In my new book, London Feeds Itself, I document London’s everyday foods that show where the city has been and where it’s going. Here are 50 places that sum up London for me—although check back monthly, as it might be completely different.
Less📍Added in February: Since Ikoyi gave up any pretence of being a West African restaurant, it has moved swiftly through the gears and now showcases Jeremy Chan’s Martian cuisine, as menacing and beautiful as a Kubrick film: black plectrums of dried citrus; squid repurposed as marshmallow. His best food has the quality of great perfumery, balancing huge flavours—long pepper, aged meat, saffron, chilli—across multiple axes in an attempt to create something subtler than the sum of its parts.
📍Added in February: This is the best and most consistent restaurant of London’s French bistro resurgence, perhaps because it’s not a trend-based reaction but the second iteration of Henry Harris’s much-missed Racine, reimagined as an intimate townhouse. Harris’s cooking feels like an exercise in how much fat you can hide in a menu before the diner feels it, like a tailor masking a true silhouette. As such, the tête de veau and lapin au moutarde are more elegant than at most bouchons in Lyon.
📍Added in February: Tomos Parry’s difficult second album is less people-pleasing than Brat, but it’s the one that keeps compelling me to return, the vast menu begging the question of what the best route through it is. I’ve concluded that the grill is a red herring: Mountain is best experienced through small assemblages—bread with cured dairy beef with enough funk to be a self-contained cheeseburger—and stews, particularly a garnet-coloured tripe dish whose collagen sticks your lips together.
📍Added in February: This Polish takeaway in Streatham serves food akin to school dinners if they were catered by God potato casserole made of sautéed potatoes, bacon, cream, and cheese; pork meatballs in gravy; duck legs with baked apple; a chicken escalope; a huge, crispy pork hock. Every time I’ve been in, I’ve hesitated at the counter and weighed up the possibility of ordering everything; each time, I’ve thought I’ve done a good job of restraining myself but left with far too much food.
📍Added in February: You might assume (as I did) that this is one of the many Jamaican takeaways that bless Norwood Junction; it’s only the presence of the garlic prawns and the green fig salad that give away that its owner, Julius Cools, is St. Lucian. However, the multicoloured selection of root vegetables that he uses for his hard food, each one tasting of itself, and the fact that he makes his own Grape-Nuts ice cream and serves it in a coupe, prove that his food is entirely his own.
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.
The Turkish-Kurdish restaurant Antepliler has continued to expand across Green Lanes with the ruthlessness of a corporate takeover. Its latest shopfront, to add to its doner, kunefe and baklava sites, is a revival of its old ciger salonu (liver shop), which was last seen in the early 2010s. It caters to every conceivable taste: liver, heart, testicles, and, a new addition, kavurma—a creamy mix of minced liver and lungs that might currently be the best thing on the menu.