Best
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.
Claiming to be the the world’s first Nigerian tapas restaurant, Chuku’s is a Tottenham landmark. A London institution and Time Out’s best restaurant in Soho. The air is thick with chatter, the shelves full of wine. Walking into Levan on a Saturday night is like arriving at a house party.
The dining room now seats 12 – four more than the original eight spaces – and there’s a bar to hang out in for an aperitif or digestif, to properly make an evening of it. As with any good Mexican, there’s a carefully curated list of mezcal which also feature at the end of the wine flight. The house wine has been created specifically for KOL by Slovakian winemakers Slobodné Vinárstvo. Sunshiny chef Ravinder Bhogal cut her teeth at Michelin-starred Trishna before opening up her own place – a ‘no borders’ kitchen that draws on Indian, African and European cooking to curate its menu.
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.
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.
Mount St. Restaurant
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.
- This is the kind of restaurant you want to lose an afternoon in.
- Mission accomplished – this lowkey, unassuming spot instantly became London’s most acclaimed new restaurant.
- On the menu there might creamy ‘nduja on toast, burrata served with peach and basil or breakfast radishes with aioli.
- It’s unfussy and honest cooking, served in a setting that feels more country house than East End.
- The old yellow restaurant sign now hangs on an inside wall.
- 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.
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.
Merging high-end food, glamorous interiors and a hard-to-impress postcode, with authentic familial influences and traditional Indian cuisine, BiBi was well worth the wait. I’d advise you to leave some room for dessert, too; the cacao ganache will be haunting my dreams for some time to come. This was followed by the freshest Irish oysters drizzled in a slap-in-the-face kind of hot fermented chilli sauce. The bisque is made up of the remnants of crab from one of the a la carte dishes – bonus points for waste reduction.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
The soy braised short ribs and slices of pan-fried pork belly delivered in a glowing apple-and-mustard sauce are also must-orders. Mission accomplished – this lowkey, unassuming spot instantly became London’s most acclaimed new restaurant. Their turmeric spiced green plantain chips are hand cut and dehydrated in-house, and come served with jerk mayo.
Don’t forget to sign up to our free newsletter for unbeatable London restaurant news and tips. Every summer we give this legendary list a thorough makeover and announce a brand new Number 1, and that’s what we did last month. An indisputable list of the 50 best places to eat in the capital right now Add best to one of your lists below, or create a new one. To add best to a word list please sign up or log in.
The restaurant’s menu features seriously old-school dishes like kedgeree, bubble and squeak, and ‘raw beef and crisps’, which is some kind of wonderful. There’s a rotation of fiery, no-frills dishes such as bavette steak rubbed with yaji dressing (served with the requisite quarter-tomato as is custom, Rafal explains), and ekuru with pumpkin-seed pestou and Scotch bonnet sauce. The wine list is extensive, ranging from the house St John white (£8.75), red (£8.75) or Cremant (£11) by the glass up to blow-the-budget Burgundys north of £600. We update this list regularly as new restaurants open and existing ones evolve. A grand dining room in a Grade II-listed former courthouse. Now it’s a wonderful, community-focused space, with a menu of Jamaican-inspired home-cooked classics.
The Barbary
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.
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.
The wine list is a delight – order by the glass as you graze your way through the menu of sure-fire hits, whatever the season, and leave feeling smug that you even found this unassuming spot at all. Next to all this glamorous shimmy, you worry that the actual food may appear a little drab, or see-saw more towards style than substance, but Ballymaloe-trained Parle is a good old boy of London dining with restaurants such as Sardine, JOY and Pastaio under his belt. Ask any Londoner for their list of the best restaurants in London, and you’ll get a different answer every time. That means house wine is served by the pot, a 460ml serving in a heavy-bottomed glass bottle, and charged to your bill based on how much you drink, whether that’s one glass or three bottles. Among a grid of Islington’s manicured parks and grand townhouses, chefs at Indian-spiced pub The Tamil Prince serve dishes tapas style (as they’re ready), from the small kitchen. When word got around that David Carter – the man behind some of London’s most buzzy restaurants, including Smokestack and Manteca – had opened a new spot in Borough Market, it didn’t take long for it to become one of the capital’s most exciting eateries.
Now with offshoots in Soho and Mayfair, the original site – on lovely little Lamb’s Conduit Street – remains the best. At the helm is Hiếu Bùi, the godfather of London’s Vietnamese food movement (he also runs the Kêu chain and another branch of Cây Tre in Soho). A family-run ‘modern Korean’ and Time Out’s best London restaurant of 2025.
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.
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.
Levelling up from her tiny outpost in Peckham, Lee recently brought her exciting modern Malaysian concept to a sweet spot in Lower Clapton. On the menu, a mean, signature Manhattan (rude not to), oysters, steak, fish and a twice-baked chocolate cake simply asking to be devoured. A rickety wooden staircase leads to the restaurant, which is inspired by New York glamour and top-notch hospitality. It was once a nightclub and it remains relatively inconspicuous save for the bold blue awning over the door and the italicised logo, which contradicts surrounding brown-brick, graffiti-covered walls.
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.
This is the kind of restaurant you want to lose an afternoon in. An intensely violet-y Jordanian Saint George Petite Syrah accompanies us through plates of salty-spongy Nabulsi cheese; Sheikh El Mahshi baby aubergines with pickled herbs and walnuts; Rye Bay skate fish kofta and a slow-cooked lamb spiced with mahlab and mastic. Named after a flowering Palestinian thistle, it is a four-level earthy, imaginative space in a quiet symphony of natural greens, lemony yellows and poured creams. Now, behind the sage-green facade of a Notting Hill townhouse, he has unveiled petite Akub with his friend Rasha Khouri. Franco-Palestinian chef Fadi Kattan has done more than anyone to raise the status (and stake the rights) of Palestine’s gastronomic identity.
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.
The menu is nothing but small plates; sassy smoked eel omelettes, chunky chips done ‘bravas’ style, pickled anchovies, rosy red prawns cooked on the plancha, and cod cheeks with peppers. Of course, Hackney is now overrun with small plates wine bars, so Charlie’s done the only thing he could; bring his uproarious brand of hospitality to Soho. It comes from Charlie Mellor, who, a decade ago, opened Hackney Road’s Laughing Heart, a small plates wine bar named after a rousing Charles Bukowski poem, with a 2am licence and a deeply devious energy.
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 non gamstop casinos with your dining companions about your must-orders.