10 Best Restaurants in London

A. Wong retained two Michelin stars in the 2026 Michelin Guide Great Britain and Ireland, which makes it the most decorated Chinese kitchen in the country, and it effectively operates as two restaurants in one building. Lunch is dim sum ordered a la carte: the Shanghai steamed dumpling at £6, clear shrimp dumpling at £5.50, the three treasure dumpling with king crab, tofu and lemongrass at £15, crispy aromatic Peking duck with pancakes at £25, and a steamed duck yolk custard bun at £8.50. The kitchen recommends eight to ten items per guest, which lands at roughly £55 to £70 per head, about €63 to €80. Dinner is a single set banquet, The Collections of China, at £235 (around €270), tracing regional cooking from Xinjiang to Guangdong, with a vegetarian version at the same price.

Service runs Tuesday dinner only, then Wednesday to Saturday for both lunch and dinner, and the restaurant is closed Sunday and Monday. The Wilton Road dining room returns to full service on 29 September 2026 after a short late-summer closure. Book dinner three to four weeks out; lunch can often be had inside a week, particularly midweek. The room is narrow, bright and busy with an open kitchen at the back rather than a hushed fine-dining box, and wine pairings start at £150, which is where the bill can run away from you.

Pro Tip: Order the dim sum lunch and skip the banquet if you are choosing between them. Ten a la carte items comes to under a third of the £235 dinner price and includes the dumplings the two stars were actually awarded for.

St. JOHN opened in a whitewashed former smokehouse on St. John Street in 1994 and holds one Michelin star in the 2026 guide, which it has kept while changing almost nothing. The cooking is nose-to-tail British and the roast bone marrow with parsley salad and toast is the dish that reset how a generation of British chefs thought about offal; it is still on the menu, still served with a small spoon and coarse salt. Welsh rarebit, potted crab, ox heart and madeleines baked to order round out a card that shifts daily. Three courses land around £70 per head, roughly €80, before wine, which for a starred restaurant in central London is close to a bargain.

The room is deliberately plain: high white walls, no art, no music, coat hooks instead of a cloakroom, and bakery smells drifting up from downstairs. It is loud in a pleasant, room-wide way rather than a thumping one. Dinner needs two to three weeks' notice and Saturday is the hardest night; weekday lunch is far easier and the bar area takes walk-ins for a plate and a glass. Current service times shift with the seasons and are listed on the official St. JOHN site.

Pro Tip: Go at lunch on a weekday and eat at the bar without a booking. Order bone marrow, a half portion of whatever the day's roast is, and the madeleines - the madeleines take fifteen minutes, so ask for them when your main arrives.

Brat occupies the first floor above a pub on Redchurch Street and cooks nearly everything over a wood fire, which won chef Tomos Parry a Michelin star that the restaurant still holds in the 2026 guide. The whole grilled turbot, cooked Basque-style in a caged grill and basted with its own fat and vinegar, is the signature and the reason to bring a second person - it is priced by weight and designed to share. Smoked cod's roe piped onto a finger of toast, roast oysters with pickled seaweed, and hake kokotxas are the other things worth ordering. Budget £70 to £85 per head, about €80 to €98, before wine.

The room is small, hot and close: exposed brick, tall Crittall windows looking over Shoreditch, tables set at elbow distance, and a permanent haze coming off the grill. You will leave smelling of smoke, and that is not a complaint so much as a warning about what you wear. Booking is the genuine problem here. Dinner tables go several weeks ahead and weekend slots are among the hardest in east London. A small amount of counter space is held back for walk-ins, which is worth trying right at opening on a Tuesday or Wednesday.

Pro Tip: If the turbot is beyond your budget, order the grilled bread with anchovy and the smoked cod's roe, then split one meat dish. Two people can eat properly for about £55 each by staying off the fish counter.

Chishuru is modern West African cooking from chef Joke Bakare, who was born and raised in Nigeria and became the first Black female chef in Britain to hold a Michelin star. The restaurant retains that star in the 2026 Michelin Guide Great Britain and Ireland. The menu draws on Yoruba, Igbo and Hausa traditions and leans on ingredients most London kitchens never handle: uziza pepper, uda, aidan fruit, and daddawa, the fermented locust bean that gives the sauces their depth and slight funk. It runs as a set menu only, at £50 per head at lunch (about €58) and £105 at dinner (about €121), which puts a starred tasting menu within reach of a normal night out.

Service is weekdays only, with last seatings at 1:45pm for lunch and 9:30pm for dinner, so weekend visitors need to plan around it. The room on Great Titchfield Street is compact, warm and low-lit, closer to a neighbourhood dining room than a formal restaurant, and the service explains the dishes without lecturing. Reservations open 60 days ahead and dinner fills first; a small number of walk-ins are taken each service. The name is a Hausa phrase for the silence that falls over a table when the food arrives.

Pro Tip: Book the £50 lunch and treat it as the value fine-dining meal of this guide. Set a reminder for exactly 60 days before the date you want, because the Thursday and Friday dinner slots are gone within a day of release.

Tayyabs has fed Whitechapel Punjabi food since 1972 and is the best-value serious meal in this guide. The sizzling marinated lamb chops are the reason the queue exists: four to a plate, charred hard on the ocakbasi-style grill, arriving still spitting fat onto the cast iron. Order them alongside karahi gosht, the dry meat, a tarka dhal and a couple of naan, and you will spend roughly £20 to £25 per head, around €23 to €29. It is bring-your-own-bottle, which drops the drinks bill to whatever the off-licence on Whitechapel Road charges.

Be clear about what you are walking into, because this is not a quiet dinner. The room is bright, hard-surfaced and extremely loud, tables turn fast, and service is brisk rather than warm. On Friday and Saturday nights the wait without a booking runs 30 to 45 minutes even though the restaurant seats several hundred across multiple floors. It opens daily from midday to 11:30pm and the kitchen does not slow down in between. Book through the restaurant's own reservation system if you are a party of four or more, and go early if you want to hear each other.

Pro Tip: Arrive before 6:30pm on a weekday and you will walk straight in. Buy your beer at an off-licence on the way, order one plate of lamb chops per person plus one karahi to share, and you will over-order rather than under-order.

Mangal 2 has run an ocakbasi - the open charcoal grill you can watch from your table - on Stoke Newington Road since Ali Dirik opened it in 1994. His sons Ferhat and Sertac took over in 2020 and rebuilt the menu without gutting the point of the place. The mutton kofte, seasoned hard and left rosy in the middle, is the signature. The sourdough pide with kaymak butter, the mushroom manti with cordyceps and confit garlic yoghurt, and the lamb shoulder tandir with bulgur and ezme are the other orders that matter. Around £45 to £55 per head, roughly €52 to €63, plus a natural wine list that is considerably better than a Dalston grill house needs.

The post-lockdown redesign put ultramarine blue on the walls and spotlights on a whitewashed ceiling, but the furniture is still worn and the noise level is still high, which is most of the charm. It opens Monday to Saturday only, so a Sunday plan needs to go elsewhere. Book a week or two ahead for Friday or Saturday evening; midweek you can usually walk in before 7pm. Dalston is a 15 to 20 minute Overground ride from the City fringe, so check the last train back if you are staying central.

Pro Tip: Ask for a table facing the grill rather than in the back room. Start with the pide and kaymak butter while you decide, because it arrives in minutes and the grilled courses take a while when the ocakbasi is full.

Kolamba is the Sri Lankan restaurant to take somebody to in central London, run by husband-and-wife team Eroshan and Aushi Meewella on Kingly Street behind Carnaby. Everything is built to share in the traditional style. The hot butter fried cuttlefish is the dish to order first, followed by the black pepper king prawn fry, the creamy yellow monkfish curry, and hoppers - bowl-shaped fermented rice pancakes, best taken with the fried egg in the base. A jackfruit curry handles the vegetarians properly rather than as an afterthought, and watalappam, a spiced coconut and jaggery custard, closes the meal. Expect £35 to £45 per head, about €40 to €52, which makes it one of the better-value rooms in the West End.

The Soho site is genuinely small: a short terrace out front, an open kitchen, and a handful of tables under softly lit woven lampshades, with service that lets you sit rather than turning the table. Weekend evenings need about a week's notice; weekday lunch is usually available on the day. If Kingly Street is full, there is a second and larger site, Kolamba East, at 12 Blossom Street in Spitalfields, London E1 6PL, which takes bigger groups more comfortably.

Pro Tip: Order three small plates and one curry between two rather than a curry each. The portions are generous, and weekend brunch is the quietest service if you want the room without the wait.

Kiln cooks northern Thai food over wood and in clay pots along a counter on Brewer Street, and it holds a Michelin Bib Gourmand rather than a star, which tells you exactly what kind of place it is: serious cooking, unserious prices. The aged lamb and cumin skewers and the clay pot baked glass noodles with brown crab and pork belly are the two dishes nobody should skip. Jungle curry, sai ua smoked northern Thai sausage, and whatever whole fish is on the specials board fill out a meal at roughly £30 to £40 per head, about €35 to €46, and the kitchen sources heritage-breed meat rather than commodity pork.

The catch is the seating. The ground-floor counter is walk-in only, about twenty stools facing the grill, and the queue on Brewer Street from 6pm on a Friday is real and unsheltered. The downstairs room takes bookings for parties of four or more, which is the only way to guarantee a table. The counter is the better experience regardless: low light, grill haze, and cooks working an arm's length from your plate. It opens Monday to Saturday until 11pm and Sunday until 9pm.

Pro Tip: Turn up alone or as a pair at noon on a weekday and you will get a counter stool immediately. Solo diners are seated fastest at any time, so if you are two, splitting up along the counter beats waiting forty minutes for a pair of adjacent stools.

Rules opened on Maiden Lane in 1798 and is London's oldest restaurant, a claim documented on its Wikipedia entry. It is a game specialist above everything else, sourcing from its own estate in the Pennines, and the grouse that appears from 12 August is the reason to come in autumn 2026. Year-round the order is the steak and kidney pudding at £26.25, available with an oyster in it for £27.95, or the roast rib of beef for two at £55 per person. Start with the Hertfordshire short rib and ox cheek terrine at £17.95 and finish with the Rules sticky toffee pudding at £11.50, and three courses with a side puts you at £70 to £85 per head, roughly €80 to €98, before wine.

The room is the point: red leather banquettes, low ceilings, oil paintings and Victorian cartoons stacked frame to frame, taxidermy, and waiters in white jackets who have worked here for decades. It is theatrical and slightly absurd and completely unlike anywhere else on this list. Weekend dinner needs three to four weeks' notice; a weekday lunch is much easier to get. Smart-casual dress is expected and sportswear is not welcome.

Pro Tip: Come between mid-August and December for the game season, when grouse, partridge and venison are on the card. Ask for a table in the ground-floor front room rather than upstairs - the upstairs bar is handsome but the main room is where the 1798 atmosphere actually lives.