📍Added in May: London doesn’t lack for much, but it does need more late-night dessert spots to finish an evening. Some of my best nights have ended at Antepliler Kunefe, where the spinning kunefe wheels make the cook look like he’s playing a Boiler Room DJ set. Now it has moved over the road and is three times larger, but the kunefe is the same: a discus of cheese-stuffed kadayif, fried and doused in syrup and pistachios. It’s rich. Share among three; clotted cream and strong tea are essential.

📍Added in May: Ocakbaşıs like Enfes are to the rest of Edmonton what Highbury used to be before Arsenal moved to the Emirates: less comfortable, less glitzy, but more huddled in and atmospheric, a real human theater. Take a seat near the mangal, where you can order a whole lamb from nose to tail—ribs, liver, heart, sweetbread, and testicles—and you’ll experience something close to what London ocakbaşıs were like many decades ago, when you would come out wearing a cologne of meat smoke.

📍Added in May: A good bánh mì is primarily about the bread—all fillings must proceed from this fact. Banh’s Le Cordon Bleu–trained owner, Christine, understands this, and spent a year honing her bread recipe so it lands somewhere between a French baguette and a soft sub roll. Only through making itself invisible, with the lightest of crusts that crackles like bubble wrap as you press down, does it become the ideal vehicle for the fillings. Order the classic—a perfect sandwich.

📍Added in May: You wouldn’t think there was a large Costa Rican diaspora in London. Even the owner of Pura Vida didn’t think so until he opened this spot with his parents. Now they’re all flocking to Brixton Plaza for the only place in the city that serves Costa Rican food. The gallo pinto with beef stew and chifrijo (pork belly with fried corn chips) are crowd-pleasers, but I can’t look past the tamale: a banana leaf of soft masa, rice, and peas, bound together with the creaminess of pork fat.

📍Added in May: In a city overtaken with “Italian-American” joints pretending to be family-run, Brutto deftly straddles the line between pastiche and the real thing. Brutto claims to be an ode to Florence but looks nothing like that city. Instead it’s pure London, the London that the late Russell Norman gifted us with the similarly referential Polpo and Spuntino. The best version of it may just be the coccoli with prosciutto and stracciatella taken outside with a negroni on a warm evening.

There are two types of laksa connoisseur: those who enjoy trying variations and those who know that the only real laksa is assam laksa. 7 Floor catered for the second type, back when Malaysian families would travel from all over London to Peckham for its uncompromising assam laksa: dense, sour and briny with mackerel—more stew than soup. You can now find it in a mini-mall in Holborn, along with a weekend-only curry mee, which is not laksa but (whisper it) might be even better.

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.

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.

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.

Henry Ford once said you could have any color car you want, as long as it’s black; Asian Harvest says you can have any dish you want, as long as it’s pork. This Filipino butcher in Shepherd’s Bush Market does a side trade in Ilocano dishes: a creamy dinakdakan of ears and brain, jet black dinuguan of intestines; I suspect even the one vegetarian dish has pork in it… Best is the bagnet, a double-fried version of lechon that ranks as one of the city’s best crispy porks.