The best regional in London
254 places
101 Thai Kitchen
££A King Street veteran cooking Isaan and Southern in one kitchen, two hundred metres from Khun Pakin.
805
££The oldest name on this page and the one south London Nigerian families have been marking occasions in for a quarter of a century, with further London sites at Hyde Park and Hendon.
A. Wong
££££The only two-Michelin-starred Chinese restaurant in Europe, working through the regional cooking of the whole country across a tasting menu.
Dim sum at lunch is a different and far cheaper proposition than the evening tasting menu - the two services barely resemble each other.
Addie's Thai
££Trading since 1987 and packed for more than three decades - Bangkok street food in a room that never needed to reinvent itself.
ADOH!
££Kolamba's siblings doing Colombo street food instead of home cooking — plastic chairs, murals, painted lorry art and a canteen volume.
Akoko
££££A Michelin-starred tasting menu drawing on the cooking of Nigeria, Ghana and Senegal, with a grill and a clay oven at the centre of it.
Al Boccon di'vino
£££There is no menu. You are brought course after course of whatever is being cooked that night, the way an Italian wedding feeds people, until you stop.
Alexander the Great
££A Greek taverna a few seconds' walk from Andy's, with a private dining room; the mixed meze for a group and the sheftalia are the orders.
Anima e Cuore
£A Camden Town room with a reputation well ahead of its prices and its decor.
Aphrodite Taverna
££Opened by a Cypriot chef and his wife in 1988, with every wall covered in plates, statuettes and gourds; kleftiko, spit-roast souvla, and meze for two or more from £30 a head.
Apollo Banana Leaf
£A few hundred metres down the same high street, and the kitchen calls itself Sri Lankan and South Indian on its own front page — which is honest, and the reason it sits here with a label rather than being quietly filed.
Appalachia
£££The cooking of the Appalachian mountains - cornbread madeleines, poussin with grits - from a chef who came out of Smoking Goat, at a counter wrapped round an open kitchen.
Artusi
££Peckham dining room doing classically based seasonal cooking with hand-made pasta, at prices well below its central equivalents.
Assa
££The budae jjigae - army stew - is the order, and it is among the best in London in a room that spends nothing on looking the part.
Ayllu
£££Jade-green walls with a water-lily motif, cushioned booths and low light, in the canalside office estate behind Paddington station — an unlikely address for a kitchen doing this much with raw fish.
Babur
£££A Brockley dining room that has been quietly outcooking most of central London for over thirty years.
Bánh Bánh
££A family recipe book turned into a Peckham restaurant, run by the grandchildren of the cook it came from.
Bar Shu
£££The restaurant that introduced London to real Sichuan cooking in 2006 - numbing peppercorn, chilli oil and dry-fried beans, at a time when the city thought Chinese food meant Cantonese.
On the corner of Frith Street and Shaftesbury Avenue, on the edge of Chinatown rather than in it. Dishes are marked for heat and the marking is honest.
Benares
££££Named Best Fine Dining Restaurant in London at the Asian Curry Awards, and a Berkeley Square fixture for two decades.
Berenjak
£££A Tehran hole-in-the-wall kabab house rebuilt in Soho - mahi, jujeh and torshi at a counter, from the JKS group.
BiBi
££££Chet Sharma's Mayfair room, cooking regional Indian dishes through a fine-dining lens with a drinks list built to match.
Bintang
££Trading on the same stretch of Kentish Town Road since 1987, which it says makes it the oldest Filipino restaurant in London, and run by the family behind Belly Bistro.
Bocca di Lupo
£££Regional cooking from across the whole of Italy, served trattoria-style in a buzzy Soho room. Counter seats face the kitchen.
Dishes labelled by region; small and large plate sizes of everything.
Brigadiers
£££Built on the Indian army mess-bar idea - big rooms, sport on the screens, whisky, and barbecue over coals. The loudest Indian restaurant in the City, by design.
Brutto
££Deliberately unfussy Florentine cooking; the bistecca is the order.
Cafe Cecilia
££Max Rocha's canalside room in Hackney - short menu, St John lineage, and a guinness cake with its own following.
Café Deco
££A short daily-changing menu on Store Street, out of the Rochelle Canteen and Quality Chop House lineage.
Cafe TPT
£A Wardour Street cha chaan teng - Hong Kong cafe food, late hours, and none of the tourist pricing of the main drag.
Campania & Jones
£££Cooking from the Campania region in a converted dairy near Columbia Road, with pasta made by hand every day.
Close to Columbia Road flower market, so Sunday is a different proposition from the rest of the week.
Canton Blue
££££Inside The Peninsula, themed on a 19th-century trading ship - the most expensive Cantonese room in London and built to look it.
Cavita
££££Time Out's pick for the best Mexican in London - the tacos get the headlines but the point is the dishes nobody else in London cooks.
Cây Tre
££Hiếu Bùi is treated as the godfather of Vietnamese food in London, and the bone marrow phở is the bowl that argument rests on.
Chakana
£££Named for the Andean cross and built on Peru's two flagship crops, corn and potatoes.
Chet's
£££Thai flavours through an American diner - an LA-inspired hotel room where the bar snacks and the drinks are doing as much work as the kitchen.
Chilli Cool
££Two shopfronts on the same street: stir-fries on one side, a separate hot pot room on the other, plus boboji - meat and vegetables on skewers, cooked in mala oil and priced by the stick.
Named by five domains, the most of any independent in the topic, and by every Chinese-language source in the corpus.
Chinese Tapas House
££Northern Chinese cooking served as small plates, which is a rarer format here than the Cantonese banquet.
Chishuru
££££Adejoké Bakare became the first Black female chef in Britain to hold a Michelin star, cooking the food of west Africa on a fixed menu.
Chotto Matte
£££An international group with six sites, and the room that taught central London the word Nikkei.
Chuku's
££Nigerian food served as tapas by a brother-and-sister team - the format is the idea, and it makes an unfamiliar menu easy to order from.
Chung'dam
££££Named for Seoul's Cheongdam-dong and priced accordingly - the three-tiered pyeonbaek steam box of prawns, mussels and brisket is the thing to order.
Circolo Popolare
££Big Mamma group's Fitzrovia room, wall-to-wall bottles and a ceiling of greenery. Booked out well ahead.
Cirilo Filipino Kainan
££A low, single-storey building tucked under the railway arches at the western end of Cable Street — walking in feels like ducking into a cottage.
City Spice
££The Brick Lane curry house that gets named most often when people argue about which of them is still worth eating at.
Colombo Kitchen
££Sylvia Perera grew up in Negombo on the west coast, cooked her way through a catering business and a street stall, and now runs two rooms with a live hopper and kottu bar — the pans and the blades are
Colonel Saab
£££Inside the old Holborn Town Hall, filled with the owner's family collection of Indian antiques. Named Asian Restaurant of the Year for London.
Core by Clare Smyth
££££Three Michelin stars, built on British produce rather than French technique - widely called the most technically accomplished table in the city.
Corrochio's
£££Founder Daniel grew up in Guadalajara and trained in the Yucatan - the cooking is regional, and the cocktail bar runs long after the kitchen stops.
Coya
££££The food is better than the room's reputation suggests when you order Peruvian rather than around it: the signature ceviche platter runs sea bass, corvina, yellowtail and tuna, each cured differently,
Crystal China
££Dry hot pot, which is not hot pot at all in the broth sense - the ingredients are stir-fried in mala oil and arrive already cooked, so there is no simmering and no waiting.
Dammika's
££The chicken lamprais is why people come: rice boiled in stock, then a meat curry, aubergine pickle, caramelised seeni sambol, a fish cutlet and a boiled egg all folded into a banana leaf and baked, wh
Daphne
££A Greek-Cypriot restaurant on three floors run by the Lymbouri family since the 1980s, with photographs of Cypriot villages downstairs; the koubes are bulgur shells stuffed with lamb.
Daphne's
£££A Draycott Avenue fixture since 1964, and still the Chelsea room people book for a long lunch.
Darjeeling Express
£££Asma Khan's kitchen, staffed entirely by women, cooking the food of Calcutta and the royal Mughlai tradition she grew up in.
Dim Sum & Duck
££Dim sum served day and night rather than only until mid-afternoon, which almost nowhere else in London does.
Dinner by Heston Blumenthal
££££CLOSING JANUARY 2027. Two Michelin stars for dishes rebuilt from British recipes as far back as the 14th century - the Meat Fruit, a chicken liver parfait disguised as a mandarin, is the one everybody orders.
CONFIRMED CLOSING in January 2027, when the Knightsbridge lease ends. Anyone planning a 2027 trip should not be sent here without checking first. Overlooks Hyde Park from inside the Mandarin Oriental.
Dishoom
££The Irani cafes of old Bombay recreated in careful detail, and the bacon naan roll that made it a breakfast destination as much as a dinner one.
Any party size can book before 6pm; after 6pm bookings are for groups of six or more only. Most tables are held back for walk-ins either way. Seven London branches; the Branches tab has six named.
Dishoom
££The Irani cafes of old Bombay recreated in careful detail, and the bacon naan roll that made it a breakfast destination as much as a dinner one.
Any party size can book before 6pm; after 6pm bookings are for groups of six or more only. Most tables are held back for walk-ins either way. Seven London branches; the Branches tab has six named.
Dishoom
££The Irani cafes of old Bombay recreated in careful detail, and the bacon naan roll that made it a breakfast destination as much as a dinner one.
Any party size can book before 6pm; after 6pm bookings are for groups of six or more only. Most tables are held back for walk-ins either way. Seven London branches; the Branches tab has six named.
Dishoom
££The Irani cafes of old Bombay recreated in careful detail, and the bacon naan roll that made it a breakfast destination as much as a dinner one.
Any party size can book before 6pm; after 6pm bookings are for groups of six or more only. Most tables are held back for walk-ins either way. Seven London branches; the Branches tab has six named.
Dishoom
££The Irani cafes of old Bombay recreated in careful detail, and the bacon naan roll that made it a breakfast destination as much as a dinner one.
Any party size can book before 6pm; after 6pm bookings are for groups of six or more only. Most tables are held back for walk-ins either way. Seven London branches; the Branches tab has six named.
Dishoom
££The Irani cafes of old Bombay recreated in careful detail, and the bacon naan roll that made it a breakfast destination as much as a dinner one.
Any party size can book before 6pm; after 6pm bookings are for groups of six or more only. Most tables are held back for walk-ins either way. Seven London branches; the Branches tab has six named.
Doma
££Spasia Dinkovski reopened after Mystic Burek closed, and Doma - 'at home' in Macedonian - trades one day a week with a different proposition each Saturday.
Saturdays only, and the format changes week to week - check before travelling.
Donia
£££Filipino sharing plates in Kingly Court with a European wine list behind them - the first Filipino room in London to take a Bib Gourmand.
Dragon Castle
££South London's proper dim sum hall - a full-size Cantonese banqueting room at Elephant and Castle, with trolley-era scale and none of the Chinatown mark-up.
Dim sum is served through the day rather than only at lunch, which is unusual. Large enough to take a group without booking far ahead.
Dragon Inn Club
£££The dearest broths in the corpus: a fish maw and chicken soup base alongside coconut chicken, beef tallow red soup and tomato, served from a dragon's-head pot.
Dream Xi'An
££Xi'an cooking - biang biang noodles, roujiamo, the food of the Silk Road's eastern end.
Eataly
££Three restaurants, a market of Italian ingredients, a cafe, a takeaway counter and a cookery school, all in one building beside Liverpool Street. Terra has a two-metre wood-fired grill.
A venue rather than a single restaurant - the format varies by which counter or dining room you use. Useful as a wet-weather or with-children option in the City.
El Pastor
££Al pastor carved off the trompo, in a railway-arch room that has been the default London taqueria for years.
Empire Empire
£££A love letter to 1970s Bombay dining rooms, from the JKS group - velvet, brass and disco-era styling.
En Root
££The Indian-East African-Caribbean crossover almost nothing in central London cooks, from a food truck that took a room in 2016.
Esarn Kheaw
££London's first Isaan restaurant, open since 1992 and still run by the Puntar family, cooking Ubon dishes nobody else bothers with.
Etles Uyghur Restaurant
££Uyghur cooking from Xinjiang - hand-pulled laghman, cumin lamb skewers, a tradition almost nowhere else in London represents.
Facing Heaven
££Vegan Sichuan built on tofu and mushrooms rather than mock meat, from the chef behind the much-missed Mao Chow.
Fallow
£££Whole-animal and root-to-stem cooking pushed further than anywhere else in London - offcuts, byproducts and discarded species treated as the menu rather than a footnote.
Runs a Sunday roast and a breakfast service as well, which is why it surfaced on both of those passes rather than on a best-British listicle.
Farang
£££A north London room doing modern Thai with none of the timidity that usually comes with a neighbourhood address.
Feng Shang Princess
£££A three-tiered Chinese pagoda, painted red and hung with lanterns, moored on the Regent's Canal at Cumberland Basin - hand-built in the 1980s as the first floating restaurant of its kind in London.
Cantonese and Szechuan cooking; the boat is the reason to book rather than the kitchen, and reviews are mixed on the food. About ten minutes' walk from London Zoo's main entrance. Evenings only Monday to Friday; open from noon at weekends.
Feng Wei Shi Tang
££Copper pot upstairs, and the rest of the northern repertoire downstairs - grilled fish, rou jia mo, lamb spine. Clear water in a tall copper pot, and a mellow sesame dipping sauce.
Filishack, Peckham
£Brothers Jonathan and Justice Cacho have built three sites in four years on one dish: chicken inasal, marinated in lemongrass, ginger, vinegar and calamansi, then charred.
Flavour Hubb
££Southern Thai cooked inside a badminton club, from a chef with Surat Thani roots, on a menu named after the forest on the Thai-Malaysian border.
Four Seasons
££Roast duck hanging in the window and a queue outside for it - the most-cited Chinese restaurant in London across every guide read.
Freej Swaileh
£££One of the very few Kuwaiti kitchens in London - machboos and kabsa rather than the Levantine mezze everywhere else does.
Gloria
££Big Mamma group's deliberately over-the-top trattoria, with a menu that changes every month.
Gold Mine
££Roast duck hanging in the window and carved to order - the Queensway institution people cross London for, and cheaper than Chinatown for the same thing.
Queues at peak times and no bookings for small tables. Duck sells out; go early evening rather than late.
Golden Phoenix
££A Chinatown Cantonese room that both Time Out and The Hotel Journal single out from a very crowded street.
Gopal's Corner
£Roti canai clapped and folded to order, served with mutton, chicken or dhal curry - from the founder of Soho's Roti King.
Govinda's
£A temple-run canteen serving rotating thalis in the middle of Soho since 1979, for less than anything else in W1 charges for a hot meal.
Gujarati Rasoi
£Mother-and-son Gujarati cooking from family recipes - thalis, bhajia and dhal - at a market where almost everything else is European.
Gymkhana
££££Modelled on the colonial-era gymkhana clubs of India, and the highest-decorated Indian kitchen in the city.
Hainan House
££Hainanese chicken rice cooked properly - poached chicken, rice cooked in the stock, three sauces - which almost nothing else in London attempts as its main event.
Hakkasan
££££The basement room on Hanway Place that made high-end Chinese food fashionable in London, and set the template every glossy Chinese dining room since has borrowed from.
Han Restaurant
££The beef tallow arrives as a moulded bear that melts into the broth, and there is a Hainanese coconut chicken pot for anyone who wants sweetness rather than heat. Crab pot, barbecue and Dongbei dishes alongside.
Harrods Dining Hall
£££A live-music dining hall inside Harrods itself - the department-store equivalent of a food hall, and priced accordingly rather than as a casual street-food stop.
Considerably more expensive than the other halls on this list - it is Harrods. Book ahead; walk-ins are not reliable.
Hide
££££Three floors above Green Park with the Hedonism wine cellar underneath - the list runs to thousands of bins.
Hoa Sen
££The roast duck served in lettuce leaves with mango is the dish to order and the reason to cross Covent Garden for it.
Hoppers
£££Hoppers, kothu and sambols from the JKS group - Sri Lankan and Tamil cooking that London had been filing under Indian for years.
Horn OK Please
£Samosa chaat built to order - the samosas crushed under chickpea curry, yoghurt and tamarind while still hot - from an all-vegetarian Borough Market stall.
Hunan
££££No menu at all - you say what you dislike and dishes keep arriving until you stop them. Hunanese cooking, changing daily.
There is no a la carte. The kitchen decides, which is the whole proposition - say in advance if you have restrictions.
Hyderabadi Spice
££Hyderabadi biryani done as its own tradition rather than as a side dish on a north Indian menu.
Il Gattopardo
£££Massimo Pasquarelli - Abruzzo-born, a decade under Alain Ducasse, previously executive chef at the Ritz-Carlton Singapore - cooking classic Italian on Albemarle Street.
Sharing is encouraged and portions are generous. Three ways to sit: the main room, the light-filled terrace, or the crudo bar. The £20 Pasta & Vino counter offer makes a Mayfair Michelin-listed kitchen unusually reachable.
Imone
££A small family-run room on New Malden high street, strong on seafood and with halal chicken options that most Korean kitchens do not offer.
Imperial Treasure
££££The London arm of the Singapore group, doing Cantonese cooking at a level and price that assumes you know what you are ordering.
Indian Veg
£An all-you-can-eat North Indian vegetarian buffet that has fed Islington on a shoestring for decades, in a room papered with hand-made posters about vegetarianism.
Itadaki Zen
££A thirty-seat organic vegan Japanese room, shojin-influenced rather than a Western vegan menu with Japanese dishes bolted on.
Ixchel
£££A Chelsea room that leans as hard on mezcal and the bar as on the kitchen.
Jaffna House
£The Jaffna special chicken curry is the order — boneless chicken in a sharp, tomato-heavy northern sauce — with an egg hopper and katta sambol, a fierce dried-chilli and Maldive-fish relish that is not a chutney and is not sweet.
Jam Delish
££Plant-based Caribbean from siblings cooking their grandparents' recipes, and a 2025 award won against Caribbean kitchens generally rather than vegan ones.
Jamavar
££££Named for the handwoven Kashmiri shawl, cooking across the whole subcontinent rather than one region of it.
Jikoni
£££Ravinder Bhogal cooks across her Kenyan, Indian and British background without picking one - Ottolenghi called it the restaurant he wished he had opened.
Jin-Da Thai
££Northern Thai cooking on a Hammersmith side street, and the room Thai Londoners send people to rather than the ones in Soho.
Jollibee, Earl's Court
£The Philippines' own fast-food chain, and more of a cultural fixture than a restaurant — the Earl's Court branch was the first it opened in Britain.
Joy King Lau
££Four floors off Leicester Square doing trolley-era dim sum the old way, largely unchanged while the street around it turned over.
Kai Mayfair
££££Held a Michelin star for the best part of two decades on South Audley Street, cooking Chinese food for Mayfair rather than adapting Mayfair to it.
Kamayan sa Earl's Court
££Next door to Lutong Pinoy and a separate business, doing the same feast at a lower price: the daily boodle fight is £15.99 a head for a minimum of four, and it comes with your choice of starters, four mains, jasmine rice, salad and soup.
Kanishka
£££Atul Kochhar cooking the north-eastern states - Assam, Nagaland, Sikkim - which almost nowhere else in London attempts.
Kapihan
£A family-run Filipino coffee house and bakery, and the only place on this page pouring single-origin coffee grown in the Philippines.
Karapincha
£Twin sisters Vasanthini and Dharshini Perumal, from Kandy, started as market traders and now run three counters: Unit 14 inside Canary Wharf station, Old Spitalfields Market and Mercato Metropolitano at Elephant & Castle.
Kasa and Kin
££Named by eight of the sources, one behind Donia, and the one place on this page that is a restaurant, a bar and a Filipino bakery at once.
Kateh
££A Michelin Bib Gourmand Persian kitchen in a small townhouse off Warwick Avenue, hung with Persian art and run more like a home than a restaurant.
Khao So-i
£££Named for the northern Thai coconut curry noodle it is built around - the newest room on these lists and already on all of them.
Khun Pakin Thai
££The best of London's Thai-in-a-pub genre, and genuinely raw and fermented Isaan rather than a toned-down version.
Khun Pakin Thai
££Thai food out of a pub kitchen, which in London usually means a bad green curry - here it means fierce Isaan cooking.
Kiln
£££Everything comes off wood and charcoal along a single counter - sit at the bar and the short rib curry is cooked in front of you.
Counter seats are walk-in only and the wait is real. Tables can be booked.
Kolae
£££Southern Thai grilling from the Kiln team - a different regional tradition again, built around charcoal and coconut.
Kolamba
££---
Kolkati
£Kati rolls the Kolkata way - paratha cooked with egg through it, wrapped round spiced chicken or paneer with pickled onion and lime.
Kothu, Tooting
£Started at food markets in the Midlands and now three London rooms — 114 Tooting High Street, plus Harrow and Croydon — with booths at the back and a bar.
Kricket
££Started in a Brixton shipping container and grew into several sites, doing Indian cooking as small plates rather than curries.
Kruk
££Refuses to pick a region - khao soi from the north, moo hong from the south, som tam from Isaan - and took a Bib Gourmand within months of opening.
Kung Fu Noodle
£Noodles pulled to order in the window - the cheapest proper cooked meal in Chinatown.
Kutir
£££A Chelsea townhouse done as an Indian hunting lodge, with a menu built around game and the outdoors.
Kuya Fernando
££A restaurant and a Filipino grocery in the same premises, which is how a lot of this food arrived in London in the first place.
Lahori Nihaari
£Built around nihari, the slow-cooked breakfast stew - a single-dish kitchen in a city with very few of them.
Legado
££££Nieves Barragán Mohacho's second restaurant after Sabor, cooking regional Spanish food rarely seen this side of the Pyrenees - and it took a Michelin star within two years.
Leong's Legend
££A Taiwanese snack house hung with Water Margin murals, where the all-you-can-eat hot pot runs around GBP 25 a head - among the cheapest sit-down pots in Chinatown.
Lima
£££Order the stone bass ceviche — the fish cured in leche de tigre, the cloudy lime-and-chilli marinade that has no milk in it despite the name — and the Ikejime trout sashimi with strawberry ponzu.
Little Sichuan
££A Finchley Road parade Sichuanese that regulars from Sichuan vouch for - the mala base is the one to order, and the stir-fry menu runs alongside it.
Llama Inn
£££The London branch of a Brooklyn restaurant that opened in 2015, reached through a yellow door on a back street and a service lift to the roof of The Hoxton.
Locatelli at The National Gallery
£££Giorgio and Plaxy Locatelli's return after Locanda Locatelli closed, on the mezzanine of the Sainsbury Wing. Handmade pasta is the reason to go - the cappellacci stuffed with peas in particular.
80 seats. Runs on gallery hours, so dinner is early: 11:30-19:30 Sun-Thu, to 22:15 Fri, to 20:15 Sat. Bar Giorgio on the ground floor does espresso and maritozzi for a shorter stop.
Lutong Pinoy
££Founded in 1996 by Mario Malata — lutong pinoy means home cooking — and the place the community's own filmmakers keep going back to: three of its five citations are videos rather than published lists,
M Manze
£The oldest surviving pie and mash shop in London, open on Tower Bridge Road since 1902, with the original tiling and marble counters.
Daytime only and closed Sundays, like most pie and mash shops. Liquor is a parsley sauce, not alcohol - worth knowing before ordering.
Macellaio RC
£££A butcher's counter that became a restaurant - Piedmontese Fassona beef hung in the window and cut to order.
Madhu's
££Punjabi cooking by way of Kenya - the East African Asian tradition that Southall does better than anywhere else in Britain.
Mambow
£££Abby Lee named it for her mother's bowls and cooks Malaysian food through an open kitchen, against low-intervention wine.
Mandarin Kitchen
£££The lobster noodles are the reason - a whole lobster over ginger and spring onion noodles, and the dish most London Chinese restaurants are measured against.
Big round tables and lazy susans; built for groups rather than couples. Long-running and deliberately unmodernised.
Mangal 2
£££The Dirik brothers took over their father's Dalston ocakbaşı and turned it into one of the most inventive kitchens in London without moving the grill.
Marie's Café
£A Formica caff that takes the English menu off the wall in the evening and becomes a BYO Thai restaurant with £1 corkage.
Masala Zone
££Thalis and street-food plates at prices well below the Mayfair rooms, from the group behind Amaya and Chutney Mary.
Master Wei
££Hand-pulled biang biang noodles and Xi'an street food near Russell Square, from the team behind Xi'an Impression.
Mestizo
£££A long-running mezcaleria and dining room - the tequila and mezcal list is the reason to sit at the bar rather than a table.
Mexican Seoul
££Ashley Chipchase went from a Brick Lane street stall to a canalside room near Victoria Park in 2023, and the Korean-Mexican pairing turned out to be more than a gimmick.
Miga
£££A family-run kitchen that moved from New Malden to Hackney in 2024 and was named Time Out's best restaurant in London - the yughwe beef tartare with crisp Asian pear is the dish everyone writes about.
Mildreds
££Open on Lexington Street since 1988, which makes it the restaurant that made vegetarian food in London normal rather than worthy. Globally drawn menu, and it went fully vegan without losing the crowd.
Sites in Soho, Camden, Covent Garden, King's Cross and Victoria. Soho is the original and the one worth going out of your way for. It does not take bookings at every site - check before travelling.
Min Jiang
££££Wood-fired Peking duck carved tableside on the tenth floor, looking over Kensington Gardens - the only Chinese room in London with that view.
Monmouth Kitchen
£££A hotel dining room two minutes from Covent Garden station that runs Peruvian and Italian small plates side by side rather than blending them, with DJs at weekends and a terrace that is the best table in the place.
Mukbap
££Entirely vegan Korean cooking - a category that barely exists in London - served with the warmth of a family kitchen.
Murano
££££Angela Hartnett's Mayfair dining room, starred within four months of opening in 2008.
Named after the Venetian glass-making island. Northern Italian cooking in a formal Mayfair room.
Murger Han
£London's first dedicated Xi'an specialist, built around the murger and biang biang noodles wide enough to need folding.
Murger Han
££Named after the murger - slow-cooked meat packed into a flatbread bun - and one of the cheapest serious lunches in the City if you know to order it.
Namaaste Highgate
££Named Asian Restaurant of the Year for London at the 2025 Asian Curry Awards - a neighbourhood restaurant that beat the Mayfair field.
Namak Mandi
££Peshawari cooking rather than Punjabi - namkeen karahi seasoned with salt and little else, which is a different tradition from everything else on this list.
Naru
££A Shaftesbury Avenue standby whose dak twigim - crisp fried chicken bites with a choice of sauces - is the order.
Nipa Thai
£££One of the first Thai restaurants in London to charge what the French and Italian rooms charged - plush, polished, and still doing it.
Nissi
££A narrow sit-down room, rare in Palmers Green, with the grill visible from the middle tables; Georgina Hayden takes her yiayia here for the fish meze.
Noble Rot
£££Started as a wine magazine and became a restaurant - the list is the point and the kitchen is built to serve it.
Noci
££A short, frequently changing pasta menu drawn from across the Italian regions, at prices well below the central equivalents.
Norma
£££Sicilian cooking with the Moorish influence kept in, across four floors of a Fitzrovia townhouse.
Normah's
££A Malaysian kitchen tucked inside a Queensway market building, cooking nasi lemak and rendang for people who grew up on them.
Orient London
£££The smart end of Chinatown - several floors on Wardour Street where the room is doing as much work as the trolley.
Original Lahore Kebab House
££Trading since 1972 on lamb chops, dry lamb curry and chicken karahi, in a room that has never pretended to be anything but a canteen.
BYOB. Open late, which is half the reason it is busy.
Oudh 1722
££££Two-Michelin-star chef Aktar Islam cooking the Awadhi food of Lucknow - biryanis and kebabs - across three floors of a Victorian townhouse near London Bridge.
Pahli Hill Bandra Bhai
£££Named for the Bandra hill district of Bombay, with a basement bar that runs later than the dining room above it.
Panadera
£Five stars from Time Out in October 2025, and named by seven of the sources here — more than any Filipino restaurant except Donia and Kasa and Kin.
Paolina Thai Cuisine
£Dishes from £5.95, bring your own bottle, and no regional pretensions - central Thai canteen classics done cheaply and properly.
Paradise Cove
££Jerk cooked over pimento wood in northwest London, on a stretch that has been the centre of Caribbean London for decades.
Park Chinois
££££A 1930s Shanghai supper club recreated on Berkeley Street, with live music downstairs and cabaret rather than a quiet dinner.
Patara Thai Wimbledon
£££Curries worth the trip and a terrace that makes it a summer booking rather than a winter one.
Pearl Liang
£££An unexpectedly large basement dining room behind Paddington station, routinely rated above the Chinatown equivalents by people who eat a lot of Cantonese food.
Five set menus, built for a table that wants to share rather than order individually.
Pitanga
££Opened on 31 May 2018 by Nky Iweka, who bills herself Executive Mamaput after the roadside cooks of Lagos, and it is the westernmost entry in this guide — everything else is central, south or north-east.
Plaza Khao Gaeng
££The most doctrinaire Southern Thai kitchen in London, run as a raan khao gaeng where you pick from what is already cooked.
Plum Valley
£££A family-run Gerrard Street room in a black-fronted building, doing award-winning dim sum in a smarter setting than most of Chinatown.
Punjab
££Open since 1946 and claimed as the oldest North Indian restaurant in Britain, still run by the same family.
Queen of Sheba
££A long-running Kentish Town Ethiopian with a vegetarian platter that converts people who came for the meat.
Quo Vadis
£££Karl Marx lived in the building. The dining room below has been feeding Soho since 1926.
Rabieng Thai
££A long-standing Upper Street room near the Almeida, with generous portions and a BYOB policy that makes it cheaper again.
BYOB - worth knowing before you order drinks.
Rambutan
££Cynthia Shanmugalingam was born in Coventry to Sri Lankan Tamil parents and the menu comes from Jaffna in the north by way of her mother's kitchen, cooked over an aduppu — an open wood fire — behind the counter.
Rapsa
££Chef Francis Puyat comes from a coastal town in Occidental Mindoro and builds the menu around kinilaw, the Philippine technique of firming raw fish in vinegar or citrus instead of heat — here applied
Rasa
£An all-vegetarian Keralan kitchen behind a shocking pink shopfront, cooking with coconut and curry leaf rather than cream.
Rasa Sayang
££Hainanese chicken rice and char kway teow in Chinatown, at the volume and price of a hawker centre.
Real Beijing
££A charcoal-fired copper pot with a chimney up the middle, a preserved cabbage broth and paper-thin lamb that cooks in seconds - instant-boiled lamb, the northern format, eaten with sesame sauce rather than chilli oil.
The clearest example in Chinatown of a tradition that has nothing to do with Sichuan.
Retsina
££A family-run Greek restaurant open for more than 30 years, more formal than most, with heavy tablecloths, meze feasts and a kleftiko Eater London called arguably the best in the city.
River Café
££££Michelin-starred simplicity on the Thames, where Jamie Oliver and Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall both trained. The terrace tables are the ones everyone wants.
Informal in atmosphere, upmarket in cooking; the riverside seats book furthest ahead.
Rochelle Canteen
££Hidden behind a wall in a former school bike shed, with no sign - you ring a buzzer marked 'canteen'.
Royal China
£££A black-and-gold banquet hall on Baker Street where weekend dim sum runs at the volume of an airport terminal, and the queue is part of it.
No bookings at weekend lunch - the busiest dim sum service in London and it moves fast.
Sabor Peruano
££Three sources name it and none of them calls it fashionable, which is the point.
Sagar
£Udupi cooking from coastal Karnataka, and a masala dosa the length of your forearm - one of the cheapest proper sit-down meals in the West End.
Sagye
£££Korean cooking on the Isle of Dogs rather than in the Wharf itself - kimchi jjigae portioned out between bowls for a big table, a mile south of the office towers and all the better for it.
Sale e Pepe
£££Serving the same classic Italian menu off Sloane Street since 1974 - the kind of room that stopped being built decades ago.
Salloos
£££A long-running family-run Knightsbridge room doing Pakistani cooking with tablecloths - almost the only one of its kind in London.
Santo Remedio
£££Edson and Natalie Diaz-Fuentes cook the dishes most London Mexicans skip - mole negro, soft shell crab tacos, and guacamole topped with grasshopper.
Señor Ceviche
££Grew out of Don Ceviche, a pop-up run by chef Harry Edmeades, and now occupies a bright first-floor corner of Kingly Court with an open kitchen and a ceviche counter you can watch.
Seoul Matjib
££Tteokbokki with exactly the right chew, served without ceremony - the New Malden room people go to when they want feeding rather than impressing.
Sette
££££Knightsbridge Italian at the top of the market, and one of very few genuinely ££££ Italians left in London.
Shan Shui Jian
££Yang xie zi - lamb spine stewed to falling apart, eaten with your hands, and the pot then topped up and used to cook everything else. Grilled fish and chicken stewed with mushrooms alongside.
A branch of a well-known Chinese lamb-spine chain; the owner stews the spines to his own recipe. Not to be confused with Shan Shui Social, a separate modern Chinese restaurant.
Shan Shui Social
£££Cantonese and Sichuan cooking in a room styled on 1920s Shanghai, a minute from Victoria station - from Ellen Chew's Chew on This group.
Shanghai Me
££££Lacquered wood and 1930s glamour twenty-eight floors above Park Lane, looking down the length of Hyde Park.
Shankeys
££Named by both The Infatuation and Time Out, which is a narrow overlap to land in.
Sheba
££A long-standing Brick Lane room, picked out on a TOPJAW run through the street.
Shu La La
££A dry spicy hot pot in scarlet oil, heavy on Sichuan peppercorn - the numbing end of the format rather than the soupy end.
Sikatiô
££The dish is the soupe du pêcheur, a fisherman's soup of gently poached fish, crab and prawn served in an Asanka earthenware grinder, and after that the croaker, deep-fried in what Vittles calls a chainmail of crispy skin.
Silk Road
£Xinjiang cooking where only three items on the whole menu cost more than £8 - cumin, chilli and hand-cut noodles rather than anything Cantonese.
Simpson's in the Strand
££££Roasts carved from silver trolleys at the table, in a dining room that has been doing exactly that since the 1820s.
Singburi
££The Leytonstone cult restaurant reborn in a Shoreditch railway arch under the founders' son, and the Thai restaurant Londoners argue about most.
Smoking Goat
£££Thai drinking food and live-fire cooking in a room that behaves like a bar - the sibling to Kiln and just as loud.
Som Saa
£££Where modern regional Thai cooking in London really starts - founders trained under David Thompson at Nahm, and half the chefs in this guide trace back here.
Sông Quê Café
£The Kingsland Road institution that made the street synonymous with phở - strip lighting, fast turnover, enormous menu.
Sorabol
£££Twenty years on New Malden high street, where the owner will still tell you the right ratio of lettuce, garlic, leek and kimchi to build a wrap.
Speedboat Bar
£££Built to feel like a late-night Bangkok Chinatown canteen, with pool tables, and curries good enough that it was ranked the fourth best restaurant in London.
St John
£££Fergus Henderson's whole-animal cooking, open since 1994 and still the argument that longevity is a restaurant's best credential.
Supawan
££Understated, consistently good and near King's Cross - the Thai restaurant people return to rather than tick off.
Super Three
££All-you-can-eat Sichuan hot pot on a spicy butter base with a Korean charcoal grill on the same table, so a group that cannot agree does not have to.
One of two long-standing hot pot restaurants a few doors apart on East India Dock Road; Han Restaurant is the other.
Tamarind
££££The first Indian restaurant in the world to win a Michelin star, and still a Mayfair basement doing tandoor cooking at that level.
Tamila
££Tamil home cooking in Clapham, picked up by both the Good Food Guide and Time Out.
Tao Tao Ju
£££Towering bamboo baskets of steamed and grilled dim sum, made fresh on site each day - the refined end of Lisle Street.
Tayyabs
££The sizzling lamb chops arrive still spitting and are the reason the queue forms - a Whitechapel institution since the 1970s that has never needed to change.
BYOB, no bookings for small groups at peak, and loud. The queue is the system.
The Begging Bowl
£££Jane Alty trained under David Thompson and cooks northern Thai in Peckham - small plates meant to be ordered across the table.
The Bombay Restaurant
££Named by three independent sources including Currylife, which covers the curry-house trade rather than the restaurant press.
The Cinnamon Club
££££Inside the Grade II listed old Westminster Library, bookshelves still in place - the most unusual dining room of any Indian restaurant in London.
The Duck and Rice
£££Alan Yau put a Chinese kitchen inside a Berwick Street pub - copper tanks downstairs, dining room above. The format has no real equivalent.
The Eagle
££The pub that invented the gastropub in 1991 - an open kitchen behind the bar and a menu chalked up daily, which every pub in Britain then copied.
The Eight
££A cha chaan teng - the Hong Kong cafe format, where condensed-milk toast and macaroni soup sit on the same menu as rice plates.
The Flygerians
£The 2 Fly Chicks Plate is the order — two pieces of chicken in Mama's Forbidden Sauce, a sweet smoky red marinade, with jollof and plantain, £17.50.
The Gate
£££Opened in 1989 in a former artists' studio and still the most serious vegetarian cooking in west London - Indo-Iraqi-Jewish influences from the founding brothers rather than a generic meat-free menu.
Hammersmith is the flagship, in a high-ceilinged studio space. Also in Islington (370 St John Street) and Marylebone. Long-standing enough that it predates almost everything else on this list.
The Ledbury
££££Brett Graham reopened in 2022 with a tighter focus on British sourcing, and took a third Michelin star.
The Marksman
££Downstairs is a proper pub; upstairs is the dining room that won Michelin's Pub of the Year.
The Pelican
££Named London's best pub by the Good Food Guide and seventh in the UK - the highest-ranked London entry on that list.
The Tamil Crown
££The second pub from the Tamil Prince team, doing the same Tamil-kitchen-in-a-Victorian-boozer format that London does better than anywhere.
Sibling to The Tamil Prince, also in Islington - two separate pubs, not two names for one.
The Tamil Prince
££A Victorian pub with a Tamil kitchen behind it - the format London does better than anywhere.
Theo Randall at the InterContinental
£££Theo Randall spent fifteen years running the kitchen at The River Cafe before opening this Park Lane dining room.
Hotel dining room, so it keeps longer and more reliable hours than most of the independents on this list.
Tian Fu
££Buffet or a la carte, with the offal end of the menu taken seriously - intestine, tripe, blood tofu - and a Sichuan stir-fry list that regulars rate as highly as the pot.
Tiella
££A trattoria run with the sensibility of a pub - strangers talk to each other, and the polpette recipe is a family one.
Tierra Peru
££A Camden market stall that became a restaurant, run by two brothers with portraits from home on the walls and the national team on the television above the bar.
Tofu Vegan
££Chinese cooking done entirely without meat, and the strongest name on every vegan list in London - three of the four independent guides we read put it top. Aubergine in garlic sauce and the mock-meat dishes are what the queues are for.
Books out well ahead on Upper Street; there are further sites including Spitalfields and Marylebone. Not a substitution menu - most dishes are traditionally vegetable-based Chinese cooking rather than meat imitations.
Trishna
£££Michelin-starred cooking from India's south-west coast, and the most-cited Indian restaurant in London across every guide we read.
Turo Turo
££The cooking is charcoal-led — thrice-cooked pig's head hash, ginger wings glazed with fermented shrimp, mushroom and tofu skewers — and there is a boodle fight on the menu plus a standalone kamayan supper club.
Unity Diner
££Traditional British cooking done entirely without animal products - the place the vegan community names when asked for British food rather than international.
Non-profit; surplus goes to animal welfare work. The only fully vegan British kitchen on this list.
Vatavaran
£££Cooking from the Himalayan foothills - a region almost nowhere else in London represents.
Veeraswamy
££££Open since 1926 and the oldest surviving Indian restaurant in Britain, above Regent Street, with a Michelin star to go with the history.
Water House Restaurant
££Buffet hot pot with broths most places do not offer - old duck, old chicken and mutton alongside the usual mala and clear - plus chuanchuan skewers and a Hunanese menu.
Wong Kei
£A Wardour Street institution over several floors, famous for decades for brusque service and prices nothing central can match.
Cash was the rule for years and the service style is part of the legend. Fast, loud, and not a place to linger.
Xi'an Impression
££A small room opposite the Emirates doing the chewy, chilli-oil-heavy cooking of Shaanxi - the liangpi cold noodles are the reason people cross London for it.
No bookings, and the room is tiny - go off-peak or expect to wait.
Yauatcha
£££All-day dim sum with a patisserie counter downstairs, from the Hakkasan founder - it held a star for fourteen years and still cooks like it.
Yi-Ban
££Dim sum over the water at the Royal Docks, trading since 2003 and almost entirely unknown to central London.
Zapote
£££Part of the east London Mexican wave that has moved the centre of gravity away from the west end entirely.
Zeret Kitchen
££A family-run Camberwell room where everything arrives on one injera for the table to tear at - communal eating with no way to opt out of it.