Tom Howells

Head to Hackney and you've got a seriously exciting evening of dining ahead of you, as some of the city's boldest chefs have set up shop in this rapidly-gentrifying patch of east London. High-end restaurants sit alongside chic brunch spots, inviting gastropubs and long-established neighbourhood joints. Whatever you're after, you'll more than likely find it here. Go east(ish) and eat. New additions to the list include smoke and fire fun at Lagom, Michelin starry-ness at Behind, chef Abby Lee's incredible Mambow – which recently moved to Clapton from Peckham and canal-side standout, Sune.  Recommended: Here are London's 50 Best Restaurants. Leonie Cooper is Time Out London’s Food and Drink Editor. For more about how we curate, see our editorial guidelines.  

It's official: London is experiencing a fast-mushrooming plant-based restaurant boom. Across the city, creative chefs are showing off their prowess with plants, creating pitch-perfect imitations of meaty comfort food classics, or dreaming up new vegetable-based delights. Whether you're after a lavish night of culinary theatre, a delicate Middle Eastern spread, or a carb-coma-inducing full English breakfast, you'll find it in our list of London's best vegan restaurants. Read on and plan your next plant-free feast. RECOMMENDED: London’s best restaurants for vegetarian food. Leonie Cooper is Time Out London’s Food and Drink Editor. For more about how we curate, see our editorial guidelines.

Fancy a burger? Of course you do. The simple meat-between-bread combo is always a winner, whether for a quick fast-food fix or a decadent, gourmet feast. We’ve selflessly toiled away, trying and tasting a vast range of patties to compile this list of London’s best burgers. London’s finest are utter meaty marvels: juice-seeping, oozing with flavour and far more complex in creation than they’re ever given credit for. Roll up your sleeves and tuck in to the best flippin’ burgers in town. RECOMMENDED: These are London's best pizza restaurants. Leonie Cooper is Time Out London’s Food and Drink Editor. For more about how we curate, see our editorial guidelines.

Southampton has prospered into a fantastic seaside destination for a day out. Its proximity to the stunning New Forest, the historic town of Winchester and the quaint Isle of Wight have made it a go-to stopover in the past, but it is well worth a visit in its own right.  And that's largely thanks to its growing and increasingly confident food scene. The myriad of eateries, from incredible Mauritian dishes crafted by the hands of a MasterChef champion, to a swanky French dishes, and a popular pizza van. Here are our top picks for the best-rated restaurants in Southampton right now.  RECOMMENDED:🌤️The best things to do in Southampton🍂The best things to do in Winchester⛰️The best things to in the New Forest🏖️The best seaside towns in the UK💕The best things to do in the UK At Time Out, all of our travel guides are written by local writers who know their cities inside out. For more about how we curate, see our editorial guidelines.

Many relationships are founded on a well-curated dinner date – but what the hell makes a ‘romantic’ restaurant, anyway? Traditional metrics would suggest something a bit French and a bit floral, with dark corners for salacious doings. A safe bet, sure, but the UK’s brilliantly diverse dining scene means you can opt for something a little more original than that. If amorous appeal is in the eye of the beholder, then we’ve got the whole sordid gamut covered. From timeless Soho refuges to chichi hotel dining rooms, super-cosy country pubs, lime-washed Venetian villas, art-strewn former churches, rolling vineyards and winsome waterside hatches, these are the most romantic restaurants in the UK. As the old adage goes: if food be the music of love – fill your face. (And no, you at the back, the tumescent ick of Naked Soho didn’t make the cut.) RECOMMENDED: The 15 best restaurants in the UK

Southend in England hasn’t quite shaken its reputation as a dingy, faded seaside town—but dine at the best restaurants in Southend and you might think about that again. Essex’s finest is improving all the time, especially around the western reaches of Westcliff, Chalkwell and Leigh-on-Sea. Like Margate, it’s also attracting a wave of young families and creative types—and an ascendant food scene reflects this fresh demographic. Along with the inevitable seafood and Italian spots, there’s a new breed of vegan, cosmopolitan comfort food and ambitious seasonal places, too. And all less than an hour outta London. Start planning your next meal out now with our guide tot he best restaurants in Southend.

The mince pie. It’s the sweet festive staple you either love or hate (but you’d only hate them if you were an utter soulless Grinch, obvs). And there are a hell of a lot of them available across this town. Like Christmas geese, we’ve grown visibly doughy in our efforts to taste and rate an absolute pile of mince pies: from supermarket staples to posher pies from high street names and upmarket bakeries. These are the London mincies (yeah, we’re calling them that) worth getting your baubles in a twist over. Gaudete! RECOMMENDED: For more festive fun read our guide to Christmas in London

Sure, you've all heard of a cronut by now. But what about a gold-embellished eclair, a browned meringue or a croquembouche constructed out of all of the above? Feast your eyes on London's most showstopping, jaw-dropping finales, the most OTT desserts and puds in town with a full-on flavour to match that flamboyant appearance. Diabetics, look away now.

Loads of cultures have them and London loves them – so Time Out has munched its way around the capital’s restaurants and street food stalls to find the very best dumplings our city has to offer. In the list below, find everything from Oriental specialties to delicacies from Turkey, Poland, Georgia and beyond.   

The Hackney Church Brewing Company – a cavernous beer hall behind E9’s leviathan Tesco – has two key draws. First, £3.50 pints on a Thursday. Second, and less blearily, it’s home to Lagom: chef Elliot Cunningham’s rustic, smoke-wafted paean to his dual Brit/Scandi heritage, operating from an infernal little counter kitchen behind the bar proper.  Blitzing stuff over wood-fire is the USP here: birchwood for the fragrant notes it imparts, and oak for its longer burn. Lagom means ‘just enough’ in Swedish. It’s a restrained remit that shows, vividly, that even the most unadorned ingredients can become majestic with a bit of alchemical char – and Cunningham and co are knocking out plates both artfully ascetic and bracingly delicious. True salve for London’s dreary winter wen. First, ‘snacks’. A mound of charred black and swamp-green sprouts, doused in chilli prawn oil and sweet vinegar, was dowdy in form but a panoply in the mouth, all rollicking umami and light astringency. But a bowl of curry lamb stew and scotch bonnet sour cream, served with crisp sheaves of cassava for dipping, was truly sensational; a kind of Asian subcontinental riff on loaded nachos deserving of elegies. Side-hustling property developers they may be, but the Topjaw automatons have helped cast Lagom’s burger into the upper echelons of the metro-patty hierarchy Then, the star billing. Side-hustling property developers they may be, but the Topjaw automatons of social media infamy have helped cast Lagom’s hou

Llewelyn’s is southeast London’s worst-kept secret; a buzzing little neighbourhood restaurant that’s gone from strength to strength over the years, not least when the pass was taken over by chef Lasse Petersen (late of Copenhagen’s Amass) in mid-2020. I adored it when it opened (back when a pre-fame Ravneet Gill was on dessert detail) and adore it now.   Anyhoo, Lulu’s – a teeny-tiny grocers/sandwichers/vintners in the attached former hair salon next door – is Petersen’s contribution to London’s burgeoning caves à manger boom. Which is to say, wine shops with food in the Parisian style, vaguely in that order.  It’s enormously cute. That’d mean zip but for the food and booze; but both, mercifully, are excellent The space itself is a light-filled bolthole of soaped wood and alabaster veneers; standing-height tables and stools – loomed over by shelves of bijous cupboard staples – that spill out into the charming square outside Herne Hill station, pleasantly thrumming year-round and borderline Gallic in the late-summer gloaming. It’s enormously cute. That’d mean zip but for the food and booze; but both, mercifully, are excellent, not least as the former appears to be slapped together by Petersen on a couple of hot plates next to the till, ‘Franco style.  A marmalade Martini was the ideal stiffener. All subtle sweetness and wicked strength, it was ideal for knocking back a couple of fab house gildas – here refined by subbing guindilla chillies and salted anchovies for subtler, pi

The Freak Scene first reared its appallingly monikered head back in 2017. My foodie oracle pal Rocky (a kind of compos mentis Danny from Withnail & I but with a honed palate and better hair) would occasionally drift into town for a restaurant binge, and then regale us with granular run-throughs of the bangers. These were always effusive, but one was positively rapturous: a Farringdon pop-up, helmed by expat Aussie, former Nobu head chef and Kurobuta founder Scott Hallsworth, knocking out blinding pan-Asian bits on camp stoves in a hurriedly furnished Cowcross Street unit. He was almost vibrating; always a plum sign.  The Freak Scene (Dinosaur Jr homage notwithstanding, a terrible name then and a terrible name now, even without the clunky definite article) was a sleeper hit, taking up proper in the old Frith Street Barrafina site in 2018, getting tip-top press before being nobbled by Covid and rent hikes, and shuttering for good in 2020. I didn’t make it to either; ships seemingly passed. But zip forward three years, chuck in some seed capital from omnipresent Australian TV comedian Adam Hills and lo: Freak Scene v.3 arrives, segued from central to the pinstriped, braying Fulham outpost of Parsons Green.  The space is, at first, incongruous: a mish-mash of pink-purple lighting, ersatz-midcentury brass lamps and spurious Made.com-style seating. But peer closer and, like mice on the tube tracks, the Hallsworth traits – soundtrack of Dookie-era Green Day; a profusion of skate dec

My relationship with Islington’s plant-based Caribbean classic-in-waiting Jam Delish started poorly. 'No fucking way,' I exclaimed, obnoxiously, 'are we going vegan for a joint birthday blow-out.' Call it boorish omnivorism; call it the fact that, even as a professional eater, I still see a pervasive joylessness in vegan cuisine compared to the indulgences of flesh and dairy. I won; off to The Tamil Prince. So imagine my shame when, willed to Angel by my editor, I relished the most engaging dinner I’ve had in eons. Sibling owners Jordan and Chyna opened Jam Delish off the back of stints at Kerb and a well-received six-month residency at Soho’s Sun and 13 Cantons pub. For this permanent iteration, the kitchen is headed up by Bajan-Jamaican chef Nathan Collymore, an alumnus of Jamie Oliver’s Fifteen. Dinky, sugar-flecked doughnuts arrived on a pineapple, mango and scotch bonnet sauce of such fragrant heat that we literally cackled. The vibe doesn’t exactly reflect the urbane origins. Jam Delish is almost senselesslyunfashionable. From the outside, tinted windows give it a vaguely ‘smart shoes’ suburban nightclub look. Inside, things are kookier still: a YSL-blue riad for a foyer; statement wall of plastic foliage; padded mirrors in the turquoise-bricked bathrooms. The kind of chintz that’s a world away from homogenous London cool – well, 12 miles to Zone 4 – and I adored it. First, snifters. 'It’s a secret…' was a lurid concoction of rum (possibly), blue curacao (definitely) a

London’s pizza pantheon is a sprawling beast. Ever since Franco Manca slung up the shutters in Brixton Market way back in 2008, the city has been awash in a post-Pizza Express wave of slow-rising sourdough, imported San Marzanos and lactic mozzarella. And while New York, Roman, Detroit, and Chicago styles abound, the Neapolitan pie still reigns. 50 Kalò di Ciro Salvo opened on Northumberland Avenue – the traffic-choked boulevard that runs between Trafalgar Square and Embankment – back in 2018. It’s the UK offshoot of a beloved Naples original: eponymous pizzaiolo Ciro Salvo is a Big Deal, and his forensic experiments in dough hydration (70% in his case) and fermentation have earned him a place in the Michelin guide and, recently, a top-three spot on the ‘50 Top Pizza Europe 2022’ [sic] list for 50 Kalò London, making it the UK's highest-ranked pizzeria. Time Out’s definitive run-downs aside, I take great issue with these kinds of lists. They’re parochial, male-centric, compiled from afar and, in this case, utterly incorrect. 50 Kalò is fine. First, it’s an odd space. The vertiginously high ceilings and marble colonnades bely a compact floor plan, with checkerboard tiling, a looming dome of an oven at the back, and strongman-sized sacks of dough piled on the way to the loos. We had to wait 30 minutes for a seat, which seemed reasonable for a Friday night – but I’d recommend booking to avoid the tiny walk-in tables set aside for disorganised schmos like us. The menu cuts a swif

Think ‘Argentine restaurant’ and you’ll probably envision a smoke-wafting asado grill, all hulking slabs of grilled cow and gallons of malbec. You do get a little bit of that at Zoilo (via the Mendoza-heavy wine list) but this Marylebone spot is more classy, clattery café-bar than manly meat joint. The food is more finicky too, with only a few recognisably rustic Argentinian staples. A skillet of melted provolone cheese was excellent (duh): slathered in oregano-laced honey and snaffled in the too-brief moment between blisteringly hot and totally congealed. A dinky, beef-stuffed empanada was a fine example of the ubiquitous street snack (a sort of superior pasty); the house chorizo – a flavourful warm sausage as opposed to the vividly paprika’d, hard-cured Spanish kind – with zesty chimichurri was merely good. Later, a grilled flank steak was a well-cooked bit of beef, but didn’t quite live up to the charred, gutsy promise of being prefixed ‘asado’ (that is, cooked over fire). But the mushroom ravioli, made Argentinian with a malbec reduction, were yielding, earthy and doused in a fontina fonduta we couldn’t get enough of. To drink: more malbec. What else? Putting your dreams of smoke-heavy Patagonian parilla party aside, Zoilo’s undeniably got, er, chops.

I don’t know how many times it bears repeating, but burgers are the tardigrade (google it) of the gastro world: an evergreen, ubiquitous, artery-furring staple that simply will not die. Joining the upper echelons of London’s finest patty purveyors is Brixton’s Black Bear: the first (bare) bricks and (artfully exposed) mortar site for an itinerant street-food stall already at Shoreditch’s Boxpark and Giant Robot in Canary Wharf.  This is a joint doing burgers at their best. Let’s work backwards. The house Black Bear Burger was killer: two dry-aged patties, smashed thin and crisp-charred to maillard perfection, neatly offset with onion jam, synthetic cheese and garlic mayo. The buttermilk chicken burger, topped with zingy bread-and-butter pickles and honey-mustard mayo, served ‘dipped’ (that is, molten with chilli heat) would have been up there too, had it not been sopping with oil. Still, without cutlery it was more a practical detraction than a taste one.  But the sides… Christ, the sides. Both a pile of house chicken nuggets (fiendishly succulent chunks of breast, greaselessly battered, with buffalo and blue cheese sauces for dipping) and a plate of brisket spring rolls (the fried wonton cut lengthways to reveal a heady mulch of stripped slow-cooked beef, smoked bacon and American cheese) were truly stratospheric snacks. Add in a portion of poutine, heavy with rubbery curds and deeply flavourful gravy, and you’ve got some of the best haute-junk in town – all the better knock

Volto do Mar moved to 100 Draycott Avenue, SW3 3AD in 2023 Volta do Mar – a fancy Portuguese place housed in a Georgian corner pile off the Strand and opened by a founder of once-hot tapas bar Salt Yard – translates as ‘around the sea’. It’s an apt name: this is a spot that transcends the rustic staples of caldo verde and bacalhau, instead riding Portugal’s historic trade winds across a menu dotted with pan-African, Brazilian and south Indian notes. In action, it was a bit of a mixed bag. A bitter-savoury sardine paté with charred sourdough was grand, and certainly the best of the snacks. Cured hunks of sea bream with a brûlée-style burnt sugar topping were objectively odd, though the pickled shimeji mushrooms and red peppercorns were a tingly, tangy foil. A (reassuringly pink) Iberico pork vindaloo was humdrum; but the peri peri chicken was marvellous – juicy and crisp-skinned, the volcanic sauce provided in a teeny bowl for cautious self-serving. It may not all hit the mark, but there’s enough here to make Volta do Mar one of London’s more engaging Iberian eateries.

The woe was palpable when Mayfair’s longstanding Wild Honey shuttered last winter. But chef Anthony Demetre quickly regrouped. Now located in the Sofitel St James hotel, WH version 2.0 has eschewed its previously clubby confines for something airier: lofty ceilings with spindly chandeliers, room-length leather banquettes in teal and tan, and a kidney-stained marble bar. It’s an attractive spot. As with the first iteration, the food is good but flawed. A promisingly bizarre sounding cacio e pepe rigatoni with fried chicken wings was grindingly salty, while the rolled rabbit saddle with bunny cottage pie – a rehashed hit from WH1 – suffered more slapdash seasoning. Still, the ‘slow-cooked piece of beef’ was decent – it had the plentiful taste and texture of a thick hunk of onglet – while the signature honeycomb ice cream that followed was blinding. I recall WH1 once being described as ‘affordable fine dining’. No longer: three courses plus a snack for two, a lower-end malbec and a couple of snifters was £200, which isn’t remotely cheap. Still, Demetre is a chef’s chef, the room’s dreamy and in the pantheon of pricy modern Euro spots in central you could eat far worse. 

Back in 2016, the original O’Ver brought a dash of airy south Italian elegance to Borough. This sequel, located in the slickly soulless St James’s Market development just off Haymarket, is a tad fancier: all granite, midcentury furnishings, brass fittings and so on. It’s both handsome and homogenous. Likewise the menu, with its meticulous but muted takes on trattoria classics and Campanian snacks. A platter of Neapolitan street food was a masterclass in frying, but only a ball of macaroni and mozzarella really landed. O’Ver’s USP is its Mediterranean-seawater-laced dough. Silly, yes, but the rosemary-flecked focaccia and cinque formaggi pizza were fab, and certainly more engaging than a bowl of fussilio pasta in a mundane sauce of Tuscan sausage, porcini and Italian toms. Three courses plus wine (mercifully downsold by our charming waitress) came to £120, which is understandable for the locale but lunacy for the kind of food you can find done better at neighbourhood joints and pizzerias all over the city. But if that doesn’t bother you – and you fancy something a tad more luxe than Franco Manca – O’ver’s a very sufficiente spot.

Bang opposite Covent Garden station, Wahlburgers is the first UK outpost of a chain owned by the Wahlbergs: gym-swollen actor Mark and his exponentially less famous brothers Donnie (of New Kids on the Block) and chef Paul. The food, though mostly served tepid, isn’t bad. The two smashed patties of a house double cheeseburger were full-flavoured and the ‘Wahl’ sauce tangy (though there wasn’t enough of it). Better was the Super Melt: a half-pound burger between Warburtons-style sliced white, slathered in American mustard. Unrefined to a fault but undeniably moreish. A bacon mac and cheese was simultaneously awful and grand in a wet, out-of-the-box Kraft dinner kind of way. But the place is an atmosphere vacuum – a grim approximation of a US sports bar flecked in Bostonian green (which, over here, looks like a Shake Shack knock-off), decked out with screens showing videos of Mark and his pallid bros talking about goat’s cheese, or their mum, or something. It was also empty at peak time on a Friday evening. Still, for serviceable junk food spitting distance from a major tourist tube, with delightful staff to boot, Wahlburgers is basically fine.

Please note, Baba G's Bhangra Burger has now closed. Time Out Food editors, JANUARY 2020.  Indian-style patty purveyor Baba G’s has been kicking around in stall and pop-up form for years, but the street food favourite gained a bit of well-deserved press buzz after winning the BBC’s ‘Million Dollar Menu’ early in 2019. The result of its seed investment prize is this, a permanent bare-bricks’n’mortar hub in Camden Market.  The canny menu stretches out a few flavours across myriad dishes. Behold, the saag paneer ‘pachos’: a hefty platter of mini-poppadoms, covered in tamarind chutney, raita, earthy stewed greens and teeny cubes of fried tikka paneer cheese. Genius stuff, and more interesting to eat than the saag paneer burger, which saw all the same ingredients in a bun, with a whole bhaji plonked on top. More satisfying was the signature lamb jalfrezi burger: all the same toppings, this time without cheese, but with a smattering of sweltering chilli heat. Chicken tikka ‘nuggets’ turned out to be boned-out legs, well seasoned and perfectly fried. In a world of perfunctory patties, Baba G’s is a fresh new take on the evergreen, seemingly unimprovable, staple.

Covent Garden’s Rock & Sole Plaice is a bonafide institution (as well as being the best-named chippy in town – quite something in a pun-heavy field). It’s been dishing up some of the city’s most-loved fried fare from its Endell Street shop since 1871, two World Wars and modish food fads be damned.  Current owners the Ziyeddin family have been at the helm for 35 years. To celebrate this arbitrary birthday, they’ll be selling portions of chips for 10p next Wednesday May 17 and Thursday May 18. Ten British pence! That’s less than half a Freddo! Quite absurd. Oh yeah, and they claim their ‘jockey’s whips’ are the biggest in the country, and make a point of frying them in peanut oil but y’know, basically free chips is the point here, people. Head down any time from 11.30am-10.30pm to pick up a steaming, vinegar soaked packet. You’re quite welcome.  This city ain't just built on Rock & Sole, y'know. Eat up our list of London’s best fish and chip shops.

Yup, you read that right. Murger Hanhan – a Mayfair Chinese specialising in the fiery regional food of Shan Xi province – is doing a 16ft noodle. One dish: one gargantuan hand-pulled noodle. Simple. I’ll explain: each morning, Murger Hanhan’s chefs make fresh noodle dough from wheat flour, salt and water. This is stretched to a length of eight feet, then split to make it double the length. It’s then boiled and served in a biangbiang style with braised pork, tomato and egg sauce, spring onions and chilli oil; veggie without the pork and either with the tomato sauce or chilli oil; or cold with sesame sauce. It’s all related to Chinese New Year (which starts today and last for two weeks), when it’s traditional to eat ‘lucky’ foods. Noodles typically symbolise longevity in China – so the longer the noodle, the happier and healthier life is supposed to be. Murger Hanhan’s giant noodles, they explain, ‘demonstrate the maximum potential for any long noodle dish and not being cut at any stage also signifies there is no break in your happiness, health and longevity’. Lovely stuff, and you can see it all in the video above. Murger Hanhan can be found at 8a Sackville St, W1S 3DF. London’s got loads of excellent regional Chinese restaurants. These are the best. Want more hot news like this? Then sign up to Time Out, fool.  

Veganism: currently the reigning food fad in London – and a welcome one at that. With a plethora of top restaurants revealing plant-based menus and animal-product-free street food becoming ubiquitous around the city, the green tide keeps on rising. The next high water mark? Vegan kebab merchant What the Pitta! is set to open its third permanent branch on March 9, in the resurgent foodie hotspot of Camden Town. Already a fixture at Croydon and Shoreditch Boxparks, WTP!’s vegan doner kebabs substitute mystery meat with non-GM seasoned soya that’s marinated in Middle Eastern spices, grilled and whacked into handmade flatbreads with houmous and tzatziki. Lovely stuff. But there’s more! The menu at this new spot also features meat-free Turkish pizza, couscous salads and baklava. Between WTP!, Club Mexicana at Kerb and the newfangled N1C branch of Temple of Seitan, Camden’s set to become an unlikely mecca for vegan junk food. 2018, eh?  What the Pitta! is opening on Friday March 9 at 89-91 Bayham St, NW1 0AG. Feeling green? Here’s our pick of the best vegan and vegan-friendly restaurants in London. Want more edible news? Then sign up to Time Out.

I think we can all admit that Deliveroo has made ordering hangover-soothing takeaways an inordinately easier and more delicious experience. So it’s only right and proper to acknowledge the food delivery company’s fifth birthday. In a sugary show of selflessness, Deliveroo is celebrating by giving away 5,000 Hummingbird Bakery teal velvet cupcakes across London this Friday. These snazzy little morsels will be available from 4.30pm-5pm at Soho Square, Liverpool Street Station, King’s Cross Station, Waterloo Station and King’s Road. That’s it. No ordering involved: just turn up and snaffle. Happy birthday to them (and us). Want to have your cake and eat it? Here’s our guide to some of London’s best bakes. Want more delicious news like this? Then sign up to Time Out. 

River Café, some lovely Antipodean coffee shops and a few great Middle and Far Eastern spots aside, Hammersmith is not what one could call an evergreen gastronomic go-to. Which is why it’s both delightful and surprising that Feast Canteen has opened. Housed in the old Kings Mall food court, Feast Canteen is a slick 350-seater operation, featuring concessions from reliable street and dude food purveyors like increasingly-ubiquitous-but-still-good burger spot Patty & Bun, taco kings Breddos, Vietnamese joint Salvation in Noodles, molto bene pizza people Made of Dough and, a new one to us, rice paper roll makers Sinchow. What’s more, it’s open seven days a week, and takeaway is available – a lifeline to local office worker types. Can’t even be arsed to leave the house? Deliveroo will be schlepping grub from Feast Canteen around W6 – a boon in anyone’s books.  Feast Canteen can be found at Kings Mall, King St, W6 9HW. It’s open Monday-Friday 9am-8pm; Saturday-Sunday 11am-8pm. This all sort of counts as street food, right? Right. Here’s the best in London. Want more edible news? Then sign up to Time Out.

We’re big fans of Camden fish joint Hook (we gave it a full five stars in 2014). So we were suitably distraught when it shut up shop last December for a refit (booo) then equally elated with the news that it’s just reopened (wooo!). Not only that, but it’s now expanded its menu from the superlative fish and chips it made a name with (think exotic riffs on the old classics, from Cuban ‘sazon completa’ panko-crumbed to Guinness-and-squid-ink-tempura battered fish), with fresh bites such as a poached and blow-torched sea trout salad, modish tacos, popcorn cockles, piri piri squash and so on. Plus seaweed salted chips.  Even better than that, Hook’s celebrating reopening by offering 50 percent off food at lunch and dinner from today until this Saturday (February 24). Off you pop. Hook can be found at 63 Parkway, NW1 7PP.  Fish + chips = maximum mouth-based synchronicity. Here’s our list of London’s best chippies. Want more delicious news like this? Then sign up to Time Out. 

Gluttons, crack out your diaries, flick to Wednesday February 21 and get scribbling, for the Scotch Egg Challenge returns to London. The remit is simple: a bevy of ace chefs (most London-based, but including a few out-of-towners) fashion their finest scotch egg, a winner is picked by an illustrious panel of judges and the attending crowd of egg-citable plebs go wild for samples.  This year, it’ll be held at The Canonbury pub in Islington. Hosting duty goes to food writer Joe Warwick, and the judging panel includes The Guardian types Bob Granleese and Felicity Cloake, journo Lisa Markwell and Restaurant magazine head honcho Stefan Chomka. They’ll be snaffling scotchies from a bewilderingly good list of contestants, including – breathe in – Temper’s Neil Rankin, Holborn Dining Room’s Calum Franklin, The Dairy’s/Counter Culture’s Robin Gill, Smoking Goat’s Ben Chapman, Nanban’s Tim Anderson, Rambla’s Victor Garvey and 2017 winner Gina Hopkins (formerly of The Draper’s Arms, who are repped this year by Nick Gibson), plus many more. Attendance is free – but for those worried about the availability of free samples, there’ll be an online charity auction for VIP tickets in due time. Either way, see you down the front. Good line up, ’eh? Many of these joints are on our list of London’s best restaurants, too.  Get more lip-smacking news like this by signing up to Time Out.  

Whoah now: for the next three weeks, awesome bakery (and offshoot of meaty nose-to-tail pioneer St John) St John Bread & Wine will be popping up at Old Street tube station. The bread-centric stall will be selling SJ’s super sourdough, outstanding doughnuts (the custard version is a stone-cold classic) and other pastry-based titbits from 7am-7pm daily until March 2. Fergus Henderson and Trevor Gulliver’s clattery Farringdon space is perhaps the definitive British restaurant (in London or otherwise) and its bakery offshoots (Bread & Wine in Spitalfields and a dedicated unit on Bermondsey’s Druid Street) have done for bread and doughnuts what their original joint did for offal and gutsy seasonal cookery. In short: stop reading, get to Old Street, get stuffed.  Nuts for ’nuts? Here are some more awesome doughnuts for you. Get more stuff like this by signing up to Time Out.

Ah, the avocado. Catnip to millennials; green gold to clickbait-savvy financial journos; inescapable by brunchers across the capital. There is no food that evokes the past three years quite so well. It’s shocking that there isn’t one already, but a dedicated avocado restaurant – dubbed Avobar – is coming to London. Before that appears, the peeps behind it have launched an avocado-centric pop-up just off Covent Garden, also called Avobar. And it sounds rather good. It’s a daytime affair, operating from Thursday-Saturday 10am-6pm and Sunday 10am-5pm starting next Thursday February 22 (there’s a soft opening this weekend, too, but it’s already fully booked. Soz!). The menu will transcend your standard slowly browning avocado on sourdough, featuring things like sweet potato toast with smashed avo and coconut labneh, poké bowls, a vegan green bowl, shakshuka and avocado hotcakes can be expected. Wholesome, right? Right. The Avobar pop-up can be found at 18 Floral St, WC2E 9DS. Bookings can be made at the Avobar website. If you’re reading this you probably like brunch. Here are the places doing London’s best. Want more utterly essential London news like this? Then sign up to Time Out, got it?

Vegan food is having more than a moment in London. You can barely move for decent restaurants plugging plant-based menus, from kick-ass high-end joints like Nama and Essence, to upstart spots like vegan fried chicken pioneers Temple of Hackney or Club Mexicana (now settled in at the Spread Eagle pub). Cook Daily’s one of the best of ‘em: an unpretentious international vegan café in Shoreditch Boxpark, doing low-cost, high-flavour Southeast Asian-inspired bowls rammed with rainbow veg and slathered in banging ‘high grade’ sauces. Whet your appetite with our video introduction to King Cook’s delicious domain above. Cult Eats is a ’thing’ we’re doing now, ya hear? Check out our previous micro-profile on awesome Ealing/Fitzrovia pizza place Santa Maria. Want more plant-based grub? Check our list of London’s best vegan and vegan-friendly restaurants. Get more delicious stuff delivered straight to your inbox when you sign up to Time Out.   

Er, possibly. We’re big fans of mash-up Middle Eastern/Asian kebab joint Le Bab here at Time Out – so of course we were thrilled to hear that the folks behind it, Stephen Tozer and Ed Brunet, are opening a new spot in Covent Garden this spring, dubbed Maison Bab. Not only that, they’re aiming to make it ‘one of the best kebab houses in the world’ – an extremely ambitious remit given the competition in London alone. Gotta give ’em points for enthusiasm, though. The new pad is being headed up by Le Bab head chef Manu Canales Garces (who used to work at Michel Roux Jr’s two-Michelin-starred Le Gavroche) and will, says Tozer, be dishing up ‘something punchier, bolder, and more surprising’ than the fare at Le Bab. By which he means sourdough flatbreads topped with things like onglet steak and peppercorn mayo, or slow-grilled celeriac shish with carrot purée. Fancy! Maison Bab will be located at Mercers Walk, Covent Garden, and is due to open this spring. Maison Bab’s babs will all cost £10 or under. Here are some more sweet cheap eats around Covent Garden. Want more lovely news like this? Then sign up to Time Out.

Tacos are ten-a-penny these days (not literally, we wish, etc), but humble old Benito’s Hat remains a reliable purveyor of deliciously filling Tex-Mex grub. Next Tuesday (February 13) sees the release of their second cookbook, ’Everyone Loves Tacos‘. And to celebrate/prove that fact, they’ll be dishing up £1 tacos at all their sites (bar King’s Cross) after 5pm on the very same day. Here’s the deal: £1 gets you one taco (you choose the filling, from sautéed veg with guac to super-slow braised pork, beef brisket barbecoa and more), but you can order as many as you like. That’s it. Stuff your face with multiple tacos for minimal cash. Mucho gracias to that. Mexican food is alive and kicking in the capital. Here’s our list of London’s best. Make sure you hear about more delicious offers like this by signing up to Time Out.