The 11 Best Restaurants in London Right Now

The Eurostar can get you from London to Paris in a hair over two hours, yet the last few years have seen an explosion of elegant bistros on this side of the English Channel. Among them, chef Henry Harris’s Bouchon Racine stands out from the crowd. A reopening of the much-beloved restaurant he ran from 2002–2015, Racine is a gutsy love letter to Lyonnaise cuisine on the second floor of a 300-year-old pub. Charcuterie and cheese, potatoes and onions, meat and offal: These are the ingredients that animate Harris’s chalkboard menu, all old friends, treated with a grandmotherly mix of tenderness and brawn. A rosy slab of chicken liver pâté, shot through with nubbins of cured pork, coarse enough to make cornichons blush. Wobbly tête de veau, cheek by jowl by tongue, served with an equally wobbly sauce ravigote. Lamb kidneys that’ll make your nostrils flare from two tables away. This is cooking that feeds the soul and lubricates the joints, and makes a nice long train nap sound good indeed.

Mambow

78 Lower Clapton Rd, Lower Clapton, London E5 0RN, United Kingdom

On a cold, damp, blustery night, you’d be lucky to find yourself at Mambow. Ideally hunched over a steaming bowl of chef Abby Lee’s Kam Heong Mussels fresh from the wok, electronic music pumping through the speakers, the scent of soy, curry leaf, and chile instantly banishing whatever chill you walked in with. The rich, shrimpy sauciness left over at the bottom of the bowl is too good to waste, and you’ll find that single order of aromatic pandan rice you thought might get you through the whole meal disappearing faster than a glass of crisp, fizzy Chenin. Same story with a hot and sour short rib curry, the chunky, tamarind-tart braising medium beguiling long after the bones have been nibbled bare. The smart move is to just double that rice order right off the bat, otherwise you’ll doubtless find yourself hoarding near-empty plates and bowls while awaiting a re-up, not willing to surrender a single drop of Lee’s masterfully layered Malaysian flavors.

Yuki Bar

426 Reading Ln, London E8 1DS, United Kingdom

London has long been a destination for natural wine, with ready access to European producers and the kinds of coveted allocations that make US somms green with envy. And over the last year, Yuki Bar, a low-lit cubby hole built into a railway arch in London Fields, has quietly become the coolest place in town to throw back a glass of low-intervention juice. Owner and master sommelier Yukiyasu Kaneko, whose résumé includes stints at Noma and the dearly departed P Franco, presides over the room from behind a horseshoe bar, pouring tastes and offering guidance on the idiosyncratic bottle list. The chalkboard menu leans homestyle Japanese: plump mussels steamed with sake, grilled onigiri in a puddle of dashi, a warming monkfish hot pot. It is a welcome departure from the more de rigueur wine bar fare. Strikingly subtle and long on umami, it’s fascinating food to pair with a second bottle of earthy Gamay from the Auvergne and plenty of Japanese disco.

Tollington’s

172 Tollington Park, Finsbury Park, London N4 3AJ, United Kingdom