The 11 Best Restaurants in London Right Now

Photo by Bobby Beasley

Twenty years ago this month, Gourmet magazine devoted an entire issue to what was then a rather audacious claim: That London was, as the all-caps cover line declared, “The Best Place to Eat in the World Right Now.” Over the 180 pages that followed, the case was vigorously made. An A-to-Z celebration of everything from the city’s breakfast culture to its open-air markets. Nigel Slater’s paean to the likes of St. John and the River Café, places that still hold sway today. A scene report from the red-hot East End. This must be the place!

But looming over all this was one word: “actually.” The implied specter of real or imagined Bad Old Days. The editors were well aware that this anointment would come as a surprise, something of a zag. (Ruth Reichl’s editor’s letter opens with an anecdote about a Heathrow passport agent insisting that nobody comes to London to eat for pleasure.) Curiously, over the decades that followed, writers could not resist the urge to project a big fat chip (sorry) onto the shoulders of England’s capital city. Even the most glowing story had the same sort of twinge, if not the same familiar setup: You might think it’s all pie and mash, but actually it’s…

Well, let us be the ones to officially call it: London’s “Actually” Era is over. It is—has been, will continue to be—one of the world’s greatest places to eat. Full stop. And London knows it too—the chefs, but also the diners. There is a confidence to the city’s food scene that is positively electric. Modern British cooking has cemented itself as a fully legible category, with lore and canon, elder gods and young flamethrowers. Cuisines from every corner of the globe are an integral and integrated part of the culinary framework, as English as Branston pickle. Ask any friend of a friend for their list, and they’re as likely to extol the virtues of a hot new Michelin contender as an Iranian stew specialist they read about in Jonathan Nunn’s food culture newsletter “Vittles.”

London is right now; London is forever; London is alive, and vital, and irresistibly delicious. And if you’re hungry for a taste of a true culinary destination, this is the best place to start.

Bouchon Racine

Upstairs, 66 Cowcross St, London EC1M 6BP, United Kingdom

The Eurostar can get you from London to Paris in a hair over two hours, yet the last few years have seen an explosion of elegant bistros on this side of the English Channel. Among them, chef Henry Harris’s Bouchon Racine stands out from the crowd. A reopening of the much-beloved restaurant he ran from 2002–2015, Racine is a gutsy love letter to Lyonnaise cuisine on the second floor of a 300-year-old pub. Charcuterie and cheese, potatoes and onions, meat and offal: These are the ingredients that animate Harris’s chalkboard menu, all old friends, treated with a grandmotherly mix of tenderness and brawn. A rosy slab of chicken liver pâté, shot through with nubbins of cured pork, coarse enough to make cornichons blush. Wobbly tête de veau, cheek by jowl by tongue, served with an equally wobbly sauce ravigote. Lamb kidneys that’ll make your nostrils flare from two tables away. This is cooking that feeds the soul and lubricates the joints, and makes a nice long train nap sound good indeed.

Mambow

78 Lower Clapton Rd, Lower Clapton, London E5 0RN, United Kingdom

On a cold, damp, blustery night, you’d be lucky to find yourself at Mambow. Ideally hunched over a steaming bowl of chef Abby Lee’s Kam Heong Mussels fresh from the wok, electronic music pumping through the speakers, the scent of soy, curry leaf, and chile instantly banishing whatever chill you walked in with. The rich, shrimpy sauciness left over at the bottom of the bowl is too good to waste, and you’ll find that single order of aromatic pandan rice you thought might get you through the whole meal disappearing faster than a glass of crisp, fizzy Chenin. Same story with a hot and sour short rib curry, the chunky, tamarind-tart braising medium beguiling long after the bones have been nibbled bare. The smart move is to just double that rice order right off the bat, otherwise you’ll doubtless find yourself hoarding near-empty plates and bowls while awaiting a re-up, not willing to surrender a single drop of Lee’s masterfully layered Malaysian flavors.

Yuki Bar

426 Reading Ln, London E8 1DS, United Kingdom

London has long been a destination for natural wine, with ready access to European producers and the kinds of coveted allocations that make US somms green with envy. And over the last year, Yuki Bar, a low-lit cubby hole built into a railway arch in London Fields, has quietly become the coolest place in town to throw back a glass of low-intervention juice. Owner and master sommelier Yukiyasu Kaneko, whose résumé includes stints at Noma and the dearly departed P Franco, presides over the room from behind a horseshoe bar, pouring tastes and offering guidance on the idiosyncratic bottle list. The chalkboard menu leans homestyle Japanese: plump mussels steamed with sake, grilled onigiri in a puddle of dashi, a warming monkfish hot pot. It is a welcome departure from the more de rigueur wine bar fare. Strikingly subtle and long on umami, it’s fascinating food to pair with a second bottle of earthy Gamay from the Auvergne and plenty of Japanese disco.

Tollington’s

172 Tollington Park, Finsbury Park, London N4 3AJ, United Kingdom

Ed McIlroy has a knack for infusing old spaces with the sort of madcap energy that makes them positively magnetic—places that feel a whole personality. He did it first with The Plimsoll, a gorgeous old pub that seemingly woke up one day with an appreciation for biodynamic Burgundy and Sonic Youth and had Londoners flocking to Finsbury Park for a gloriously greasy American-style cheeseburger. And he’s done it again with Tollington’s: a fish and chips shop that returned from a class trip to Barcelona with a duffel full of vermut and big ideas about the unexplored synergy between the British chippie and the tapas bar. This is a place to linger over glasses of Estrella and big-gulp cava while little plates of fresh and fried seafood appear and disappear. But its the “chips bravas” that are the unifying principle: shaggy-crisp, bearing the whiff of beef tallow that sets the best English chips apart and a dollop of the kind of undauntedly garlicky aioli that tops true Spanish patatas bravas.

Planque

322-324 Acton Mews, London E8 4EA, United Kingdom

There is a part of Planque that isn’t for everybody. Literally: A members’ club for the sort of urban natural wine enthusiast who finds themself in need of a place to cellar the wine they can’t store at home, and a modish environment in which to drink said wine. Not you? That’s just as well, because the restaurant at the heart of Planque, helmed by the supremely talented Sebastian Myers, is open to all, and one of the best places in the city to splash out on rare, expertly cellared wine. Myers’s menu—a little British, a bit French—is perfectly met to the occasion, high-touch yet easy to love, precisely delicious. An elegantly constructed guinea foul pithivier is packed with fine dining flair, but retains all the greedy pleasure of the best sausage roll. Sheepy Wigmore ice cream under a shock of burnt meringue is every bit as clever as it is craveable, Willy Wonka stuff. Is it serious fun food? Or fun serious food? Questions to consider with a full belly and a glass of vintage Vin Jaune in hand.

Mountain

16-18 Beak St, London W1F 9RD, United Kingdom

Welsh chef Tomos Parry first made waves in 2018 with Brat, a hearth-centric Basque restaurant that introduced the city’s diners to the sticky-fingered pleasures of whole-grilled turbot and earned him his first Michelin star. Mountain, his latest venture, is more expansive in all respects—more seats, fancier grills, a bigger playbook of influences and techniques—while retaining the giddy obsession with sourcing that has become Parry’s signature. Each line of the menu feels like an invitation to share in the discovery of some uniquely delicious ingredient. Sobrasada, a chorizo-esque sausage made exclusively for the restaurant in Mallorca. Beef from heirloom dairy breeds, aged on the hoof—wouldn’t you like to taste the difference between a steak from a three-year-old Jersey and an eight-year-old Friesian? Parry does. This is the kind of serious restaurant where the chef is having fun, playing with house money and having a grand time doing it—which is to say, the very best kind.

Café Deco

43 Store St, London WC1E 7DB, United Kingdom

No other restaurant embodies the evolution of modern British cuisine quite like chef Anna Tobais’s Café Deco. Her résumé is strongly felt: the understated ebullience of Jeremy Lee’s Quo Vadis; the ingredient worship of the River Cafe’s Ruthie Rogers; a bit of the elegant straightforwardness that has made Margot Henderson’s Rochelle’s Canteen a cult classic. But Tobias is more than the sum of her mentors, with a style of cooking that is at once whimsical and integrated. Here, zurek, the Polish sour rye soup, can share space with a pork tonnato and a flaky-crusted beef and onion pie. Confidence is the through line. Tobias cooks with a conviction that humble ingredients treated with care will always be more arresting than an Instagram feed’s worth of over-clever garnishes and gimmickry—and here, they absolutely are. Throw in a covetable natural wine list from the team at 40 Maltby Street, and you have a restaurant that reflects the best of what London dining has to offer right now.

The Devonshire

The Devonshire, 17 Denman St, London W1D 7HW, United Kingdom

London is full of beautiful old pubs, and lately also full of beautiful old pubs that have come under new management determined to restore them to their former glory—or, even better, some idealized version thereof. None have made a splash quite like The Devonshire, a Georgian-era Soho boozer that publican Oisín Rogers, Charlie Carroll, and chef Ashley Palmer-Watts have transformed into one of the hottest tickets in town. The ground floor pub room pours what is widely thought of as the finest pint of Guinness in a city that has gone absolutely gonzo for the stuff—something to do with dedicated tap lines, customized carbon dioxide-to-nitrogen ratios, and other sorts of dark magic—but the real fireworks can be found in the upstairs restaurant. Quite literally: A massive, heaving wood-fired grill is the focal point of the room and the guiding force behind Palmer-Watts’ straightforwardly excellent pub menu of dry-aged, house-butchered chops, sparkling-fresh British seafood—creel-caught Scottish langoustines, anyone?—and simple sides like duck fat chips and creamed leeks treated with fine dining aplomb.

The Tamil Prince

115 Hemingford Rd, London N1 1BZ, United Kingdom

You could build an entire London eating itinerary around South Asian food, from casual family run chaat houses to Michelin-starred tasting menu spots and all the vastness in between. But perhaps the most unique to the UK is the phenomenon of the Desi pub. What began as refuges from racial discrimination, old English boozers run by South Asian immigrants serving the food of their homelands, have become a distinct part of the city’s culinary fabric, beloved institutions where British ales and Indian curries exist in beautiful synergy. Among the buzziest is the Tamil Prince, a collaboration between chef Prince Durairaj, former executive chef of the wildly popular Roti King chainlet, and JKS restaurant group alum Glen Leeson. The pair have turned an unassuming corner of Islington into a red-hot destination for plates of crackling onion bhaji, a silky paneer butter masala demanding vast quantities of flaky roti for mopping, and their signature channa bhatura: a great blimp of fried dough served with spiced chickpeas and raita.

Ikoyi

180 Strand, Temple, London WC2R 1EA, United Kingdom

Through an air lock of a door, past dry-aging chambers glowing with slabs of beef, around a corner into a hushed cloister of dusky copper and English oak: You’re in Jeremy Chan’s world now. This is the workshop of an intensely cerebral chef, who along with managing director Iré Hassan-Odukale has created a 10-course experience truly worthy of hours and hard-earned coin. Chan’s food is soulful and slippery, playing fast and loose with references from the very first bite. A delicate tartlet: raw Cornish beef atop a sticky-rich carrot emulsion, mounted with a tumble of peas barely larger than the beads of caviar and Pyrenean finger lime vesicles around them. It is an outrageous thing to have in one’s mouth, bursts of salty, sweet, and sour, shooting stars in a galaxy of grassy funk—an everyday dish of peas and carrots strapped to a rocket and sent into low earth orbit. It goes on like this, each course managing to surprise and delight in equal measure, the kind of singular dining experience that lingers long after the last plate is cleared.

The Yellow Bittern

20 Caledonian Rd, London N1 9DU, United Kingdom

Nearly all the (many) reviews, think pieces, and posts about the Yellow Bittern start with these facts. The restaurant has 18 seats. It is only open for lunch, seatings at noon and 2 p.m., and is closed on weekends. It has no website nor social media presence, and reservations can only be made by phone or, famously, postcard. There’s a lefty bookstore in the basement. Cash only, please.

That this all sounds a bit out of time and space is obviously a good hook, and clearly by design. Hugh Corcoran, along with his partners Oisín Davies and Frances Armstrong-Jones, imagined the restaurant as a sort of prelapsarian oasis, a portal to a time before reservation apps and point-of-sale tablets sucked the romance out of dining, and a long, boozy midday meal was the order of the day. That it managed to become London’s most controversial restaurant for a period of time—you can read our full story about the Yellow Bittern and our interview with Corcoran here—belies that fact that it is a truly delightful place to have lunch. The menu changes daily and reflects Corcoran’s proud Irish heritage, as well as time spent in France and the Basque country: potato leek soup, guinea fowl pie, Dublin coddle, rice pudding. Simple food, well-seasoned and honest, pretentious only in its aggressive unpretentiousness. Wash it all down with a good bottle of Burgundy from the restaurant’s impressive cellar, maybe a cheeky thimble of eau de vie with dessert, and you’d be hardpressed to find a better way to spend an afternoon in London.

Originally Appeared on Bon Appétit