It has to be said: a good restaurant booking can do a lot for a person. It can rescue a bleak Monday, spice up even the laziest of weekends, or even make you feel, briefly but powerfully, like life is not just emails and laundry.
That is the point of this month’s guide, because that’s exactly what every restaurant listed has managed to achieve. These are, quite simply, five restaurants that feel worth staying out late or leaving the house for right now.
Where to eat in London right nowTavern, Shoreditch
Despite only opening yesterday, I am deeply emotionally invested in Tavern’s pickleback martini. Served with salami and gherkins on a cocktail skewer, it has exactly the right amount of chill for a restaurant taking elevated pub culture seriously, and is just one of many reasons I’ll be telling everyone to book immediately.
From the team behind Restaurant St Barts, Tavern has taken over the former Nest site on Old Street with a menu that reads like a very clever chef’s favourite dishes. There is fire bread with wild garlic, smoked cod’s roe with crisp pig skin served in a tankard, Lindisfarne oysters, a crab and seaweed muffin, St Brides chicken skewers with a British take on satay, and the signature “Chunion” puff, a molten cheese and onion gougère (need one say more?).
Larger plates keep the British produce line without going beige, with baked Barra scallop in cobnut XO, turbot with laverbread and cockles, Saddleback pork with black apple and pickles, et al. Book now, before everyone starts claiming they found it first.
Pyro, Borough
Greek food, in London, is often flattened into feta, olives and a few tired ideas about holiday eating. Then, at Pyro, chef Yiannis Mexis is doing something far more interesting: taking the food of his heritage and pushing it through fire, finesse and some proper f***ing serious cooking technique.
The new tasting menu makes the point quickly, too. Spanakopita as pastel de nata. Smoked aubergine and roasted garlic dip served with a sourdough potato pita that could feasibly make them millionaires. Dorset lamb arriving with lamb-fat flatbreads, smoked anchovy yoghurt and moussaka.
Quite honestly, it was one of the most gorgeous meals I’ve had in months, with special thanks to sommelier Spiros Athanasiou, who has a real knack for selecting knockout Greek wines. It’s polished without being overly polite (thank God), and somewhere I’d return to for any special occasion.
Chishuru, Fitzrovia
For the yet to be uninitiated, you’re in for a real treat at Chishuru. Adejoké Bakare’s renowned Fitzrovia restaurant has a Michelin star, many-a major award, international acclaim and a chef-owner whose cooking has helped change the conversation around West African food in London. The reason it’s in this guide is perhaps simpler: assurance that its reign as one of the best restaurants in the city is far from over.
Bakare’s six-course menu draws on the Yoruba, Igbo and Hausa food of her Nigerian heritage, using ingredients such as uziza pepper, uda, aidan fruit and daddawa with a confidence that makes most tasting menus feel, well… timid. The cooking is layered, fragrant and completely its ow, with dishes such as sinasir, a fermented rice cake inspired by childhood meals in Kaduna, served with poached corn-fed chicken, chicken skin and onion-mustard sauce.
It’s a restaurant with accolades, sure, but more importantly, one definitively deserving of them.
Idalia, Kensington
D&G cocktail at Idalia
Thomas Alexander Photography
Olympia has not, historically, been the first place you think of when someone says “glamorous dinner,” but Idalia may change that. Set inside the newly restored Grade II* listed Pillar Hall, it is the first hospitality opening within Olympia’s £1.3 billion regeneration and feels like a restaurant designed to make West London look over its shoulder again.
The dining room, to start, is an sight in itself, softened by greenery, warm lighting and a central bar that gives the whole thing a bit of old-school occasion. In the kitchen, executive chef Samantha Williams, formerly executive chef to Angela Hartnett, leads an all-female senior team alongside executive pastry chef Lorena Tommasi, all ‘modern British’ with a London accent.
See: lobster linguine with datterini tomatoes, chilli, garlic and basil; whole wood-roasted turbot with shichimi togarashi butter and pickled daikon; and rather ridiculous cocktails like The Vivienne Heel, a chocolate stiletto dessert nodding to Olympia’s fashion history.
LPM, Mayfair
LPM is one of those restaurants that could be easy to forget about. Then all of a sudden your colleague reminds you of their Tomatini (vodka, white balsamic, fresh tomato, an extravagant crack of black pepper), you head in for a few, and immediately start questioning why more places in Mayfair don’t feel as effortless once more.
The room has that particular French-Mediterranean brightness that makes central London feel briefly less grey, and the food and service rarely disappoint. Just simple French Riviera cooking that works because the ingredients are properly sourced, all of it arriving with confidence you just can’t fake. Go when Soho feels too much and Mayfair feels too Mayfair (it sits between the two somehow and makes a very strong case for staying for a second, or seventh, Tomatini in the sunshine).
This article was originally published on Forbes.com