a big group

Destination · Thai grill · Soho · $$

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There is a small insulated furnace behind the counter burning chestnut and oak logs, and the cooks reach into it for glowing embers to feed the grill (Time Out).

Destination · British grill pub · Soho · $$$

booking essential

Ashley Palmer-Watts spent twenty years in the Fat Duck Group and now runs a wood ember grill on Denman Street, a fuel he says is "far more challenging to cook using" than charcoal (Hot Dinners, Restaurant Online).

Destination · Cocktail bar · Mayfair · $$$$

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The current menu, Stream, holds the same ten drinks for its entire life and rewrites their recipes as the seasons move, so Stem currently arrives as cognac infused with argan oil, Michter's rye, Acqua Bianca, Persian cordial, new-make wine and coriander bitters (The World's 50 Best…

Destination · Gastropub · Bethnal Green · $$$

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Lee Tiernan cooked at St John for a decade and then built Black Axe Mangal, and this is what he says about one dish here: "Have you ever had their beef and barley bun with horseradish cream?

Destination · Spanish · Mayfair · $$$

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The Segovian suckling pig comes out of an oven Sabor had built for it, and upstairs in El Asador is the only part of the building that will take a booking.

Destination · Basque-Welsh grill · Soho · $$$

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The spider crab omelette gets cut open the moment it hits the table so the residual heat stops cooking it, and the crab and sugar kelp inside come from Car y Mor in West Wales while the butter comes from Caws Teifi in Cardigan.

Destination · Spanish · Shoreditch · $$$$

booking essential

The kitchen is built around two wood-fired ovens hand-made in Segovia and shipped over, plus a two-tier charcoal Josper, and what comes out of them is whole suckling pig and milk-fed lamb (CODE Hospitality, April 2026).

Destination · Indian · Mayfair · $$$$

booking essential

Four working industry people, asked separately over two years, all named this room. Three of them run restaurants themselves.

Destination · Thai · Chinatown · $$

booking essential

Luke Farrell keeps a jungle microclimate at Ryewater Nursery in Dorset and grows the regional Thai herb varieties, green papaya, Thai limes and chillies himself, because as Jay Rayner put it, imported frozen herbs "are diminished" (The Observer; venue site).

Destination · Cocktail bar · South Bank · $$$

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In October 2024 The Pinnacle Guide gave Lyaness the first three-pin award it had ever issued, out of an inaugural list of 37 bars in which twelve reached two pins and nobody reached three (The Spirits Business).

Destination · Southern Thai · Borough · $$$

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They press fresh coconut cream in the kitchen and then burn what is left, because as Andy Oliver puts it, the spent solids are "almost like used coffee grounds" and make "a perfect smoking medium on the grill," alongside charcoal and wood (Borough Market, October 2023).

Destination · Levantine · Dalston · $$$

booking essential

A pitta packed with hake and grilled in lamb fat, which the London editor of The Infatuation called one of the best things you can eat in the city (The Infatuation).

Destination · Thai · Marylebone · $$$$

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There is no rice.

Destination · Greek · Borough · $$$

booking essential

Nick Molyviatis described the plan before the doors opened as "Most of the food will be cooked on sticks," with the seasoning kept to "good olive oil, lemon, oregano and salt" (Restaurant magazine, 2024).

Destination · British chophouse · Clerkenwell · $$$

booking essential

The à la carte is written in the kitchen every morning, and one dish has never been allowed off it: potatoes sliced thin, pressed overnight into a slab, cut into fat chips and fried in duck fat (The Quality Chop House).

Destination · Modern British · Covent Garden · $$$

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The dish three national critics wrote about is bread: a small warm loaf of potato sourdough served with Town house gravy, which is a bowl of hot beef dripping (Harden's).

Solid · Southern Thai · Holborn · $$

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Luke Farrell grows his southern Thai chillies, herbs and aromatics in a tropical greenhouse in Dorset, then cooks them into curries at this khao gaeng canteen on the Arcade Food Hall mezzanine, a Bib Gourmand kitchen since 2023.

Solid · Italian · Hammersmith · $$$$

booking essential

Rose Gray and Ruth Rogers opened this in 1987 to feed the staff of Richard Rogers's architecture practice, then let the public in (The Staff Canteen).

Destination · British game · Covent Garden · $$$$

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Rules sells more game than any other restaurant in the UK, on an exclusive line to estate game dealer Andy Dent, from a dining room it has occupied on Maiden Lane since 1798 (CNN, July 2026).

Destination · Craft beer · Bermondsey · $

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Kernel was the first London brewery to put beer back in oak tuns, in late 2014, and the list still runs an Export Stout London 1890 and an 1840 that has been sitting in cognac and red wine barrels since 2018.

Destination · Ethiopian · Camberwell · $

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A London editor who ranks restaurants for a living put this corner room next to a newsagent in his Top 25 for the whole city and called it arguably the best Ethiopian cooking in London (The Infatuation).

Solid · Italian nose-to-tail · Shoreditch · $$$

booking essential

They break whole carcasses in the building, cure the salami themselves, and the whey left over from making the ricotta goes into the caramel on the chocolate tart (Manteca, Hot Dinners).

Solid · Gastropub · Stockwell · $$

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After dark the front bar cooks one thing, toasties pressed in a Breville, and you can have yours filled with foie gras or haggis (The Infatuation).

Solid · Cocktail bar · Shoreditch · $$$

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The December 2025 list runs a basil and mascarpone fat wash through the vodka, a French toast fat wash through the Breakfast Martini, and clarified carrot and orange through a Harvey Wallbanger, which is prep-kitchen labor served in a coupe.

Solid · Cocktail bar · Shoreditch · $$$

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The Orkney Breezer comes filtered through a sheep's pancreas, and the Breakfast Bellini uses century beans, a twist on Japan's century eggs (Time Out).

Solid · Craft beer · Bermondsey · $$

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The brewing left for Croydon in March 2020 and the arch stayed, so this is now the one room in London built solely around drinking what Anspach & Hobday make (Anspach & Hobday).

Solid · Gastropub · Islington · $$$

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Once a year the pub clears the calendar for Glandstonebury, its own festival of offal cookery, with other London chefs cooking in the kitchen.

Solid · Thai · Highbury · $$

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The kitchen shuts three days a week because the fresh Thai produce leaves Bangkok on a Sunday and takes until midweek to land in London.

Solid · Turkish ocakbasi · Harringay · $

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Six London chefs put the ezme here on the New York Times list of the twenty-five essential dishes in the city, because at most ocakbasi it is a mushy paste behind plastic and at Umut they chop it to order (Time Out).

Solid · Pizza · Soho · $$

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The dough runs on a bespoke blend of Type 0, Type 1 and Prima Macina, the flour milled off the first breaking of the grain, which the kitchen says gives "a more complex and expressive dough" (venue).

Solid · Craft beer · Soho · $$

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Up to ten cask ales and two or three ciders on handpump, with over twenty craft keg taps behind them, a hundred and fifty meters from Piccadilly Circus (CAMRA).

Destination · Cask ale · Carshalton · $

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The regulars bought this pub.

Solid · Craft beer · Paddington · $$

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Martin Hayes put the cask handpumps where a drinker cannot miss them.

Solid · Food hall · Tottenham Court Road · $$

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Nine kitchens opened here on 22 April 2022 and seven trade now, and the two that survived are the two chefs keep naming.

Solid · Craft beer taproom · Walworth · $$

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Nine taps, and Orbit brewed every beer on them across the road, on the same Walworth arch site it started on in 2014.

Solid · Natural wine bar · Dalston · $$

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The retail shelf is the wine list: more than 600 bottles from Dan Long's own merchant business, Natty Boy Wines, drinkable at the table for £15 corkage (Hot Dinners).

Solid · Craft beer tank bar · Hackney Wick · $$

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Ten conditioning tanks of a thousand litres each stand behind the bar and the staff pour straight out of them, so the beer has never been in a keg, a cask or a bottle.

Solid · Craft lager · Strand · $$

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The bar is thirteen meters of Czech-built joinery fitted with the side-pour taps you would otherwise have to be in Prague to drink from, and the Budvar comes in two-thirds tankards rather than pints so the foam has room (CAMRA, surveyed August 2025).

Solid · Mediterranean · Strand · $$$

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Toklas opened on 19 October 2021 in a Brutalist former car park off the Strand, and its own diners have scored it Average, then Very Good, and now a notch lower again in the year its chef left (Harden's).

Solid · Craft beer taproom · Hackney Wick · $$

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Cave Direct, the importer that has been bringing Belgian beer into the UK since the 1970s, opened this Hackney Wick taproom in February 2018 as the physical arm of its Beer Merchants retail operation, which means the cellar gets first call on the rarities.

Solid · British pies · Holborn · $$

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Nancy Silverton ate the dauphinoise pie here and then put a version of it on her own menu at Chi Spacca in Los Angeles.

Solid · Kurdish-Turkish · Harringay · $

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On a street where every second window advertises lahmacun, The Infatuation's Jake Missing says this one "actually tastes of lamb", and tells you to eat it straight, without salads or sauces.

Solid · Craft beer · Vauxhall · $$

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Thirty taps down one wall of a railway arch on Albert Embankment, which Matt Brown counted at thirty-three and called "more beer taps than just about anywhere else in town" (Londonist).

Solid · Moorish-Spanish · Exmouth Market · $$$

booking essential

The menu is rewritten completely every three weeks and adjusted slightly every day in between, which is the venue's own number and the reason a twenty-nine-year-old restaurant has not gone stale (Moro).

Solid · Natural wine bar · Newington Green · $$

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Two wine importers and a charcutier took over a chicken shop on Newington Green, and the charcutier's terrines are the reason to come (Cadet, The Infatuation).

Solid · Craft beer · Brixton · $$

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Verdant put its name over this railway arch as a residency, which is a brewery vouching for whoever is choosing the beer (Craft Metropolis, Untappd).

Listed · Japanese izakaya · Covent Garden · $$$

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Fillings come off a robata grill and out of a smoker, the buns are steamed in house, and you put them together yourself at the table (venue, Hot Dinners).

Listed · Riverside beer bar · South Bank · $$

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Enormous copper piping runs from a beer tank straight to the bar under the National Theatre, and the terrace outside it spills onto the South Bank walk all year round (The Nudge).