it comes at a slightly friendlier price point.
It’s dimly lit and subsequently moody, with meticulously placed light fixtures spotlighting golden fixtures. We’re guided to our table downstairs, admiring interiors inspired by co-founders Jyotin, Karam and Sunaina Sethi’s maternal Grandfather’s summer house in Dalhousie (formerly part of Punjab). It’s an exciting new launch that is sure to rival its sister, Gymkhana, which has become the A-list go-to for Indian banqueting. However, rather than mourn balmy evenings of al-fresco dining, we’re headed to JKS Restaurants’ latest jewellery box of an establishment tucked just off Piccadilly on Heddon Street.
Talking of which, most of the meat on the menu is sourced from Scottish estates, though butchered and aged in the meat room downstairs. The closer to the grill you get, the more you may want to consider wearing shorts and a T-shirt – it’s intense, almost like being on the boilerplate of The Flying Scotsman as it chugs up to the Highlands. But another star of the show is the centrepiece wood-burning grill and oven at the far end of the dining room. They’ve assembled something of a crack team, with Ashley Palmer-Watts of Fat Duck and Dinner by Heston fame in the kitchen, front-of-house staff from St John’s and head butcher George Donnelly. It’s the passion project of Oisin Rogers, who has been steering London and Dublin pubs for three decades – most notably and most recently at The Guinea Grill – and Charlie Carroll, founder of Flat Iron steakhouses.
For the food, we started with a crab bisque amuse-bouche to whet the whistle. However, these negative thoughts are washed away as I cross the threshold of the barely opened AngloThai in Marylebone and am embraced by the literal and figurative warmth of the space. Waiters buzz about in natty lilac or chocolate-brown jackets as I sip Gina’s martini, a tiny but lethal version made with olive-oil vodka and named after the restaurant’s muse and namesake, Taiano’s late mother Gina. Gina represents their first swing at nurturing a project all of their own in the locale they call home, sitting snug among the estate agents and corner shops of a nondescript high street at the end of the Overground. Wife and husband duo Ravneet Gill and Mattie Taiano have proven their chops on the capital’s food scene; Gill oversaw the sweet offering at the likes of St. John, Zuma and Black Axe Mangal, while Taiano has cooked for The Camberwell Arms, Franks and Som Saa.
A blend of spinach and beetroot, with yoghurt and mustard seeds, this superfood dish is as pink as the decor and packed with flavour. The vibrant beet cheera pachadi, usually reserved for weddings in Kerala, is worth trying. Flavours come through in dishes such as the banana boli – deep-fried plantains with black sesame – and rasa kayi, a spicy vegetable curry from Karnataka. This neighbourhood favourite is known for its all-vegetarian, south Indian menu. Come for locally sourced, seasonal food from independent producers and suppliers and one of the most seductive vibes in all of London. In 2024, Joké became the UK’s first Black female chef to win a Michelin star.
Its latest executive chef, Ayo Adeyemi, is only adding to that buzz. If world domination is their plan then we won’t stand in their way, especially when their latest venture, Donia, is serving some of the best food in London right now. It’s hard to get a table at Islington’s favourite neighbourhood restaurant. The new space still only has 20 indoor covers, making securing a table here a little like a game of musical chairs.