The best restaurants in Soho

A small, unshowy restaurant that’s made a name for itself with a short but perfectly formed menu and an easy-going conviviality. Dishes are seasonal and it’s good value for money. Tables are closely packed and in the evening it can get noisy, but otherwise it’s hard to fault the place. Adept, friendly staff are a further plus. If you can’t handle the no-booking policy at dinner, bookings are accepted for lunch.

Alan Yau’s Turkish pizza (aka ‘pide’) place is set over two levels. Sit on the ground floor if you want pizza action, with the chefs working the huge pizza oven with their wooden peels; head for the first floor if you’d like more space. The excellent pizzas wouldn’t be out of place in Istanbul, but Babaji also covers many Turkish signature dishes. For anyone making a night of it, there’s also a list of good Turkish wines. 

Though based on Taiwanese street food dishes, the kitchen pushes far beyond those boundaries. The restaurant’s name derives from gua bao: fluffy white steamed buns, in this case filled with braised pork, sprinkled with peanut powder. Other sorts of bao (bun) are more slider-like. Yet buns are only half the story. Xiao chi (small eats) are given equal prominence, and the drinks list (sakés, artisanal ciders, well-matched beers, chilled foam tea and hot oolong teas) is distinguished. 

The move from Frith Street to a new home alongside the Hart Brothers’ Quo Vadis hasn’t dented Barrafina’s allure – or shortened the seemingly endless queues outside this no-bookings star of London’s tapas scene. Fans still clamour for perches at the L-shaped marble counter, while the chefs continue to dole out dazzlers such as oozing tortillas and milk-fed lamb’s sweetbreads to go with picks from a knockout list of Spanish wines and sherries.

Here’s a delightful distraction in the heart of Soho – a French fantasy complete with stripped furniture, objects d’art and a menu that’s as Gallic as ‘La Marseillaise’. Whether you fancy a slab of pissaladière (a pizza-like onion tart) or a mighty helping of beef bourguignon, the cooking is all about fine ingredients and bourgeois sensibilities. Thankfully, the genial French-speaking staff are quite unlike their more brusque Parisian counterparts.

Lavish, ostentatious, excessive – in other words a whole lotta fun, Bob Bob Ricard is an outlandish one-off for those who want to impress business colleagues or hot dates. Louche Roaring Twenties decor sets the scene for an indulgent menu of international comfort food with a Russian slant – borscht, fish pie, chicken kiev etc. Just press the champagne buzzer if you’re running low on bubbly.

The buzz is as important as the food at Jacob Kenedy and Victor Hugo’s enduringly popular restaurant. Dine at the bar and you’re in for a fun time – especially if you sit by the window, where you can watch celebs swan into the clamorous dining room. The menu is a (slightly confusing) jumble of small and large plates celebrating the best of artisan regional Italian cooking – all supported by an enticing selection of cocktails and an impressive all-Italian wine list.

Like a breath of sea air wafting through a Soho side street, Bonnie Gull mixes the brand’s now-familiar bucket-and-spade seaside aesthetic with some ritzy urban touches – swathes of marble, modish brass light fittings and so on. Fastidiously fresh fish is the kitchen’s forte, from palourde clams with ‘nduja and samphire to Brixham plaice with beurre noisette and capers. Really affable service seals the deal.

A beautiful blast from the past on twentieth-century Shaftesbury Avenue, Café Monico comes on like a swanky grand café from the belle époque era – complete with a covetable upstairs gallery overlooking the action. The music’s loud and jazzy, service is sharp and the menu offers up a greatest-hits selection of French brasserie fare with continental add-ons – from confit chicken leg to sachertorte (that’s a banging Austrian chocolate torte). Bravo!