39 best restaurants in London worth changing your plans for
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.
For main, we enjoyed pollock fish balls in a sour orange curry sauce and our first foray away from seafood for the evening, a glistening and succulent pork chop. The menu might be simple (two pizzas – one meat, one vegetarian – four pastas, and a short list of wines and beers), but the dishes pack a punch. The menu is vast and made to share; perfectly pitched seafood dishes, a whole section just for lamb (we especially liked the lamb cutlets Milanesa) and pork (sucking pig ears, Iberian pork ribs, pig trotters). These days, thanks to the recent glut of whipsmart Thai restaurants, London diners are on first-name terms with pad peds and nahm prik paos, squeezing out nam jim jaew sauce like it’s ketchup.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 50 Best Restaurants in London
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.
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.
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.
Rochelle Canteen
St John recently celebrated 30 glorious years in the game and most great modern restaurants in London (if not the world) owe St John a serious and meaty debt. Chance your arm on a drop-in perch, where the full food menu is available. Camille is a place where carnivores will be much happier than vegetarians – it is French, after all – but it’s a triumph of imagination, talent, and guts (which you can expect to see on the menu regularly). 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. This is a snapshot of where London dining is at right now; a city of global flavours, hilariously varying budgets and some of the best food you’ve ever eaten. If an engineer capable of besting Eiffel did not step forward soon, Burnham knew, there simply would not be enough time left to build anything worthy of the fair.
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.
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.
- A joint venture between the always-excellent 40 Maltby Street and chef-owner Anna Tobias, this is impeccable European cuisine with a particular emphasis on French and Italian cult classics.
- One of Belly’s ‘viral dishes’ is cured scallops in big, shallow shells, swimming in coconut cream with basil oil and little pickled chillies.
- 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.
- 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 dimly lit and subsequently moody, with meticulously placed light fixtures spotlighting golden fixtures.
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.
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 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 casinos not on gamestop new restaurant. Their turmeric spiced green plantain chips are hand cut and dehydrated in-house, and come served with jerk mayo.
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 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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
This is the first bricks-and-mortar restaurant from Max Rocha – a canalside spot in Hackney. The open kitchen anchors the space, where head chef Jessica Filbey (formerly of the River Café) and her team move with calm precision, pulling pizza dough, slicing porchetta, and plating pasta under the watchful eyes of diners lucky enough to nab a front-row bar stool. Unlike many supremely successful chefs, Nieves Barragán Mohacho took a few years to open a second restaurant after launching her first, the knockout Sabor in Mayfair. But the menu stays joyously true to Bosi’s heritage, and the team staunchly avoids refining dishes beyond anything a Lyonnaise grandmother would recognise (Josephine is also named after Bosi’s own grand-mère).
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.
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.