📍2024 Highlight: My birthday meal was at the Pashtun restaurant Charsi Karahi, where 30 of us sat around a central Brat-green tarpaulin to eat a whole lamb, an order that feels like an event in a way that eating at no other London restaurant does. As is often the case, the lamb itself is really an expensive container for the rice, steamed inside the animal’s belly, which can be then used to mop up chapli kebabs with a thick fried crust, or wreta arranged around a central dais of bone marrow.

📍2024 Highlight: An impulsive early dinner at Bread and Wine, the looser (and, to my mind, best) version of St. John, provided an opportunity to run through one of the restaurant’s many perfect menu routes. We had cod’s roe and egg with layered confit potatoes, a whole pie to share, beef dripping chips, a bowl of steamed greens, and a dozen madeleines, a meal that seemed to me as elegant and as perfect as an Euler proof. 

📍2024 Highlight: I have been to The Ritz twice: once taken by someone who wanted to apologise to me, and this year to celebrate an anniversary. It seems apt: If I needed a restaurant to show someone I loved them, or to ostentatiously say sorry, then it’s this one, where canapés have the kind of detailing reserved for the transepts of cathedrals, and crêpes Suzettes are made tableside in a column of flame. No other restaurant in London has such a complete understanding of hospitality as theatre.

Under the stewardship of chef Steve Williams and wine importer Raef Hodgson, this restaurant below the Spa Terminus railway arches has been responsible for the most straightforwardly pleasurable London cooking of the last decade. The food is British pretending to be Continental, or the other way around: a constellation of micro seasons anchored to a polestar of pies, fritters, croquettes, tarts, toasts, and ices. Make sure to get three desserts.

Despite the wealth of restaurants in Shoreditch, I’ve always been at a loss as to where to have dinner there, at least until Afghan Grill opened. It has all the best qualities of London’s best suburban Pashtun and Afghan restaurants, but compressed into one small room. The order here is precise: metre rules of chopan kebab, crispy slices of borani budenjan (aubergine with tomato), charsi karahi (meat, your choice) by the half kilo, and the best qabili pilau in the city.

Three years ago, to get to Al Kahf, you had to go through an unpromising back alley, like Henry Hill being taken through the bowels of the Copacabana. Today, it is big enough to be a Whitechapel institution, packed to the rafters with diners eating platters of Somali rice served with lamb shank or shoulder whose fat slips off the bone with a spoon. Except for a bowl of bisbaas to cut through it all, there is no adornment—food this good doesn’t need it.

The biggest testament I can give to Aladin’s quality is that in a community where every food is an argument waiting to happen, I have yet to meet anyone who has disagreed on the Aladin nihari: a huge lamb shank that can be dismantled with the back of a spoon. Aladin’s specialises in the “Karachi holy trinity”—haleem, qorma and nihari—though I have a soft spot for the verging-on-inedibly-bitter karela (bitter melon) ghosht. Whatever you order, the nihari always wins out.

Asher’s Africana’s open kitchen, usually full of aunties stirring cooking pots big enough to hide in, is the next best thing to being invited round to your Gujarati friend’s house after school for roti. Here they are feather light but with a whole-wheat backbone that makes you feel virtuous for eating them, despite the amount of ghee. Pair it with a Gujarati thali, with two vegetarian dishes of your choice and some pickles, and you will feel golden for the rest of the day.

You can find many versions of the Gujarati potato sandwich known as dabeli across north-west London, but none as fine as Bansuri’s. All the small details are attended to: the texture of the boiled potato; the choice of adornment (pomegranate and peanut); the layering of the masala, in the traditional Kutch manner. A toasted version takes 10 minutes to arrive because every side of the sandwich is being buttered and heated so it comes out resembling a crispy orange dice.

In a city obsessed with newness, people forget that Casse-Croûte has been on a corner of Bermondsey Street for 10 years just doing its stuff—that is, serving some of the best French bistro cooking in London. Hervé Durochat’s menu is the same: three starters, three mains, three desserts, ever changing, written entirely in unreadable cursive French. Sauces, plutocratic in their richness, are a strength, and there are people who have an email alert set for the mille-feuille.