📍 Added in March: Chinatown used to be a village of nighthawks, but only Old Town still caters to the outcasts, late-night revellers and post-shift chefs. The best food here has the tenor of a midnight snack: ho fun in slippery egg sauce, salted egg yolk chicken wings; spicy golden leaf seafood fragrant with lemongrass. It is also infamous for its absurd off-menu dishes for students with iron stomachs, like LSE rice: pork belly in honey and pepper egg sauce, with egg fried rice and a fried egg.

📍 Added in March: Fifty years after it opened, Mandarin Kitchen is still full of diners of different nationalities and classes, all here for seafood: salt and pepper baby squid, steamed scallops and, of course, lobster noodles. It invented the modern version of lobster noodles, served together. These noodles, glistening with lobster, ginger and scallion, tossed in their own clear juices and portioned out with skill, remain a piece of theatre on par with anything at The Ritz.

📍 Added in March: Cloud Land’s statement dish is written on the menu as Yunnan spicy chicken, a fierce braise of on-the-bone chicken shrapnel whose heat is tempered by Yunnanese black cardamom, which infuses a frankincense smokiness throughout the dish. Some of the best food here is labelled Dai-style, like a minced beef dish stir-fried hard with chillies, culantro and wild peppercorns that has the clear, piercing quality of being drawn and quartered that you normally get from a good laab.

📍 Added in March: It is a miracle to have dim sum of this quality on King’s Cross Road; judging from the queues, everyone else in London knows it. Chef Henry Chow, formerly of Royal China Club, runs the kitchen here, delivering dumplings every bit as good as at his alma mater. To avoid the queue, try to get here just before it closes, or go to the new branch. The reward is the prawn and chive dumplings and the crispy-seafood-and-bean-curd-skin roll—two of my favourite dumplings in the city.

📍 Added in March: If you’re stuck on what to order at this East Ham Tamil canteen, whose menu runs longer than some religious texts, get the mini tiffin. It gives you a dosa whose edges taste like a toasted cheese crisp, a lightly spiced vada, two idli, a selection of chutneys, and pongal with the stiff consistency of rice pudding. Or get the south Indian thali with six faultless vegetable curries, which also contains my favourite bite here: plain white rice covered in a teaspoon of sweet ghee.

Antepliler’s döner has always been in the top echelon of London’s shaved meat rankings, but new developments on Green Lanes have propelled it to greater heights. A spate of openings specialising in yaprak döner have forced it to up its game, which has meant adding wood fire, removing the robot shavers and returning to hand carving. The result is döner for purists: modestly seasoned so the pure taste of beef comes through, gossamer thin and blistered in all the right places.

Dilpasand is the most complete Pakistani restaurant in London. It pulls together the Punjabi and Pashtun strands of the city’s Pakistani dining, but there are two Karachi homages on the menu that make it unique. The first is the gola kebab, each the size of a snooker ball, served on a laccha paratha. The second is the Behari boti, a dry lamb curry, so smoky it feels like it’s been infused with frankincense. I would sooner name a favourite limb than choose which one I prefer.

My favourite meatless dish in London might just be at Al Kareem, a Lahori sweet shop in Ilford that serves halwa puri on weekends amid an atmosphere of complete bedlam. It nails all four components of the dish: the burnt amber of semolina halwa, the earthiness of heavily spiced chana and the aniseed tang of potato curry, all bound together by the puri. Do not miss the dairy-based drinks: particularly the sweet lassi, whose curds make it as thick as an all-syrup Squishee.

At this sliver of a restaurant in Hackney, chef Mitchell Damota has a scholarly passion for the breadth and depth of Italian food. Just look at his passatelli—the missing link between pasta and sev—served with lentils, barely cooked lobster and its broth, or the frittatina, a discus-shaped omelette with the thinness of a British pancake. These dishes are at once homely and refined, proving these qualities are not mutually exclusive and that the best cooking is often both.

I love Sri Lankan Tamil food for its exuberance, its lack of concession to good taste and its casual violence on the palate. The best place to get it is still Gana in Harrow, where there are no subtle dishes, just a series of jabs and undercuts. Gana’s hot butter cuttlefish is, on a deep chemical level, tastier than any salt and pepper squid, while the rabbit and venison fries, dense, sticky and taken to the point of jerky, are the best subcontinental game cooking in town.

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.

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.

Go to Bentley’s if you’re one of those strange people attracted to every animal from the sea and are willing to pay for the best of them. Bentley’s may be famous for oysters, but you should also try whelks, the pauper’s oyster. They’re a fetish only seafood lovers have, served ice cold in their prehistoric shells; dense, with a firm snap. Get lobster, but where else, besides a Japanese izakaya, would you find herring milts, deep fried and devilled, as soft as a sweetbread.

Chet Sharma’s Mayfair restaurant goes beyond the grill, the karahi and the degh to take in the entirety of South Asian food culture, stretched and reworked like taffy in a fairground machine into something entirely new. Sharma’s absolute command of acidity runs through the menu: rasams with tomato water, nimbu pani as the citric element in a scallop dish, crescendoing with the almost shockingly lactic sauce that comes with his Lahori chicken.

We take Bocca for granted sometimes. How many truly great, dependable restaurants are there right in the centre of the city where you could conceivably take your mum, your wife or your lover (non-simultaneously)? The genius of Jacob Kenedy’s Italian restaurant is its eclectic regionality and the decision to do half-portions, which allows you to pick furrows through the menu: I love the suckling pig dish with grapes and vinegar, which I could imagine eating from a triclinium.

The best cooking at Max Rocha’s London Fields restaurant—whether Italian or Irish, anchovy fritti or mince on toast—shares the same quality: the no-nonsense simplicity of booting a clearance into row Z. You’ll find it in the onglet steak with the charred sear of a Whopper, or that mince on toast, which is nothing less than Worcestershire sauce’s final form. Unadornment is a virtue here, which is why Cecilia is one of the few restaurants that understand breakfast.

Joo Won used to be the head chef at Galvin at Windows but swapped it for a cramped restaurant where he investigates the shared architecture of Korean and French food. Won asks: What if you served jjamppong as a bouillabaisse, with a scoop of aioli, or tried to infuse an onglet steak with the intensity of bulgogi? For the most part, the answer is delicious food. Desserts by Won’s partner are a particular strength, each one delivering more than promised.

Middle-aged restaurant writers with a time machine only want one thing: to go to Harvey’s in 1987 when Marco Pierre White was cooking. Chez Bruce is the closest we have, occupying the same space and continuing a technique-led lineage: a sweetbread croquette that honours a veal chateaubriand; an impossibly rich stuffed trotter (taken from Marco, taken from Pierre Koffmann). Fay Maschler once said that Bruce, for its consistency, is more impressive than Harvey’s. I believe her.

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.

This “Asian-inspired” smash burger joint in Victoria is a rich text: American burgers, Turkish ownership, a Japanese name, Dubai aesthetic, high proximity to King Charles’s house. The Isaan burger is inedible, but the basic smash burger is great, with golden-ratio proportions of meat, cheese, gherkins, ketchup and mustard, and the Sichuan chicken burger has enough fragrant, numbing oil to activate your salivary glands. These two burgers justify the entire enterprise.

Other cities’ Koreatowns usually visually dominate the urban landscape that was previously there, but London’s cannot escape being New Malden. This bland, office-worker suburbia is still the best place to get Korean food, and Imone’s homestyle cooking is the best of the best. Just the carefully modulated banchan is worth the journey, with the saengseon jjim—whiting with chrysanthemum greens—a highlight from the mains. Check the menu on the wall for specials if you read hangul.

If all you want from a menu is a succession of snacks, then this is the place for you. Although its specialty is a very decent version of moqueca, I’ve always found the best things are the starters, like acarajé served with vatapá and dried prawns, or torresmo, undersold on the menu as “pork scratchings” but really huge chunks of perfectly rendered fried pork belly. This is perfect drinking food, to be eaten with one of the three Cs: caipirinhas, cachaça or ice-cold Chopp.

There are two chippies in London who fry in beef fat: One is the Fryer’s Delight, whose reputation is better than its food; the other is Knight’s in West Norwood. Knight’s, run by couple Gary and Debbie, is by far the better option and maybe the only chip shop in London that could cure northern homesickness: It’s clear in everything from the beefy tang of the chips, so heady that Diptyque should bottle it, to the unfeasibly low price of a cod-and-chips special. Leave room for a Spam fritter.

The calling card of this Colombian restaurant was given to its owner, Maria-Luisa Riascos Solis, by one of her chefs: a recipe for pica pollo, or Dominican fried chicken. The smallest version here is five pieces of chicken with a thick jacket of batter that, on its death throes in the oil, has twisted and spluttered into dark brown curlicues. On the weekend, you’ll find the restaurant packed, and, inevitably, a table of young men tackling the biggest pica pollo available.

This is owner Sameh Asami’s love letter to Damascus in the unlikely location of an industrial park. The design is like something out of a Syrian Wes Anderson film, from ornate chess sets used by old men and families alike to shelves of Arabic books that you can borrow to the jewel-hued rows of fruit preserves. Take a book, then sit down for Nabulseyeh knafeh, halawet el jibn (milk curds scented with rose water), and booza—Syrian ice cream, stretchy with mastic with a bracing pine flavor.

Recently, I arrived at a wake in Edmonton with no food to offer, so I made a detour to the Caribbean bakery Lincoln’s Patisserie to pick up its carrot cake. This is a cake that looks unassuming but reveals its brilliance in the mouth: the integrity of the crumb, the moistness of the interior, the balance of spice and sugar. After I left, I got a phone call from my dad asking me where the cake was from and that everyone at the wake was talking about it—it’s that kind of cake.

I’m not sure there’s a single noodle dish in the city I love eating more than the pork biang biang with tomato and egg at Guirong Wei’s Shaanxi restaurant, Master Wei. It’s an order for the indecisive, combining the caramel sweetness of the meat, the acidity of tomato, a coddled cloud of egg and perfectly al dente belt noodles. If there’s a dish I love almost as much, it’s Master Wei’s cool liang pi: the noodle equivalent of sticking your head in an ice-cold bath.

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.

My definition of a great restaurant is that it should do one thing better than anywhere else in the city. How then to describe Neco Tantuni in Enfield, which does three? First, the tantuni, small L-shaped wraps of meat, parsley, onion and a slick of meat fat and pickled chilies to tie it together. Then the yoghurtlu version, covered in tomato sauce and yoghurt and baked in the oven. And third, nut-brown kunefe, more buttery than sweet. This is a perfect restaurant.

People get misty-eyed about old London because they think it has disappeared, but it still exists and is sustained by the city’s new migrants, particularly every Sunday at Nine Elms. Amid illicit CD rips, you’ll find Ghanaian grilled rabbit, Brazilian pasteles, a Ukrainian and Polish duo doing pork rotisserie, and at least three Romanian stalls selling mici with unnecessary amounts of garlic sauce. Get a funnel cake and sugar cane juice and you have all the fun of the fair.

Mezedes at Palmers Green tavernas can be a chore: too many dips that bloat you out before the fish arrives. At Nissi, though, everything is timed to the second, from the dips and veg (fasolakia that actually tastes of the bean; salty, intense tarama) to the hot starters (a globe of kolokithokeftedes that collapses like a soufflé; unimprovable calamari). The fish course is a barnstormer, featuring a skewer of swordfish so burnished by the grill the char forms a second skin.

At Oslo Court, an absurd cream puff of a restaurant on the ground floor of a housing block in St John’s Wood, the food itself is a bystander to the experience. This is a place for those with unearned nostalgia for how things were: where Melba toast comes unbidden and the most avant-garde main is steak Diane. If the legendary septuagenarian waiter Neil Heshmat is on duty, recommending the best dessert on his trolley, Oslo Court reaches some kind of perfection.

There are fine-dining menus that feel like a very expensive and convoluted way for a chef to show off that they can cook more precisely than other chefs, and others that feel like all their knowledge has gone toward understanding the finer points of making things taste good. Seb Myers’s Planque is the latter, a wine club with a Parisian sensibility but completely London. The cooking is both hedonistic and cerebral, but the desserts are fully silly—three ice cream sundaes in various guises.

The vegan constraints of Kirk Haworth’s tiny Shoreditch restaurant are never forced. Rather, Haworth treats “no meat, no dairy” like any chef treats their own code: as something that enables the creation of new things. Tasting menus need to offer surprise, and there are dishes here that have utterly confounded me: from laminated brioche that made me temporarily forget about the existence of butter to a whole host of chthonic mushrooms that tasted like God’s little mistakes.

Originally a way to use up dead space, Quality Wines has surpassed its sibling next door, the Quality Chop House, thanks to chef Nick Bramham’s intimate understanding of deliciousness. Bramham knows that it's dependent on the smallest details: the exact elasticity of his focaccia; the balance of the chili, olive, and anchovy gilda, as perfect as a quadratic equation; and the sandwiches, taken with a magpie’s eye from around Europe and the U.S. As suggested by the name, the wine is excellent too.

I rarely feel the tectonic plates of London dining shifting beneath my feet as I eat, but I felt it the first time I went to Sabiib in Acton: a Somali restaurant that has set a template for the kind of generous, pan-Muslim dining that the Turkish ocakbaşi did 40 years ago. The food has thankfully not been yassified: It’s the same aunty/uncle-cooked Somali classics—beef suqaar, lamb shoulder that shrugs off its bone—done with access to a high-end kitchen and great decor.

The stews at this kitchen are not brown fare for winter. Instead they show the range of aromatics and colour in Iranian khoresh: the cinnabar of barberries, the verdant forest green of fresh herbs, and the petroleum sheen of those that are long cooked in tamarind. There is one colour the owner Monem Hoseyni prizes above all others: saffron. Its hazy warmth animates stews, rices, and the ice cream, scooped onto frozen noodles, that you should finish your meal with.

The sandwich is a British institution that has been perfected elsewhere, so finding a good one is often cause for celebration. One of the best is located at Scotti’s, an old-school Italian café on Clerkenwell Green run by brothers Al and Max Scotti. The cutlet is one of the few in the city that is fried to order, and Scotti’s understands that when this is done fresh, all it needs is lemon juice, some raw onion, and “Slim Shady” (M&M: mustard and mayo). About 25 are made a day—get there early.

This exceptional Ivorian restaurant run by couple Lynda Beble and Brice Assemian should, by rights, be in Paris. Yet luckily it’s here in Brockley, where it’s putting out some of the most skillful meat and fish cooking going on in the city: croaker in a deep-fried chain mail of skin, lamb and guinea fowl suffused with woodsmoke, brisket in sauce graine (a gothic palm-nut soup), and the soupe du pêcheur, a Satanic bouillabaisse of fish, crab, and prawn, ruddy with chili.

There is a version of Woongchul Park and Bomee Ki’s Korean restaurant that I would eat at every week. It would involve a large portion of Park’s sot-bap, which arrives seething with a layer of crispy rice, then a course of Ki’s magical desserts and Korean teas, ending with an oozing black sesame madeleine. However, this is London, so this restaurant doesn’t exist—Sollip has to be content with a Michelin star, and I have to be content with Sollip being a once-a-year treat.

There are now many good tacos in London, but Michelle Salazar de la Rocha and Sam Napier’s Sonora is the only London taqueria that passes the ultimate test: Would I stake the city’s reputation on bringing the most annoying American person I know there? The aggressive caramelisation on the carne asada, the sticky, concentrated jus of the cabeza, the translucency of the tortillas—these small touches are reminders that great taco makers have the same skill-set as miniaturists.

There are two St. John experiences. There is the Smithfield mothership, frozen in time, a museum exhibit of bone marrow. But at Bread and Wine, the ethos and the menu are more living, breathing things, freer to move with the times. The best food here blends the spartan philosophy set down by Fergus Henderson with head chef Farokh Talati’s eclecticism, seeing how far that ethos stretches before its breaking point. One menu even had bulgur on it.

The suya at Suya Academy is a full-head experience, the combination of searing yaji, crispy fat and heat from the live-fire grill creating rivulets in the mouth, starting a drum solo in your skull, and almost sending it into fight-or-flight mode. Start with the tozo, with creamy fat on the verge of too much, like the sweetness in a ripe jackfruit, and then move on to guinea fowl or a side of goat rib with a crunchy bark that looks like something you might find at a tannery.

A dinner at Takahashi starts with seven courses of snacks prepared behind a curtain by Nobuhisa Takahashi, like a perfectly set shot of porcini-and-kombu chawanmushi with a layer of melted Parmesan, a dish that is to umami as the espresso is to bitterness. Then Taka comes out and makes sushi: wild salmon from the Faroe Islands, the butterfat of a torched Hokkaido scallop, a maki roll of smoked radish with tuna so finely chopped that it’s almost an emulsion.

Anyone can make a curry, but making roti is a vocation. At this new Trini takeaway from the team who started Clapham’s legendary Roti Joupa, Vash Mathura rolls them to the thickness of two playing cards, pliant enough that they hold the split pea mixture and don’t rip. Fill the roti with mixed veg, add a macaroni pie—tangy with tamarind and a jolt of black pepper—plus doubles (a Venn diagram of fried bara and chana), and you have one of the best vegetarian meals money can buy.

I have had many Jamaican dumplings in my life: dumplings as big as softballs, dumplings that could do grievous bodily harm. However, give me 50 dumplings in a line-up and I could spot the one from The Bread of Life: an Escher braid, gossamer light with a sugar-snap coating. Every time I have one, I think: No one is doing it like this. A peanut porridge, warm with nutmeg, and a dumpling—this is as perfect a breakfast as the city has to offer.

The classic bistro cooking of Neil Borthwick suits The French House as it moves into its Soho grande dame era: some parfaits, rillettes and pates; a scallop drowning in garlic butter and lifted by fragrant shards of Périgord truffles; a truly excellent, bronzed confit duck with lentils that Michael Winner might have once called ‘historic’; madeleines—even better, more bien cuit than St. John’s. A lot of sweat goes into making a restaurant like this look so effortless.

Don’t worry about directions: On Whitehorse Road, the smoke from Tasty Jerk’s extraction hits you from a mile away if the wind catches it right. This is London’s best jerk and maybe best barbecue, full stop: You can taste decades’ worth of seasoned black drums, soot, char, and petroleum on the skin of the jerk pork, which shatters in the mouth, then the long, careful cooking of the meat, the marinade that goes down into the bone. This is London heritage that should be protected by UNESCO.

A recent meal here cooked by Shaun Searley contained every known shade of brown, plus a few that QCH must have invented: a game broth that tastes like Bovril if you gave it a knighthood; grouse with a mottled, mahogany breast; brown bread fried in something unholy; plum jam the colour of sin, a scoop of liver parfait that sits atop like chestnut gelato; more gravy. If you want to feel like a boy being fattened up by a witch in a Brothers Grimm tale, nothing else will do.

The Ritz serves French food as only an outsider would. There are canapés with the kind of astonishing detailing usually reserved for the transepts of Roman cathedrals; glossy sauces enriched with butter, armagnac and blood. As waiters scurry back and forth with the insouciance of a Pina Bausch dance, and crêpes Suzettes go up in a column of brandy-induced flame, you might wonder if any other restaurant has such a complete understanding of hospitality as theatre.