BEST English meaning
Noble Rot’s Dan Keeling gave a helping hand with the wine list here, with a changing monthly focus on small producers. The dining room is nothing fancy, but the omnipresent queue outside says it all – this is some of the most delicious, authentic Malaysian food in the city. Chicken offal skewers (a Filipino street food staple), come with a sweet barbecue glaze and cucumber vinegar dip. Reassuringly frequented by Filipino diners, this Kingly Court eatery combines Filipino street food concepts with British cooking techniques. Their Maginhawa Group (behind some of London’s popular Filipino and Southeast Asian restaurants, including Mamasons Dirty Ice Cream) has grown exponentially in just six years. And while there are main courses from the grill (black Hampshire pork chops with capers and rosemary borlotti beans; whole Brixham mackerel with Castelluccio lentils and salsa rossa) it’s the beef-shin ragu with pappardelle that keeps the locals coming back, and back again.
The latest Michelin-starred Spanish spot from Nieves Barragán Mohacho, the visionary chef behind Mayfair’s Sabor. One of London’s oldest restaurants, this hospitality monolith dates back to 1828 but recently re-opened after a fallow period. Instead, you will be awed by fat egg noodles glistening in rich, piquant curry laksa adorned with crispy onion and deep-fried seabass wallowing in rich chili sauce. Normah’s – named after its chef owner, whose nephew, Aizad, runs the front of house – fits that description perfectly. If anyone ever says that English food is bad, simply rub their face in a St John menu.
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.
Bakare offers a serious set menu that includes a fiery hot pepper soup and peaks with a decadent, crispy skinned guinea fowl yassa. In our original review, we heralded the perfect collision of sweet, salty and peppery heat, and dubbed it London’s best restaurant of 2022. They just celebrated their 10th anniversary, and food is fancy without ever being smug or exclusionary.
Spectacular food aside, the team and servers are warm, passionate and engaged, making for an evening well spent. Clean lines, natural materials and a subdued colour palette define this elegant space, and lest we forget the endless views of Big Ben and Parliament. For pudding, there’s a rogue Prego steak sandwich option (a post-seafood dessert alternative borrowed from Portugal), as well as decadent portions of chocolate mousse and choux à la creme, plopped into pretty art deco dessert bowls. Be sure to order the curiously named ‘Lilibet’s triptych,’ which translates to fish served three ways – raw, grilled and then lastly as a punchy soup. Anchovies are served on eclairs, oysters come dressed, fire roasted and fried, while an ‘unsung heroes’ section offers up sea urchin, garfish and sea cucumber. Just to witness it all with average food would be enough, but nay, the actual feast is equally as joyful.
There’s still no dessert, and BYOB is still possible, despite rumours to the contrary; even better, the menu is still very reasonably priced, with nothing over £19. The old yellow restaurant sign now hangs on an inside wall. Word got out as food hounds made the pilgrimage there; the simple wooden tables were booked out months in advance. In 1999, Thai food often meant predictable green curries. I’d come here again for date night, or on a weekend with a group of friends to order endless plates of pasta and indulge in cocktails and gossip. I’m a tiramisu aficionado, but I’d actually recommend the lemon meringue here – the hint of fennel added a new depth of flavour and it was easy to stomach, even after the many courses on the menu.
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 casino not on gamstop of which seems to rise up from the dish and do an impression of the famous Bisto advert.
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.
One of Belly’s ‘viral dishes’ is cured scallops in big, shallow shells, swimming in coconut cream with basil oil and little pickled chillies. An intimate Filipino restaurant in Kentish Town. Simply visit the walk-ins-only bar, where you’ll be able to get most of the snacky bits on the menu – including the legendary rarebit – and a glass of St John rouge. Our most recent visit saw us feast on cocks comb schnitzel and snout cassoulet, dishes that sound like you might have let Leatherface from The Texas Chainsaw Massacre into the kitchen. Head chef Elliot Hashtroudi learned his way around a carcass at St John and comes across like Keith Floyd in a trucker cap.
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 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 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.
Despite Mambow’s size, Abby Lee and her modern Malaysian restaurant will be stamping a big footprint on the London dining scene. Next up, small plates that ranged from my favourite lor bak – a spicy crispy pork bite that I’ve been dreaming about since – to a nutty grilled banana blossom and prawn toast that was unlike any I’ve tasted before. First-timers should order the classic, with juicy pork and peanuts packed inside a fluffy pocket, or the indulgent fried chicken. 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.
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.
The whole menu also makes use of local produce, with many of the ingredients being sourced from a Public House-owned garden in Oxfordshire’s Bruen Farms. Waiters flit to and fro with enviable plates of crab cakes (I can testify, a must), leek tart and fried mushrooms, as we take a seat at a corner table next to a pair who are already gushing over their starters. But as we’re here for supper, we follow the maitre d’ up a narrow staircase, past a lively open kitchen, until we’re in a rabbit hole of a dining room.
Few places are as grand and historically significant as the OWO – a hotel that’s home to nine restaurants, including Kioku by Endo. And don’t scrimp on the vegetable sides – I haven’t stopped talking about the sprouting broccolini and the mashed potato, served on a knockout shellfish bisque sauce and topped with lobster. The menu is not the traditional roast or scones that you might expect, but an unexpected, hold-onto-your-hat, seafood adventure. Taking its name from HRH Elizabeth II, who was born at the Bruton Street address, the restaurant is the creation of Ross Shonhan (Nobu, Zuma, Bone Daddies), who, peculiarly, wanted to imagine what life would have been like for Lilibet had she never become queen. London’s dining scene can be split into two categories – mouth-watering food or eye-wateringly beautiful decor. Cleanse the palate with a refreshing white port and tonic before opting for something funky from the short wine list – we’d order a Chardonnay from the Languedo or a zingy Vinho Verde from Portugal’s Minho region.
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 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.
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.
For the top restaurants elsewhere in the UK, start with the UK’s Top New Restaurant Awards 2026. The result is this edit of the very best restaurants in London. Food, after all, is personal and naming the holy grail, best-of-the-best restaurants that are worth planning a whole trip around, is a big ask. But with its classic and modern European menu boasting the likes of grilled lamb leg and anchovy, and aubergine, borlotti and wild garlic labneh, it’s the epitome of laidback excellence. And now you mention it, the restaurant does look like a particularly upmarket garden centre café, albeit one run by London foodie royalty, Melanie Arnold and Margot Henderson. Expect anything from confit duck with lentils, cabbage and mustard, to rolled pork belly with saffron roast potatoes and crispy sage, or morel and goat’s curd tart with wild garlic sauce.
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.
We pile loha karahi chicken curry on mountains of rice and strips of leftover naan bread, adjusting our belts for more room as we mop up the richly spiced tomato sauce. The lightest spice is in the dunghar paneer tikka, which is enveloped in an uber-indulgent, nutty kaju masala sauce – the pools of vivid orange oil are best soaked up with a classic butter naan. We soon realise that everything has a kick, but it’s pleasant rather than overwhelming.
- For meat eaters, it’s worth adding the poached chicken strips.
- 14 courses change daily, and are cooked in front of diners – they might include Newlyn crab on roasted chicken skin, Orkney scallops with wild chamomile or Devon Red Ruby beef with fermented artichokes and pickled tapioca, as at the time of writing.
- 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.
- Brilliant value, and utterly deserving of a spot on our edit.
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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?
This is a spot that’s deservedly at the vanguard of bringing a whole new experience of West African food to London. The five-course menu, developed over many months (Akoko is the Yoruba word for ‘time’), is a reimagining of the traditional dishes found in Nigeria, Senegal and Ghana in particular. On the menu there might creamy ‘nduja on toast, burrata served with peach and basil or breakfast radishes with aioli. When we talk of young chefs making waves on London’s restaurant scene, Abby Lee’s name won’t be far from in-the-know foodie’s lips. It’s difficult to separate stand-out dishes among the Land, Sea and Earth sections of the menu, but the charred octopus tentacle and neck of pata negra pork are both contenders.
Rochelle Canteen
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.
Most importantly though, everything on the menu is delicious. A casual spot specialising in cuisine from the Xian region in North-Central China. Lamb short rib is a revelation, as it their take on nam tok, where wobbly smoked pork belly is offset by nutty roasted rice powder.
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.
Found within the Radha-Krishna Temple on Soho Street, Govinda’s restaurant serves up what their website describes as karma-free food. Greek food is only the jumping-off point for a menu that begins on the Ionian islands before skipping off to the Levant by way of the Balkans, with a South American layover. Mostly though, Chan’s menu defies geographical borders, instead pushing culinary boundaries via dishes that simultaneously make you think and make you feel held. Of course, there is jerk chicken on the menu, but it’ll be the lamb that creates the most extreme food envy. There’s a slightly rowdy playlist that will have you questioning whether you’re in a club or restaurant.
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.
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.
Less than a year later, it seems his dreams are on their way to becoming a reality; the young chef opened his own restaurant in trendy Herne Hill (just opposite Brockwell Park) in late 2025, and the reception has been overwhelming. The owners of The Barbary, Layo and Zoe Paskin, have created something rare – a set of London restaurants under the umbrella of Studio Paskin (The Palomar, The Barbary, The Barbary Notting Hill) where a table is as coveted now as it was on opening night. It’s a dish that proves a useful avatar for the whole menu – an example of a time-honoured classic with something just a touch askew.