Middle Eastern restaurants in London
42 places
Akub
££££Fadi Kattan opened Fawda in Bethlehem before bringing Palestinian cooking to a Notting Hill townhouse - the first London kitchen to treat it as a fine-dining cuisine.
Al Waha
£££The most-cited Lebanese room in London across these sources - white walls, hanging foliage and mezze taken seriously rather than served as filler.
Al-Jabal Bakery
£Twenty years of made-to-order mana'eesh in Acton - spinach and cheese, or lahem beajin - and a weekend queue drawn from across west London.
Balady
££Hummus treated as a dish rather than a dip - served warm, in a bowl, as the meal itself.
Beit El Zaytoun
££Founded in 2016 by Ayman Assi as a small piece of Lebanon in northwest London, with a garden that does most of the work in summer.
Berber & Q
£££A railway arch built around charcoal and smoke - lamb shawarma and cauliflower off the same grill, in a room that gets very loud very quickly.
Berut Bistro
££A small comfortable Lebanese room on Paddington Street - the neighbourhood version rather than the Edgware Road spectacle.
Bubala
£££Entirely vegetarian and almost never described that way - the point is that nobody at the table notices what is missing.
Cafe Helen
££An Edgware Road institution that comes into its own long after everywhere else has shut.
Late-night trading is the point - it is a different place at midnight than at lunch.
Coal Office
££££Assaf Granit's kitchen in a converted coal office at Coal Drops Yard, built around an open grill and a room designed by Tom Dixon.
Common Breads
£Flatbreads and manakish straight out of the oven - a bakery counter rather than a restaurant, and cited by more guides than most restaurants here.
Em Sherif at Harrods
££££The Beirut group's London outpost inside Harrods - a set Lebanese menu served in sequence rather than a mezze free-for-all.
Fairuz
£££A long-running Marylebone Lebanese where the mezze arrives in waves and nobody is rushed out.
Falafel & Shawarma
£Homemade falafel, hummus, chillies and salad in a flatbread, made to order in Camberwell.
Falafel Zaki Zaki
£A Palestinian-run stall doing generously filled wraps for the price of a coffee.
Freej Swaileh
£££One of the very few Kuwaiti kitchens in London - machboos and kabsa rather than the Levantine mezze everywhere else does.
Green Valley
££Part supermarket, part counter, part patisserie - the Edgware Road institution people shop in and eat at in the same trip.
Hiba Express
£Family-run, generous and cheap - the lunch counter people in Holborn actually queue at rather than the one guidebooks send them to.
Honey & Co
£££Sarit Packer and Itamar Srulovich cook the food they write about, in rooms small enough that the kitchen is effectively at your table.
Hoxton Beach Falafel
£A market stall that has been frying falafel to order for years, and is on more London falafel lists than most sit-down restaurants.
Hummus Bar
££Modelled on the hummus places of Tel Aviv, where a bowl of hummus is lunch rather than a side - the toppings list runs from oriental beef to sloppy joe.
Imad's Syrian Kitchen
£££Imad Alarnab cooked his way from Damascus to a Kingly Court balcony - the Syrian home cooking is the draw and the story is not decoration.
Impala
£££Meedu Saad left the top job at Kiln to cook his own history - Egyptian heritage crossed with the Cypriot kebab houses of north London he grew up around.
Ishbilia
£££A Knightsbridge Lebanese that has held its regulars for decades - the mezze list runs long enough that ordering is the hard part.
Kinz
£££A 1930s Lloyds Bank on Notting Hill Gate turned Lebanese brasserie - triple-height ground floor, a deli at the front and the wine room inside the old vault.
Lebo Lebanese Grill
£Cash only, mostly takeaway, and a late-night queue for the chicken that tells you everything about how good it is.
Cash only. The queue builds late rather than at dinner time.
Magic Falafel
£Entirely vegan, fried fresh to order from 100 per cent ground chickpeas - trading in Camden Market since 2013.
Maramia Cafe
££Serving Palestinian and Arabic home cooking in west London since 2005, long before anyone was writing guides to it.
Maroush
££Opened on Edgware Road in 1981 and effectively established the street as London's Lebanese quarter - still the reference point for everything that followed.
Meza
££A tiny Tooting room where the mezze arrives faster than the table can clear it, at prices that explain the permanent queue.
Mr Falafel
£Palestinian falafel from a market stall in Shepherd's Bush, and the one name that appears on every falafel list in London.
Ottolenghi
£££The window display of salads and cakes is the London original - communal tables behind it, and a deli counter that shaped how a generation of home cooks eat.
Palmyra's Kitchen
££Tucked round the back of Finsbury Park station, cooking across Lebanon and Syria - hidden in plain sight next to the bus stands.
Pilpel
£The City lunch falafel - fast, consistent and vegetarian by default across a handful of sites.
Ranoush Juice
£Rough, quick and mostly takeaway - the shawarma queue out of the door late on a weekend is an Edgware Road fixture in its own right.
Rovi
£££The Ottolenghi group's fermentation-and-fire room, where vegetables go on the grill and get the treatment meat usually gets.
Sohaila
£££Lebanese sharing plates against a hundred-plus natural wine list - and it is run by Fat Macy's, a social enterprise that helps Londoners move out of hostels into their own homes.
T by Tamara
££London's only fatteh bar, from Tamara Al Saadi - Palestinian and Jordanian cooking served as brunch, with the cakes doing serious work.
Ta'mini Lebanese Bakery
£All-day manakish and fatayer from a husband-and-wife team, Ali from north Lebanon and Nermin from Beirut - opened in the first lockdown and has been expanding since.
The Barbary
£££A horseshoe counter wrapped around an open grill in Neal's Yard, seating about twenty - you watch every plate being made.
The Palomar
£££The zinc counter, not the tables - sit at it and the cooking happens a foot from your plate, with the room loud enough to make it a night out.
Zeit & Za'atar
££Za'atar manakish and vegetarian Levantine plates in Ealing, a long way from where the guides usually look.