Every Michelin star restaurant in London for 2024

Pulling largely from the cuisines of Nigeria, Ghana and Senegal, Akoko offers a ten-course tasting menu with head chef Ayo Adeyemi in the driving seat. From the opening cocktail – a sweet and zippy cacao and date Negroni, to a pudding of Ghanaian bofrot doughnuts decorated with elegant flowers – it’s no giddy exaggeration to say that everything at Akoko is spectacular and packed full of huge flavours. Yam croquettes, miyantaushe pumpkin stew, scotch-bonnet pepper soup and jollof rice will have you in raptures. Bliss on many, many plates. 

Specialising in stylish pan-Indian tapas, sleek, clubby Amaya struts its stuff for well-heeled Belgravia types with inquisitive palates and deep pockets. Ask for a table by the theatrical open kitchen, where you can watch the chefs manning their battery of tandoors, tawa skillets and sigri grills. Service is as smooth as silk, and the sexy cocktail bar hots up as the evening wears on.

Michelin-starred seafood cookery is the lure at this swanky City restaurant on the seventh floor of the South Place Hotel. The food’s ultra-modern, technically excellent and impeccably crafted – a perfect fit for the dining room’s sophisticated vibe and gleaming monochrome interiors. It’s not the most daring restaurant in town, but the combination of consistent cooking and ultra-polished service is bang-on for the City’s expense-account crowd.

A 12-seater 'experimental' kitchen from chef Simon Rogan MBE, which opened in 2017 and prides itself on its farm-to-fork ethos; the farm being Rogan's own bucolic wonderland in the Lake District, where you'll also find his acclaimed L’Enclume restaurant.

This 18-seater chef’s table experience scored its star within 20 days of opening back in 2020. If you think that's impressive, wait until you try the tasting menu from Andy Beynon – a former development chef for Jason Atherton – which highlights sustainable seafood. The menu changes seasonally but expect Iced Gem-alike pea, mint and pike tarts, devastatingly clean pieces of raw mackerel, and a warm cups of wine infused with prawn.

A longstanding favourite for Indian fine dining, Benares sacked chef-patron Atul Kochhar in 2018 (over anti-Islamic tweets directed at the actress Priyanka Chopra). As a result of the disgraced chef’s departure, the restaurant saw its star rating removed. Now it’s back to one-star glory with chef Sameer Taneja on the pans. The kitchen produces modern cooking in the haute-cuisine league across its à la carte and six-course tasting menu. 

The first London spot from Welsh whizz-kid Tomos Parry (he followed it up with Mountain in Soho in 2023) is brilliant; service is switched-on, you feel like you’re right there in the kitchen, and the food is full-frontal, no-frills stuff from the wood-fired grill – including a show-stopping dish of turbot (aka ‘brat’) cooked Basque-style in an iron cage. Small plates and wines by the glass add to the all-round fun. 

A tasting menu for £65? Yes please. And not a starched tablecloth in sight. Instead, it’s a place serving a cutting-edge line-up of seven small courses, plus freebies (bread, petits fours). All in a single Hackney dining room. Dishes are the surprisingly, relentlessly ambitious kind, with the kitchen led by ex-Pidgin head chef Adolfo de Cecco. Quite simply, one of the best-value tasting-menus in town.

Promising low-key glamour in high-rise surroundings (the twenty-fourth floor of Tower 42, to be precise), City Social is one of super-chef Jason Atherton’s more conservative ventures – a go-to for City suits wanting to impress or let off steam. The gorgeous, sexy space comes with all-enveloping wraparound views and the cooking is all about precision-tuned contemporary flavours – from pretty-pretty salads to slabs of beefy protein.

Chez Bruce may not be especially original, but it’s reliable and one of Wandsworth’s prime neighbourhood assets. The look is a study in classic (if slightly dated) restaurant decor but the cooking is timeless, led decisively by the Franco/European school without much deference to culinary fads. Expect big-boned muscular flavours supported by one of the finest wine lists in the capital.

Joké Bakare's independent West African restaurant started life after the chef won a contest to stage a Brixton Village pop-up – and at the end of 2023 she set up shop in Fitzrovia, serving a sensational tasting menu of sinasir rice cake with white crab meat, moi moi bean cake with creamy duck egg sauce, fragrant pepper soup and guinea fowl with taro root, ehuru and uziza sauce. She's now the first black female Michelin star chef in the UK and the second in the world. An icon. 

Duck, foie gras and the flavours of main man Pascal Aussignac’s native Gascony point up this serene Michelin-starred homage to French regional cuisine – although there’s also a lighter side to the cooking these days with veggie (‘garden’) plates now sitting alongside their heftier meat-based bedfellows. Cosy up amid the heavy wooden screens and marble-clad panels with a bottle from the stonking Provence-inspired wine list.   

This large, ruggedly handsome restaurant turns out dishes – with a special emphasis on seafood – that are meticulous and restrained. When you consider who’s behind all this, it’s no surprise. Chef-owner Tom Brown is Cornish and trained under the acclaimed Nathan Outlaw (a Cornish seafood maestro). This is quiet finesse, in a genuinely buzzy, attractive space, and wherever you sit, you’ll feel like part of the action.

Housed in east London’s Blue Mountain School, you have to ring a bell to enter this hidden drawing room-style restaurant with a kitchen led by Theo Clench, a chef who’s worked at a slew of Michelin-starred spots including Trinity, Clove Club and Portland. Welcome drinks and a first course are served in the bar before you tuck into the rest of the surprise meal in the intimate dining room. You can even eat one of the dishes in the kitchen. Be warned: you’ll have to book well in advance here, with new reservations released a couple of months in advance. 

A 'bistro for locals', is how Notting Hill's Dorian has billed itself since opening in 2022, and this Talbot Road joint is all about excellent steak, stunning red wine and solid sharing plates. When it comes to cookery, its one of the simpler places flagged by the Michelin lot, but the quality is up there. 

Located between Petersham Nurseries and the Petersham Hotel in the verdant expanses of Richmond Park, this ornate-looking former pub is now the culinary domain of former Roux Scholar Kenneth Culharne – a chef who cares about provenance. Seasonal ingredients, rare-breed meats, heritage vegetables and sustainable fish are the building blocks for a roster of high-end contemporary dishes with the odd Japanese nuance. 

You know the score: meticulously presented high-end food served in warm low-lit surrounds with a suitably hefty price tag. However, the fact that Elystan Street is fronted by Phil Howard (ex-The Square) may persuade you to give this sleek Chelsea rendezvous a go. In return, you’ll be rewarded with a roster of immaculately crafted, Euro-accented dishes backed by big-ticket wines.

Sushi fans: gather round. Endo is not like any other omakase restaurant (omakase being the ‘chef’s selection’: like a tasting menu, but more personal). At least, not like one you’ll find in this city. Endo Kazutoshi is a third-generation ‘sushi master’, who introduces most of the dishes – all of which are dazzling.

The intimate 12 seater counter, led by head chef James Goodyear, serves a monthly-changing seasonal set menu that’s sure to blow your socks off. Hidden away in the basement of The Blue Posts pub in Chinatown, this small but mighty place is not to be missed. 

A bijou Chelsea spot and a showcase for chef-proprietor Taylor Bonnyman’s gloriously fresh flavoured food – much of it from British growers, fishermen and his own gardens in East Sussex (his gardener used to work for Raymond Blanc). Intriguing flavour combos such as ‘sea and earth’ just beg to be tried, and desserts include some wonderfully playful sweet/savoury riffs. You’ll want to try the cocktails and global wines too.  

Brother Jeff’s patch of the Galvin siblings’ empire, La Chapelle, is an awe-inspiring architectural behemoth with ecclesiastical overtones and a menu of impressively rendered modern French cuisine. Service is as smooth as béarnaise, with staff on hand to suggest champagne aperitifs, point out the menu’s signature dishes (lasagne of Dorset crab sounds too good to refuse) and advise which bottle of Hermitage La Chapelle to choose.

Gaze around the Goring Hotel’s plush dining room as bow-tied waiters glide serenely by and imagine you’re back in the Edwardian era – mobile phones are most unwelcome here. The decor has been updated while preserving the refinement and understated luxury of the vintage interior – although the food is anything but stuffy, with highly sophisticated interpretations of British classics outshining more outré ideas.

Is it a pub? Is it a restaurant? In truth, this upmarket Fulham boozer is a bit of both – although with a serious wine list and a Michelin star to its name, we know where its priorities lie. Seasonal bags of furred and feathered game receive special attention, whether you’re noshing in the chunkily furnished dining room or boozing and snacking at the bar.

Part of a hugely ambitious three-storey project off Piccadilly, Ollie Dabbous’s latest gaff is on a different scale to his bijou self-named Fitzrovia debut. ‘Below’ is the bar, ‘Above’ is the restaurant where the chef serves up a signature tasting menu – eight dazzling courses bursting with excitement for the tastebuds and visual mischief. To drink? Consult the leather-bound iPad for access to some 6,000 bottles courtesy of Dabbous’s backers, Hedonism Wines.

Young and dedicated head chef Angelo Sato's omakase of 13 immaculate East Asian-rooted dishes pivots from seafood mastery that’s nigh on hallucinogenic to a quirky bao and a miso sesame butter and smooth chicken liver parfait. Sato's done time under the great Clare Smyth when she was at Restaurant Gordon Ramsay, and was then head chef at Tom Sellers’ Restaurant Story in Southwark. It shows. 

Mayfair's Humo does things differently. Exec chef Miller Prada mixes up Japanese cooking techniques with his Colombian heritage and cooking is done on a four-metre long grill. There's no electricity or gas here, just pure fire and a smattering of smoke. Try the 11-day aged Brixham turbot with geotropa mushroom, barley koji, sea buckthorn, and Humo mole.

For more than 20 years, Malaysian-born Bernard Yeoh and his team have been teasing Londoners with their ‘liberated’ take on Chinese cuisine in an exotic Mayfair dining room that exudes confidence. The kitchen shows its inventive streak from the off and the momentum never dips, while accommodating staff also get our vote. This being Mayfair, Kai’s culinary liberation obviously comes at a high price. 

For understated Michelin-starred charm, look no further than Kitchen W8. This dining room exudes refinement with its orderly white table linen and smooth, unstuffy service. Diners in the know come for the pedigree: founding partner Philip Howard is co-owner of the Ledbury in Notting Hill. The menu is modern English with a French complexity, its delicate mains featuring the finest seasonal ingredients. 

One of London’s most highly regarded Italian chefs, Giorgio Locatelli presides over this glamorous, well-groomed destination, allowing the dining room’s suave interiors to soothe his well-heeled clientele while his kitchen doles out food that deserves to be relished as well as admired. Superb hand-crafted pasta is the top shout, but everything screams quality. Wines offer a positively educational survey of Italy’s regions. 

Luca, a Clerkenwell Italian from the bods behind the Clove Club, is a classy joint. From the airy marble-clad bar section, to the lofty dining room and the faded-palazzo loos, it’s a handsome spot. This warmth extends to the menu: trad-rustic and occasionally finicky, this is upscale country comfort food. For slick cooking in design-mag surroundings, Luca ticks all the boxes.

Dinner at Lyle’s is a leisurely affair, so kick back, take in the understated interiors and chat to the sweet staff before getting stuck into some palate-dazzling food from one of the most talented cooks in town. Chef James Lowe regularly hits his mark when it comes to fine-tuned new-breed British cuisine. There’s no table-turning (hooray!), so stay as long as you like.

Tomos Parry's Brat in Shoreditch has already got a star, so it makes sense that Mountain would follow. His kitchens are synonymous with flame-cooked, Basque-ish cooking that’s both cutting edge and assuredly simplistic, and this Soho spot boasts an expansive, industrial-chic dining room, a downstairs bar and two open kitchens. The food is big on narrative with sobrasada made for Parry on an organic farm in Mallorca. Meat, sourced somewhere equally lovely, is butchered on-site downstairs.

We happen to think that Angela Hartnett’s flagship is Mayfair’s least stuffy fine-dining restaurant. Yes, there are beautifully dressed tables and carpets so thick you’d slip out of your shoes if only they were Manolo Blahniks, but the focus is resolutely on the good times: cue generous portions of big-flavoured Italian dishes, ferried by smiling, down-to-earth staff. (Psst: the set lunch is a steal.)

Tom Aikens opened Muse at the start of 2020 at a time when anything still felt possible. The 25-cover restaurant takes over a Georgian townhouse and serves dishes based on stories from Aikens’s own life experiences (yes, really). 

Big-name chef Jun Tanaka has been around for years, and this chic, contemporary venue in Fitzrovia is the ninth restaurant he has been involved in (geddit?). Although small plates with a French slant are the focus, the cooking doesn’t really lend itself to sharing-is-caring – still, Tanaka is a genius when it comes to pointing up flavours, creating harmonious marriages and making ingredients sing.

Tucked downstairs in the upscale Flemings Mayfair hotel, this restaurant was reimagined in 2021 with hot-young-chef-du-jour Sofian Msetfi at the helm. Ormer offers a true-to-form tasting menu of expertly portioned dishes that are only a few mouthfuls each. Detailed dishes are swapped out every few weeks, with menu staples such as Ibérico ham jelly and cured Cornish mackerel. A sophisticated hotel haunt for serious foodies.

Another Michelin star for Yannick Alléno? Why not. After his new-ish London restaurant was honoured in February 2024, he now has 16 Michelin stars across 17 worldwide restaurants. It's all down to his adroit gastronomy, fondness for fermentation and coy way with cryoconcentration. Pavyllon is his first ever London restaurant and you'll find it inside Park Lane's Four Seasons, with French classics made with the best British ingredients. 

A womb-like room enveloped in shades of pearlescent pink and dusky greys, this Belgravia outpost of Gordon Ramsay’s empire is famed for its centrepiece circular wine store holding vintages of titular Château Pétrus and much more besides. The food is all about indulgence and luxury ingredients.

A bijou Fitzrovia aristocrat, Pied à Terre trades on intimacy and purrs like a pedigree Persian cat. From sensational amuse-bouches onwards, the attention to detail is mightily impressive as the kitchen sends out wave after wave of stellar dishes that look a million dollars on the plate. Prices are top-end, but superb-value set lunches make this the perfect setting for tête-à-têtes, business-related or otherwise.

Midas-touch Jason Atherton’s Michelin-starred Mayfair flagship promises near-perfect fine dining without over-egging the formality. British ingredients form the backbone of a seasonal menu that picks up influences from Spain, Japan and elsewhere, while the setting speaks of smart, sleek and unfussy sophistication. Well-drilled staff are some of the most professional in the business, and the globetrotting wine list is a real corker.

This cool, pared-back and thoroughly grown-up Fitzrovia gem serves up bold, powerful and surprising food from its visible open kitchen. Diners congregate at bare Scandi-style tables for reasonably priced small plates and larger sharing dishes in the modern idiom – check the blackboard for the latest specials. Turn over the menu and you’ll find a list of ‘textbook’ and ‘leftfield’ wines, plus privately sourced single bottles.

It may look more like a bland business lounge than a top-end Indian culinary destination, but if you blot out the corporate hotel surrounds there’s much to enjoy here. Michelin-starred Quilon specialises in serving exquisite regional seafood from the subcontinent’s coastal southern provinces such as Kerala – although there’s also plenty for meat-eaters and veggies too. A comfortable refuelling point for residents and tourists.

Tucked away inside the Savoy, the 10-table Restaurant 1890 is so called as it harks back to the days of Escoffier who created so many of his famous dishes while busying himself in the kitchens at the hotel during the late Victorian era. But it's not all old-school delights here, with modern techniques and fancy flourishes courtesy of head honcho Gordon Ramsay.

This minimalist Scandi-style spot specialises in top-class seasonal produce sourced from around the British Isles, which it serves up on beautiful handmade crockery. You’ll find everything from Chinese water deer from Woburn to Cornish cuttlefish and Wiltshire truffles on its dinner menu, which is packed with punchy flavours. 

Set back from the Thames Path, the River Café is a riverside icon in its own right. Warm, buzzy and expensive (in a semi-casual way), it’s dedicated to serving unfussy yet stunning Italian food based on artisan seasonal ingredients. Okay, the prices are painful, but portions are generous – so go for a summer lunch, sit on the terrace, and live it large like an A-lister.

Chef John Williams MBE has presided over the unimaginably opulent Ritz restaurant since 2004, serving precision-tuned dishes (old and new) to punters ensconced in the Louis XVI-inspired dining room. Aside from the Michelin-starred food and all the gilt, what you are buying here is a conservative formula, complete with coat-tailed politesse, cloches, a tinkling piano and the reassurance that all remains unruffled in this privileged world.

Tapas fans prepare to cheer loudly. After years as executive chef at Barrafina, Spanish queen bee Nieves Barragán Mohacho is now presiding over her first solo gaff – a highly distinctive set-up spread over two floors (small-plate counter fun downstairs, regional wood-fired feasting upstairs). The food’s all-round flawless with a rustic edge: don’t swerve the plumped-up, just-runny salt-cod tortilla – it’s sheer eggy bliss.

This Californian restaurant sits on the former site of Rambla and comes from the very same chef, Victor Garvey. The name? It comes from ‘Soho via LA’, apparently. That translates to dishes like flambé native lobster and burnt figs with toasted buckwheat ice cream. 

The original ‘nose-to-tail’ pioneer and a Michelin-starred restaurant for those who flee from the very idea, St John is a defiantly casual, bare-bones kind of place with come-as-you-please decor and famously full-on cooking. Born-again British dishes are given a sophisticated spin that often belies their humble origins – we all know about that bone marrow and parsley salad. Powerful stuff, with French(!) wines providing unpatriotic support.  

Located within the 5-star 45 Park Lane Hotel, this is Mayfair sushi at Mayfair prices, with the omakase offering at Sushi Kanesaka priced at £420. Per person. That said, a meal at Sushi Kanesaka is special; an intimate, 13-seat restaurant with tradition and craftsmanship running through every element, with seventeen courses in total, each a work of art.

Taku is an extremely serious place. The front door is unbolted to let diners in, and then swiftly bolted again behind them. With a maximum of 16 covers perched along a light pine bar, this highly fancy omakase joint is headed up by chef Takuya Watanabe. Watanabe knows good fish (he used to be behind the counter at Jin, Paris’s first omakase to score a Michelin star). 

Balancing smart decor and smiling service with exemplary wines and cutting-edge Michelin-starred cooking, Trinity is king of the hill in Clapham – a restaurant that gets the swish/casual balance just right when it comes to creating a neighbourhood vibe. Chef-patron Adam Byatt knows how to put on a show without showboating his talents or puffing up his food. A dead-cert for special occasions and celebratory splurges.

They now have a string of hits to their name (think Gymkhana, Hoppers and Bao for starters), but this is where it all began for the all-conquering Sethi siblings. The setting is smart and quietly conservative, while the kitchen thrills punters with its interpretations of Indian regional cuisine – especially seafood from the south. And the thrills continue with Sunaina Sethi’s globetrotting wine list.  

Chiswick’s favourite ‘posh’ neighbourhood restaurant just keeps trundling on: the tables are still decked with starched white tablecloths and gleaming glassware, service is impeccably polished and the diners tend to be plummy-voiced locals with cash to splash. The revamped interior may have lost some of its original intimacy, but the cooking is as classy as ever – so too, the magnificent wine list.

It’s all about attention to detail at Yoshinori Ishii’s Japanese enclave, from the futuristic entrance to the chef’s handcrafted tableware and the procession of surgically precise, extraordinarily delicate dishes emanating from the kitchen. If you’re celebrating, go for the full-strength multi-course tasting menu highlighting the intricacies of Kyoto kaiseki cuisine. Be warned: prices will slice through your wallet as mercilessly as a samurai sword.

Proof that good things come to those who wait, the venerable Veeraswamy finally bagged a Michelin gong a mere 90 years after opening in 1926. If you’re expecting staid, however, think again: old Veera styles it out like Iris Apfel, with exotic colours, tinted lamps and turbans, not to mention some top-end, perfectly spiced food: we head straight for the signature dishes. The only thing that jars here is the cost.

The recently revamped Wild Honey at the Sofitel London St James is where all Londoners should immediately swarm to. Chef Anthony Demetre offers the finest seasonal British produce using contemporary French techniques. The best thing? It’s all about flavours, not frippery in glamorous and intimate setting.