Open for: Lunch through late night
Price range: $
As Jonathan Nunn wrote in his guide to north London’s best-value restaurants, “Durak, a tantuni salonu run by Dogan Yesil on West Green Road, is the superior late night snack template.” Only the tantuni, a speciality which originates in the city of Mersin on the southern coast of Turkey, is served here. Beef is boiled, seasoned with the likes of tomato, pul biber, sumac, and cumin and subsequently fried in cotton oil before being loaded, meat juices aplenty, inside a thin lavash with chopped parsley, tomato, and onion. It is then given a pleasing bend before being eaten; a selection of high-acid accompaniments — pickled chiles, lemon — provide the necessary cut-through.
Best for: A snack on the way home after a long day.

Open for: Lunch and dinner
Price range: $
Mukaddes Yadikar’s restaurant near Walthamstow Central station opened in London in summer 2017. It was London’s first strictly Uyghur restaurant, and has become perhaps E17’s finest neighborhood restaurant. To start, go for the Chaomian, a stir-fry of short noodle snippets wokked with chunks of beef, spring onion, and tomato. Third, and most importantly, get the signature da pan ji (“big plate chicken”): a remarkably deep, savoury, and spicy chicken and potato stew, teeming with Sichuan peppercorns, served with flat hand-pulled noodles. This is a warm, homely, and treasured space to eat in east London.
Best for: Casual dinner with a group.

Open for: Breakfast and lunch
Price range: $
This small Stoke Newington cafe seriously overdelivers, preparing some of London’s best American diner-style smash burgers, Nashville hots, playful samosas, and the inimitable chicken makhani sandwich come the weekend, with a solid core menu for weekday visitors. Its sweet offering isn’t half bad either; cookies are particularly excellent, as is the seasonal ice cream from Crabtree and co-founder Feroz Gajia in warmer months.
Must-try dish: Do not miss the ingenious creme brulee cookie, developed by pastry chef Chloe-Rose Crabtree from a recipe by Los Angeles’s Dough and Arrow. And the makhani chicken bun at weekends.

Open for: Breakfast and lunch
Price range: $
Bad Manners — a breakfast and lunch kiosk, originally called Quarter Kitchen, which Max Fishman opened with chef Rodrigo Cervantes in a Hackney churchyard in summer 2022 — serves some of London’s best Mexican food. Originally from Mexico City and previously an employee of Smoking Goat, Koya, and Rita’s in London, Cervantes cooks a mighty fine breakfast. Options include two tortillas with hash browns, fried eggs, and smoked bacon glazed with maple syrup and sugar; breakfast burritos based on the American McDonald’s version (with sausage patties, American cheese, and chopped peppers); gorditas; tepache; tacos al pastor done on a small yakitori grill inside the kiosk; and the mess-making bright-red pambazo. Bad Manners also serves excellent coffee and features a range of espressos from some of Europe’s best roasters.
Best for: Mexican and Mexican-American breakfast outdoors.

Open for: Weekday lunch
Price range: $
This diminutive Vietnamese shop on Hackney’s Graham Road serves one of the city’s best sandwiches — inside one of the city’s best baguettes. Although the spot has just one table and three or four seats, it’s difficult to think of warmer hospitality than at Bánh Mì Hội-An. The duo behind the counter prepare fresh sandwiches to go, and while the pork classic is excellent, don’t sleep on the turmeric-heavy fried catfish on Mondays, Tuesdays, and Wednesdays; fragrant with coriander, mayo, fermented chile paste, sriracha, and pickled vegetables, it is an object lesson in flavor, texture, and balance.
Best for: Takeaway lunch.

Open for: Dinner
Price range: $$
Ex-Noma sommelier Yukiyasu Kaneko’s wine bar, set in a cozy space beneath a railway arch close to London Fields, may yet become the new template for natural wine bars, a category that has grown a little tired and derivative. Few other businesses can rival Yuki’s assured sense of self and pleasing ambience. An extensive (and fairly priced) list includes highlights from the Jura, Savoie, and Loire regions, as well as bottles from elsewhere in the Old World. Food is secondary but not an afterthought, with snacky dishes such as eggs with tahini, house-made potato crisps dressed with sansho pepper, cured beet tops, silken tofu with mushrooms, and made-to-order beef tartare.
Must-try dish: Ask Yuki for his best wines from the Jura or the Savoie.

Open for: Lunch and dinner
Price range: $$
East Ham is home to London’s largest Kerala community and its greatest concentration of South Indian restaurants. The pick of them is Thattukada, run by chef-owners Biju and Preeti Gopinath. Curries and roasts have a depth of flavor and spicing that belie their simple descriptions, and they should be mopped up with crisp parottas or snow-white appams. But it’s the legendary fries that are unmissable: half a chicken cut into segments, then aggressively and skillfully fried with chiles and crispy onions; little netholi (anchovies) cooked and eaten whole; or battered mussels that pop thrillingly in the mouth.
Must-try dish: Get the mussel fry.

Open for: Dinner
Price range: $$$
This elegantly designed wine club beneath a Haggerston railway arch now firmly belongs in the top bracket of (French) restaurants in London. Chef Seb Myers and his modern-ish, playful take on French country cooking fits perfectly with the fascinating and broad wine list owned by patron Jonathan Alphandery. With dishes such as a red mullet tartine; grilled leeks vinaigrette with Tunworth cheese; a duck offal choux farcis; and mackerel with coco beans and greens; as well as a caramel tart with blue cheese, Planque has nearly everything that makes a great modern European restaurant great.
Best for: Pairing some of London’s cleverest cooking with some of the best wine in the city.

Open for: Lunch and dinner
Price range: $
The area around Euston station is replete with no-frills, delicious places to eat. This little Malaysian basement setup from chef Sugen Gopal on Doric Way may be the best. Two pieces of freshly made, high-moisture roti canai — to eat in or take away — are best served with curry dal. Roti King has a few other locations throughout London as well.
Know before you go: The new online queueing system makes for a seamless experience.

Open for: Lunch and dinner
Price range: $$$
Chef Ed Wilson’s hearty French Italian menu is a showcase for his own personal love of food. To eat here is to share that passion, especially now with an increased emphasis on fresh pasta and spectacular comfort food. Wines are predominantly natural and biodynamic. Illustrated wine posters, art, and curios on whitewashed brick walls also make the two relaxed dining rooms on Columbia Road among London’s most handsome and cool. 
Vibe check: This place has the city’s smallest and most beautiful bathrooms — among the very first to use Aesop, too.

Open for: Breakfast to dinner
Price range: $$
At the late chef Kate Armah’s outstanding neighborhood Ghanaian restaurant in east London, the sharing platter — which includes tsofi, chicken wings, kebabs, plantains, and more — might be the definition of generosity in hospitality. Other highlights here include akonfem (guinea fowl), red red (fried plantain with black eye bean stew and gari foto), and any of the soups, which come served with choice of starchy sides such as fufu, kenkey, kokonte, or rice. 
Vibe check: As the venue of choice for many visiting musicians and performers, Kate’s might be London’s least-appreciated celebrity restaurant.

Open for: Lunch and dinner
Price range: $$
Since March 2023, the always inventive Ben Chapman and his brilliant development chef Kim SongSoo have repositioned the laid-back Shoreditch Thai restaurant and bar Smoking Goat as a “chicken shop” — serving (very good) fried chicken, fish sauce wings, and snacks fashioned from crisped seasoned chicken skin. But Kim has also conceived a number of new dishes with a fresh focus on wok-cookery that make a visit essential; the moreish, textural phenomenon can work on its own or as the centerpiece around which other dishes can be enjoyed, such as the sweet, umami-rich pork with Chinese olives.
Must-try dish: Fried noodles with egg, chile, and green onion. Get the relishes, too.

Open for: Dinner
Price range: $$$
Clerkenwell’s Sushi Tetsu might be the hardest reservation in London. It also pound-for-pound serves the best (value) sushi in the city. To observe Toru Takahashi’s knife skills and to eat his omakase menu while receiving Harumi Takahashi’s gently flawless hospitality (the two are married) is to experience one of London’s most complete and completely brilliant restaurants.
Know before you go: There are only seven seats in the restaurant, all at the sushi counter.

Open for: Lunch and dinner
Price range: $
Chef Wei Guirong is a star of London dining: Her first (joint) venture, Xi’an Impression opposite the Emirates stadium in Highbury, has long held cult status among food lovers in London. But increasingly, Master Wei, Guirong’s solo project in Bloomsbury (and now Hammersmith), is outshining its forebear. Enjoy peerless biang biang noodles with vegetables or beef; fine liang pi, cold skin noodles with a cool, refreshing, umami-rich dressing; and the chef’s Xi’an-style “burgers” with a filling comprising cumin-spiced beef or pork.
Know before you go: The Bloomsbury location is bigger, so it’s easier to get a table.

Open for: Lunch and dinner
Price range: $$
While the original St. John is rightly regarded as the most important British restaurant in a generation, Bread and Wine, the sibling site in Spitalfields, is a better and more interesting restaurant today. If food were a religion, then this would be its church. Welsh rarebit, bone marrow and parsley salad, foie gras on toast, mussels with cider, deviled kidneys, half a dozen madeleines, and a whole pie, which might be filled with pheasant, bacon, and trotter. Praise be. 
Best for: Lunch is one of the purest, most heavenly restaurant experiences in London.

Open for: Lunch and dinner
Price range: $$$
This legend among London’s Cantonese restaurants is a sight to behold on a Sunday at lunchtime, as families from across the city gather for steaming baskets of soup-filled xiao long bao, har gow, siu mai, crisp-fried spring onion pancakes, and glistening plates of cheung fun packed with sweet-salty pork or chubby prawns. This incredibly well-oiled machine has been running for decades, rightly becoming one of London’s most famous dim sum restaurants. 
Best for: The formality of the vast dining rooms and huge round tables makes it the perfect spot for celebratory feasts.

Open for: Breakfast, lunch, and dinner
Price range: $$
Shuko Oda’s little bar in Soho is among London’s most acclaimed Japanese restaurants. Over a long, blond wooden counter, chefs calmly and politely pass hot bowls of steaming broth containing noodles made on-site, topped with proteins like tempura prawn or smoked mackerel, or seasonal green vegetables from Sussex farm Namayasai. The traditional Japanese breakfast is the most steadying in London.
Know before you go: The specials board of small plates changes every day and exhibits some of the city’s best modern British cooking.

Open for: Breakfast and lunch
Price range: $
Bar Italia remains one of London’s most precious institutions, a relic of the mid-20th century sitting indomitably on Soho’s Frith Street. More than almost anywhere else in the capital, Soho is a victim of change, fads, and nonsensical restaurants. (True story: A half decade ago this same street played host to a venue called Flavour Bastard.) But Bar Italia never changes. And for that, we must be grateful. Its consistency and sense of self is what makes it so steadying and reassuring in a world of flux and uncertainty. At Bar Italia you always know your espresso will be bitter, your Peroni will be cold, and your bacon ciabatta will be better than almost anything else you can get in this storied but spoiled patch of the city.
Best for: An iconic, reliable breakfast and espresso.

Open for: Lunch and dinner
Price range: $$
Cloud Land is one of just two London venues specializing in the cuisine of the Yunnan province of southwestern China. The serious restaurant serves ambitious and delicious food. The Yunnan spicy chicken, red with chiles and smoky with Chinese black cardamom, is incredible (and incredibly unusual in the city). So too are the ceremonial cross-bridge noodle soup and the Dai-style fried beef and mince dishes (the latter are reminiscent of Thai larbs). There’s playfulness, too, in the crispy, simply seasoned pork and the vinegar-dressed fried cabbage, which is the perfect accompaniment to cut through a host of hotter, richer plates.
Know before you go: A waiter at the restaurant describes Yunnanese flavors as a “cross between Thai and Sichuan.”

Open for: Dinner
Price range: $$
Chef Normah Abd Hamid and her family team offer a Malaysian comfort menu that makes the restaurant one of the best in the city from a nook of a unit in Queensway Market. Sour, hot assam pedas; roti to rival London’s King in Euston; and beef rendang or nasi lemak to go alongside. Normah’s is quaint and Normah is brilliant; this remains one of central London’s best restaurants to visit with a small group of friends and one to take out-of-towners visiting the city.
Know before you go: The food is halal, and no alcohol is allowed on site.

Open for: Breakfast, lunch, and dinner
Price range: $$$$
There’s something lazily obvious about including the Ritz on a list of essential restaurants in London, but credit where credit’s due. The chef in charge comes fully garlanded: John Williams MBE is the master of niche, old-school French fine dining, delivering dishes of exceptional precision, yet never at the expense of deliciousness. Despite much frippery and eye-watering expense, when you get down to the brass tacks of a meal at the Ritz, it’s really quite simple: immaculately seasoned ingredients, assembled into balanced dishes, cooked adroitly. That’s true across the menu, but nowhere more so than in the Dorset crab with creme fraiche and Imperial caviar; filet of veal with white asparagus and lovage; the classic beef Wellington; and the theatrical crepe suzette.
Know before you go: The restaurant will make sure you comply with the formal dress code.

Open for: Lunch and dinner
Price range: $$
A treasure. Unmoved by the comings and goings of trends, Bermondsey’s 40 Maltby St is a 40-cover answer to the question, pejorative as it may often be: What is British food? Steve Williams is a chef’s chef, cited by James Lowe, Brett Graham, and Florence Knight in their top five in the city. Raef Hodgson of distributor Gergovie Wines — which features low-intervention styles — runs the front-of-house without hubris. Recent dishes included winners such as pork schnitzel with raw celeriac, mustard, and braised potatoes, onion, and thyme, or a chestnut and brown sugar meringue.
Know before you go: Check Instagram for the menu, which always features an in-joke or two.

Open for: Lunch and dinner
Price range: $$
This vast restaurant dining room sits quite inexplicably on the ground floor of a Holiday Inn Express budget hotel just off the A102 on the south exit of the Blackwall Tunnel. But this is a destination dining room of tremendous pedigree. A mid-length, high-quality dim sum menu features a must-try fried prawn and Chinese chive number that stakes a fair claim to being the best single-bite hot item in the city — a crispy, fatty, sweet, salty umami nugget. Among the noodle plates to share, king prawns are excellent, with the noodles taking on the requisite smoke from the wok, seasoned judiciously. Saikei is a close-to-perfect family and group dining experience.
Best for: Sunday lunch, preferably with a large group.

Open for: Lunch and dinner
Price range: $
For the past year-plus, London has welcomed a style of pizza that’s closer to American slice-joint pies. It’s drier, and, well, crispier than the sloppier, saucier Neapolitan cousins that have dominated the London pizza scene for over a decade. The aptly named Crisp Pizza (for Crisp Street, ya know) is serving this style, on the well-done side (don’t tell this guy), with a range of classic toppings, like pepperoni with mozzarella and tomato, ’nduja, and “seasoned mushroom,” and there’s a four-cheese calzone, too. These guys call Parmesan “Parm,” which belies the back-to-basics brilliance of the overall enterprise.
Know before you go: It’s tucked inside Chancellors pub on Crisp Road.

Open for: Dinner to late night during the week, lunch to late night on weekends
Price range: $$$
In his guide to the city’s best East African restaurants, Riaz Phillips says Adulis’s “palatial setting has to make it one of the finest east African and Eritrean restaurants in the capital.” The dark wooden fixtures give every meal here a sense of occasion. The restaurant is well-suited to solo or group dining, with a menu offering selections for one, two, four, and eight persons. Look out for kwanta fitfit, smoked, dried beef with green chile and injera; zilzl assa, grilled red snapper seasoned with Eritrean herbs; and the entire range of vegetarian and vegan stews, comprising spinach, beans, chickpeas, and lentils, all eaten with more of the excellent, subtly tangy, and moreish injera.
Best for: A special occasion with vegetarians and vegans.

Open for: Lunch and dinner
Price range: $
Possibly London’s best Jamaican jerk shop. On the edge of Crystal Palace’s Selhurst Park, with a smoky aroma detectable from many hundred meters, this stark room is dedicated to one thing: immaculately, judiciously seasoned protein grilled without remorse. The age of these oil drums and the time-honored expertise of chef Murphy Lawrence and his team result in jerked pork belly, chicken, goat, and even lobster, all penetrated with smoke and lifted by allspice, Scotch bonnet, and salt. Tasty Jerk is a heady, intoxicating, and remarkably good-value eating experience.
Know before you go: Buy a bottle of the home-made pepper sauce to take away, but use with caution and keep it in the fridge.

Open for: Lunch and dinner every day, and late nights on weekends
Price range: $$$
JKS Restaurants’ (Gymkhana, Trishna, Brigadiers) newest venue has a fair claim at being its most extra to date. The pre-Partition Punjabi restaurant focuses on the rich cuisine of the north of India and Pakistan and the wider region, incorporating Afghan influences, too. It’s full-on in every way, and fulfils its promise of being a clubhouse, particularly in the evening. Don’t be shy with the snacks and starters, making sure to include a portion of papads with chutneys and raita, as well as the fast-food-like chilli cheese pakode with tamatar chutney. Then move through some of the grills, like the butter chicken chops (a speciality preparation of the restaurant group), and finish with a curry — the move here is the guinea fowl changezi, which is best mopped up with a portion of the paratha-like ajwaini warqi naan. One of the hottest restaurants to have opened in the city in the last six months. 
Best for: Festive dinner with a group and ordering big.

Open for: Lunch and dinner
Price range: $$$$
For my money, Ikoyi may be the choicest special occasion venue in the city. Chef Jeremy Chan and restaurateur Iré Hasan-Odukale’s venue has evolved since its inception in St. James’s in 2017. It now occupies a sleek location in the bowels of 180 The Strand and has matured accordingly, elevating the food yet further to match its fancy new surroundings. While it is still philosophically rooted in the culinary traditions and flavor profiles of Nigeria and the West African region, Ikoyi is now an archetype of the Ultra-Modern European genre. Recent meals have featured the seductive savory deliciousness of Chan’s signature smoked jollof rice, and the precise application of spice and chile heat to immaculately cooked protein will blow you away, whether it’s sweetbread suya, dry-aged turbot, or charcoal-grilled lobster. A special restaurant, deserving of its two Michelin-starred status. 
Best for: A true blowout dinner.