London for foodies

Best restaurants

London does not have a single restaurant scene; it has a dozen overlapping ones, and the twelve rooms below sit inside a half-mile radius of Trafalgar Square where those scenes rub against each other hardest. The strip between the Strand and Wardour Street is where a Nordic tasting counter cooking over open fire shares a postcode with a Korean barbecue that has held the same door on Panton Street for years, where a portrait gallery's dining room looks down at the same crowd queueing for a chain slice on Leicester Square. This list is for the visitor who has one week and forty meals in it, and would rather spend them on rooms that argue for themselves than on the safe options the guidebooks keep in rotation. It runs from a fire-only kitchen at 3-5 Great Scotland Yard to a Cantonese roast house on Wardour Street, and it treats the mid-range chains honestly: kept where the address itself is the case, skipped where it is not. Every hour, address and phone number below is cited to OpenStreetMap or the venue's own site, so you can plan against the same ground truth we did.