Joel Hart

Every week, a frankly silly amount of brilliant new restaurants, cafés and street food joints arrive in London. Which makes whittling down a shortlist of the best newbies a serious challenge. But here it is. The 20 very best new restaurants in the capital, ranked in order of greatness and deliciousness. All of them have opened in the past year and been visited by our hungry critics. So go forth and take inspo from this list, which is updated regularly. Check in often to find out what we really rate on the London restaurant scene. And look here for all the info about the best new openings in December. London's best new restaurants at a glance: 🍛 Central: Khao Bird, Soho 🍠 North: Ling Ling’s, Islington 🥟 South: Doma, Sydenham 🍝 East: Legado, Shoreditch 🥗 West: Martino’s, Chelsea December 2025: New additions include slinky Italian Martino's in Chelsea, cosy Chinese cuisine at Ling Ling's at Godet in Islington, Hunanese heat at Fiery Flavors in Surrey Quays, Sri Lankan fast food at Adoh! in Covent Garden, Caribbean classics with a twist at 2210 by NattyCanCook in Herne Hill, perfect pasta at Casa Felicia in Queen's Park, Thai BBQ at Khao Bird in Soho, and Thai soup noodles at Khao So-i in Fitzrovia. Hungry yet? Leonie Cooper is Time Out London’s Food and Drink Editor. For more about how we curate, see our editorial guidelines. RECOMMENDED: The 50 best restaurants in London. The hottest new openings, the tastiest tips, the spiciest reviews: we’re serving it all on our Lond

December 2025: Our latest update to this list sees the addition of new Fitzrovia bistro, Khao So-i, which impressed with its Northern Thai coconut curry noodles. Som Saa has also been added back into the Top 20 - the much-loved Spitalfields spot has just reopened after closing earlier in 2025 due to a fire.  London’s best Thai restaurants at a glance:  🍴 Best for Michelin star cuisine: AngloThai, Marylebone 🔥 Best for fiery flavour: Kiln, Soho  🍹 Best for a boozy dinner: Speedboat Bar, Chinatown + Notting Hill 🍺 Best for a pub meal: Khun Pakin Thai, Hammersmith 🇹🇭 Best for southern Thai cuisine: Kolae, Borough  Thai cuisine is one of the world’s most complex. It can deliver relentless, tongue-chest-and-stomach-busting fireworks for serious chilli-chasers, but harmoniously balance these formidable levels of heat with sweet, salty, umami, sour, and bitter tones. It does all of this whilst showing off a vast repertoire of zesty, herbal, and pungent aromatics. With its blend of fresh, grilled and richly stewed dishes and palate-journeying energy, a Thai meal is a thrilling game of contrasts.  For Londoners, chasing the ecstatic heights Thai food can offer has never been a more viable pursuit, with London’s Thai-obsessed British chefs behind the acclaimed likes of Begging Bowl, Som Saa, Farang, and Smoking Goat. The increasing diversification of Thai food has also meant greater attention to hyper-regional cooking. Northern Thai spots have clustered around Hammersmith, whi

Lebanese food has been available in London for roughly a half century, with Fakhreldine opening in Mayfair in the 1970s and the first branch of Maroush on Edgware Road in 1981. While there is still plenty of decent Lebanese fare on Edgware Road, it is further west in Park Royal, that some of the best Lebanese – and Middle Eastern food in general – can now be found. But what is Lebanese cuisine anyway? And what makes it distinct from Syrian or Palestinian food? In the late 1990s, when the Arab world’s first TV chef Ramzi Choueiri began chronicling rural culinary traditions across Lebanon, a more coherent nationalist idea of the cuisine emerged, while the urban restaurant culture of Beirut was exported across global cities with an idea of Lebanese cuisine as a uniquely elegant take on Middle Eastern cuisine. While this image of Lebanese food has stuck, it is at its core characterised by the Arabic saying baynatna khubz wa-milih (between us there is bread and salt). In other words, it is food to be eaten communally; dishes to be shared. The interesting thing about Lebanese restaurants in London is that the differences between menus can be so subtle they’re hard to notice. Menus are often organised the same way: cold mezze, hot mezze, and then mains, often organized into stewed dishes and charcoal grill items. So the differences can be put down to three things. First, service style. At the more upmarket end of the spectrum, home-baked pita or taboun bread are served over industr

It’s March 2018. A severe cold snap has passed, Theresa May is battling Brexit dissent, and a whole turbot, kissed by flames, begins its slow, smoky transformation in a Shoreditch restaurant kitchen. While certainly not the first Basque restaurant in London – Donostia opened in 2012, and Sagardi in 2016 – few of us could have imagined how far Brat would transform British cooking.  Fast forward to 2025, and British dining has embraced influences from Spain’s Basque Country – a fiercely proud region straddling the Bay of Biscay in the north – with remarkable intensity. London leads the charge, with Tomos Parry’s Mountain — his second Basque-inspired venture after Brat — named the UK’s second-best restaurant at the 2024 National Restaurant Awards, just a year after its July 2023 opening. Photograph: Benjamin McMahonBrat The Basque boom continued to dominate the capital last year with Ibai’s swanky debut in Farringdon, while Tollington’s in Finsbury Park brought a playful mix of Basque, Catalan and ‘Spanglish’ cuisine to a former fish and chip shop. Meanwhile, restaurants like Lita and Oma — though not explicitly Basque — earned Michelin stars for similar wood-fired grilling techniques. Bar Valette by two-Michelin-starred Isaac McHale opened in early 2025, continuing the trend, while Basque chef residences and pop-ups like Topa and Gorka proliferate across the city, with the now-shuttered Whyte’s running a full Basque menu last summer.  But the movement extends far beyond Londo

In a Fitzrovia basement, 100kg of coconut is pressed over three hours every morning. Above, a frenetic dining room. The engine of Khao-So-i is running, but some cogs need oiling before the machine hums. Or perhaps the mayhem – complete with a soundtrack of Thai rap over noughties R&B and hip-hop – is precisely the point. Khao-So-i is the brainchild of Win Srinavakool, a self-taught Chiang Mai chef who ditched his career as a travel agent to reinvent the khao soi shop – casual eateries serving Northern Thai coconut curry noodles. Four Bangkok locations followed, but this London outpost is his most ambitious move yet. The flavours are constantly novel and the textures varied throughout Dim-lit, earth-toned, and wood-panelled, the tables are centred around a mildly pyrotechnic open kitchen, which emanates contrasting brightness, steam and aura. The chaotic flair fits seamlessly in central London, but the food is so engaging that it wouldn’t matter if they hadn’t thought about ambiance at all. The flavours are constantly novel, and the textures varied throughout – especially when you take the gap khao approach – Thailand’s mix-and-match style of eating. The first bite is grilled Norfolk pork moo ping, tender and caramelised to an exacting, gentle sweetness. Then comes pla som – butterflied sea bream, cured before cooking, with a silken, subtly smoky flesh and an inexplicably complex flavour. A glass of tensile, smoky Chablis bursts and mesmerises alongside both of them. Tum khan

London’s most-loved Thai restaurant has relocated to Shoreditch. For anyone who managed to score a booking at the Leytonstone original, the move is surreal. For years, the rumour mill spun tales of a high-investment relaunch — but it was impossible to imagine Singburi outside its tiny, low-ceilinged, bathroom-through-the-kitchen home. Cult dishes have been revamped and feel even more accomplished The new location sits under a railway arch. It’s a fresh, pared-back space with a stainless steel bar, open kitchen, terracotta and clay-pink tiles, and tangerine-hued lights and tables. Gone is the ornate blue china, replaced with pastel plates you might recognise from the likes of Speedboat Bar or (crucially) Bangkok. Singburi 2.0 will be navigating a balancing act of nostalgia and renewal for a while. It now competes directly with the likes of Kolae, Plaza Khao Gaeng, Smoking Goat and Kiln (some chefs have already made the move). So what remains of Singburi 1.0? Some cult dishes haven’t made the jump. There’s no moo krob, salted fish rice, or stir-fried clams yet. Apart from the cabbage – which remains the same and is fine – those that have been revamped feel even more accomplished. The fiery yet refreshing watermelon salad now stars peak-season strawberries and enough umami-rich pork floss and mint to instigate thrilling contrasts from multiple directions. A tiger prawn and cucumber curry is as good as any seafood dish from the original. The crustaceans are conveniently split in