The UK's Top New Restaurants: the 2023 winners revealed

The perfect pint of Guinness. An ancient culinary tradition given its moment in the spotlight. A proper pie. A buzzy dining room where you might just as easily bump into an old colleague as a Haim sister. These are all answers to the question that kept coming up as we put together The UK’s Top New Restaurant Awards – what makes a restaurant one of the best?

Over 250 restaurants opened in London alone in 2023 – the highest number of launches since 2019. But despite exciting restaurants opening all across the country (keep reading for proof), the hospitality landscape remains almost absurdly challenging. Opening the doors of a new restaurant is hard enough – keeping them open requires grit, talent and a little magic. To be named on this list of the UK’s Top New Restaurants is about more than Michelin stars (although you’ll find a few here) and big-name chefs (ditto); it’s about experiencing exceptional service; an atmosphere you can truly unwind in; storytelling you wouldn’t find anywhere else; and food that opens up a little slice of the world for you – whether’s that’s the West Country or West Africa.

To create the inaugural list of The UK’s Top New Restaurants, we brought on board some of the most trusted foodies in the country to whittle down the vast swathes of excellent 2023 restaurant openings to an edit of only the most exceptional. During the process, chefs Angela Hartnett, Andi Oliver, Skye Gyngell, Gurdeep Loyal, Julie Lin and James Cochran; food writers Gizzi Erskine and Tom Parker Bowles; Instagram sensation Notorious Foodie and Condé Nast Traveller’s global editorial director Divia Thani debated and considered that question time and time again – what makes a restaurant one of the best? The list below – 23 restaurants scattered across the UK from Scotland’s Cairngorm Mountains to Cornwall by way of Yorkshire, Narbeth, Suffolk, Liverpool and beyond – answers that question in 23 unique ways that make us more excited than ever about the future of the UK’s dining scene.

These are the winners of The UK’s Top New Restaurant Awards.

The latest restaurant from the Woodhead Restaurant Group (also behind much-loved Portland and Clipstone) centres elegant, unfussy cooking in a handsome dining room in Fitzrovia that's embodying the vibe of a classic French bistro. A heavily French-accented a la carte menu (salad Lyonnaise; snails, bacon and garlic bon bons) is paired with a fastidious wine menu with an ‘unapologetic focus on Burgundy’ – the team's words, not ours.

Puddings are a big deal here. All reliably lean on French dessert classics – arguably the best part of any bistro meal – and include perfectly light crêpes suzette, profiteroles, crème caramel made with Muscat and a few Francophile-friendly cheese plates. If you're on a budget or short of time, there's an awfully reasonably priced (£39) prix-fixe lunch menu, too. This is one to bookmark for when you want a reliably excellent meal with a team that knows how to look after you. And really, isn't that what we're all looking for in one of the country's best restaurants?

Address: 64 Goodge St, London W1T 4NF
Price: ££
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Tommy Banks is to Yorkshire what Rick Stein is to Cornwall. Which is to say, this young-gun chef (and he still is young, just 35 years old despite seemingly having been on the scene for decades) has been at the head of a foodie renaissance in the bountiful northern county. In 2013, Banks became the youngest ever chef to receive a Michelin star at 24 years old, for his work in the kitchen of his parents’ pub, The Black Swan at Oldstead. Now, 10 years later, Banks and his family have added yet another bow to the family-run foodie empire: The Abbey Inn, five minutes down the road in Byland.

The garden of this latest venture, a Grade II-listed 19th-century building, peeps over the Cistercian monastery of Byland. Head chef Charlie Smith (previously of The Black Swan and another of Banks’s outposts, Roots York) draws heavily on the team’s vegetable garden, as well as meat reared on the Banks Family Farm such as rare-breed pigs and Dexter cows. The menu is pared-back, filled with things you really want to eat: chicken liver parfait with crispy chicken skin and milk bread; a burger served with pork fat chips; sausages, mash and onion gravy. Upstairs, a two-night stay in one of the three bedrooms combines supper downstairs with an evening at The Black Swan, for the full Banks experience.

Address: The Abbey Inn, Byland, York, YO61 4BD
Price: £££
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A modern West African dining movement is making it big across London – and Aji Akokomi, chef founded of Borough Market's Akara and big-sister fine-dining restaurant Akoko (which won a Michelin star this year), is leading the charge. Nigerian-born Akokomi has been on the scene since 2020, when he and his team shook up the capital's narrow-minded impression of West African dining by creating a 10-course tasting menu that quickly gained critical acclaim. Now, they're back in one of London's foodiest neighbourhoods with a more accessible – but no less accomplished – follow-up.

While at Akoko, the team refined and elevated West African flavours; at Akara, plates are bigger and can be ordered a la carte. The namesake the akara is a soft inside, crispy outside fritter made from black-eyed beans and filled with mushrooms or prawns, while the first-rate edesi isip (coconut rice with briny mackerel) is a must-order. Shortly after Akara began service at the end of 2023, we caught up with Akokomi in this new restaurant that rubs shoulders with some of the biggest names on the food scene right now (Bao, Berenjak and Barrafina are all neighbours). With a smile, he told us, “Opening here, it shows that our food is here to stay.”

Address: Akara, Arch 208, 18 Stoney St, London SE1 9AD
Price: £££
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A Michelin green star is awarded to restaurants which are at the cutting edge when it comes to sustainable practices – and since the accolade was introduced in 2020, 31 restaurants have been bestowed with the honour. The latest to join the ranks is Annwn, a Welsh wild-food restaurant, where the team puts responsibly foraged ingredients front and centre – curious guests can even join them on their educational foraging days in the gorgeous local area.

Back at the restaurant, the menu naturally evolves with the seasons. The winter iteration might include preserved hogweed seeds or chanterelles alongside slow-cooked duck egg yolk or crab broth with sea radish. Whatever's been gathered up is given the refined, fine-dining treatment and presented in a 10-course tasting menu that brings to the stage the most glorious of Wales's bounty.

Address: 1 Market Square, Narberth, Pembrokeshire, Wales, SA67 7AU
Price: ££££
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It took just a few years for Nigerian-born Adejoké’ Joké’ Bakare to go from relatively unknown on the London restaurant scene to one of the capital’s most talked-about chefs. It was only five years ago, after all, that she won the Brixton Kitchen competition and was given the chance to run a six-month pop-up in Brixton Market. The residency was a knock-out, in spite of – or perhaps because of – Bakare’s novice status as a restaurateur. When the pop-up ended, a more permanent – although, as this was 2020, often disrupted by the pandemic – stint in Brixton Village followed. It didn’t take long for Bakare and the team to outpace this South London outpost. So last year, they all upped sticks and headed north of the river to Fitzrovia.

This new iteration of the restaurant is set menu only (£75 per person at supper; £40 per person at lunch). That menu takes diners on a whip-smart journey through modern West African cuisine, and might include peppersoup with cured mackerel or mutton cutlet with a coffee and yaji dressing. And while West African food is finally having its moment in London’s spotlight, it felt like a seminal moment when, in February 2024, Bakare became the first Black British woman chef to be awarded a Michelin star, as well as the second Black woman in the world to ever get awarded the accolade. Bakare’s passion, creativity, and stratospheric rise from amateur cook to Michelin-star winner also means our judging panel unanimously named her The Best New Chef in the UK. Make a reservation now, and don’t look back.

Address: Chishuru, 3 Great Titchfield St, London W1W 8AX
Price: £££
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There are a lot of half-decent hotel restaurants in the UK. But this, from well-respected Brunswick House and Orasay chef Jackson Boxer, is our favourite of them all from the past 12 months. It’s set in Cowley Manor Experimental, a Cotswolds country-house hotel with generations of loyal guests. Last year, Cowley reopened under the Experimental Group’s watchful eye having undergone a cool-as-a-cucumber renovation. The Experimental Group, responsible for pin-sharp hangouts in Paris, London, Venice and beyond, brought on Boxer to oversee a new restaurant they hoped would draw in locals as well as overnighters, making Cowley a buzzy eatery bringing fresh energy to the Cotswolds’ often trad dining scene.

They succeeded. Boxer and his team rustle up ingredients from the verdant surrounding area in a veg-forward menu. Plates such as roasted cod with fennel butter and smoked tomatoes and pumpkin, cavolo nero and peanut lean a little on Boxer’s London background and a little on the Experimental Group’s Parisian heritage. As Experimental first became known for its bars, it’s little wonder that the cocktail menu packs a punch (on that note, order the Horlicks Milk Punch, with Cotswold single malt, lemon and spiced Horlicks). The team also do a stellar Sunday roast and an afternoon tea – this is still a Cotswolds hotel, of course. All served in a grand wood-panelled dining room in one of the area’s hottest addresses of 2023.

Address: Cowley Manor Experimental, Cowley, Cheltenham GL53 9NL
Price: £££
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Produce is king at Crocadon. In 2017 – when Dan Cox’s dream of creating a self-sufficient Cornish restaurant-slash-farm was born – hyper-seasonal, eco-focussed dining was hard to come by. Seven years later, the zeitgeist has firmly swung in favour of this low-intervention way of cooking and eating, no longer relegating sustainable food to the domain of hemp-loving hippies and dour eco-warriors. But even today, there are those who elevate farm-to-fork dining to new levels, and Cox happens to be one of them. It took him five years to launch the restaurant at Crocadon, which opened in January 2023. Less than two months later, it won a Green Michelin star for the team’s exemplary ecological approach to soil-centric farming and planet-loving cooking. In 2024, the kitchen was awarded its first Michelin Star after little more than a year of service.

But forget what you think you know about white tablecloths and fancy-pants French food. Cox – who won the prestigious Roux Scholarship and cut his teeth working at the Simon Rogan group – presents an always-changing menu that puts his farm-grown and reared ingredients front and centre without imposing a buttoned-up atmosphere. This is, after all, a Cornish farm first and foremost. The dinner menu (£105 per person) might include green tomatoes, lemon verbena and locally caught fish, while the Sunday feasting menu (£50 per person) bears little resemblance to the roasts found in pubs around the county, instead spotlighting veg such as Jerusalem artichoke or confit swede. “The combination of the climate, land and sea makes for some of the country’s best produce,” Cox points out. “It’s an exciting time to be eating in Cornwall.” All the more exciting, we say, thanks to this trailblazing opening.

Address: Crocadon, St Mellion, Saltash PL12 6RL
Price: £££
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Hyped restaurants in London are nothing new. But The Devonshire, just off Piccadilly Circus, has reached buzzed-about levels we’ve not seen in a while. A proper Soho boozer downstairs, the team slings out pint after pint of perfectly creamy Guinness, London’s drink du jour right now. The pub itself is always thrumming, partially thanks to the fact that getting a table in one of the three dining rooms is trickier than securing Glastonbury tickets. Reservations open three weeks in advance and get booked up in minutes.

At the helm of all this fanfare is Oisin Rogers, an old-school landlord who has been working in London pubs for 30 years, and business partner Charlie Carroll, who founded Flatiron Steakhouses. Ashley Palmer-Watts (The Fat Duck, Dinner by Heston) heads up the kitchen, making a song and dance about the wood-burning grill and oven, a dining room centrepiece. A large chunk of the meat and fish on the hand-scrawled menu (lamb cutlets, beef cheek and Guinness suet pudding, langoustines, scallops with bacon and malt vinegar) are sourced from Scotland and butchered by ex-St John alum George Donnelly. They might be served with plump duck fat chips or salad doused in vinaigrette. All washed down, of course, with pint after pint of that precisely poured Guinness, plonked down on tables from a tray which a waiter whizzes around the room at breakneck speed.

Address: The Devonshire, 17 Denman St, Soho, London W1D 7HW
Price: £££
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A crack chef-sommelier team are behind Edinburgh's latest and smartest fine-dining restaurant. Scot Brian Grigor cut his teeth cooking at the Balmoral Hotel, while Irishman Glen Montgomery looked after all things wine at the likes of Gleneagles' Andrew Farlie and Michelin-starred Heron, also in Edinburgh. The duo looked to the Scottish and Irish Gaelic word for ‘barley’ for the restaurant's name (pronounced yor-na), and kick-started the 12-person chef's table last spring.

Diners arrive promptly for an aperitif, before a series of canapés (Isle of Mull cheddar tart, venison chorizo with horseradish) start the evening. A six-course supper follows, prepared in front of guests and discussed convivially as you watch the menu come to life. Naturally, dishes change based on what's in season and, crucially, at its best, but might include hand-dived Orkney scallops or smoked salmon with smoked caviar. The drinks pairing from Montgomery is split into two refreshingly simply named options, the core wine flight or the fancy wine flight. Put your faith in the team and relinquish control for the evening, safe in the knowledge that you'll be getting a taste of the best of Scotland.

Address: Eórna, 68 Hamilton Pl, Edinburgh EH3 5AZ
Price: ££££
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25 minutes from Scotland’s slickest hotel, The Fife Arms, sits its sister property, the deceptively named Fish Shop. Not so much a classic Aberdeenshire chippy, it turns out, as a beautifully designed seafood restaurant dishing up elevated Scottish fish and shellfish. Russell Sage Studio (who also designed The Fife Arms) are behind the interiors, all white subway tiles, boat installations, and suspended marine sculptures that nod to the fishy menu without veering into kitschy design.

Suppers might start with Cumbrae oysters in Champagne tempura, a brown crab crumpet or salt cod mousse with sourdough. Next, perhaps Shetland mussels with East Coast cured nduja, or grilled Macduff lobster with wild garlic, or rib of Highland beef with lobster scampi, or a selection of them all to share with a table of friends or family. If dining en famille, order a round of Fish Shop Negronis (local gin and vermouth with Campari and pimped up with samphire), followed by glasses of Riesling or Picpoul. There’s a fishmonger here, too, where a crack team fillet fish at the counter and recommends bottles of wine to go with your wares to recreate the magic at home.

Address: Fish Shop, 3 Netherley Place, Ballater, AB35 5QE
Price: ££
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Was 2023 the year we eschewed fancy dining trends and made a collective return to classic food done well in cosy restaurants? The Halfway at Kineton makes a decent case for the theory. Nathan Eades (Simpson's, The Wild Rabbit) and Liam Goff (also ex-Wild Rabbit) head up the team at this Cotswolds country pub, focusing on cooking delicious dishes that will just as easily please visiting grandparents as a young foodie couple.

The menu is comforting and nostalgic: beef ribeye with fries, double-baked Westcombe cheddar cheese souffle, pie and mash. That pie is one of the team's hero dishes, a nod to the retro dining trend sweeping the country, perhaps, or maybe just a stark refusal to cook anything other than the most delicious dishes, trends be damned. Either way, it's worth reserving a table just for a slice of the pie.

Address: The Halfway at Kineton, Guiting Power, Cheltenham GL54 5UG
Price: £££
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No longer content with labels such as ‘Indian cooking’ or ‘Chinese cuisine’, London’s chefs are getting more specific than ever. Kolae – the new Borough opening from the duo behind firm East London favourite Som Saa, Mark Dobbie and Andy Oliver – presents its take on the food of Thailand’s Southern Provinces. Neither Dobbie nor Oliver are from Thailand, but their respect and love for this style of cooking shines through. And rather fittingly, while vegetables are the real deal and come imported from Thailand, the meat comes from Yorkshire, and the fish is swiped from the boats on the South Coast each day.

Ingredients in dishes here are coated in curry pastes ground by hand each morning and brought out to share. Think minced venison curry, grilled mussel skewers, hogget chop. The cocktail menu is thoughtfully short and delightfully creative with a savoury twist – we particularly love the Pickled Mango Dirty Martini, but the Coconut Whisky Ginger is lip-smacking, too. The dining room is perhaps a pinch more grown up than big sister Som Saa, set in a former coach house with exposed brickwork and warm wood that throws things back to the Bangkok eateries this joint was inspired by in the first place.

Address: Kolae, 6 Park St, London SE1 9AB
Price: ££
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After leaving Suffolk’s Michelin-starred Pea Porridge, James Carn has set up his own restaurant with his wife, Sophia. A restaurant this good is a bit of a coup for market town Bury St Edmunds which hasn’t traditionally been at the top of foodies’ must-travel lists. Small but sweet, with poured concrete floors and bags of light flooding in, and a focus on dishes made for the table to share.

Best to order a selection, then: plump chicken thigh with girolles and Madeira cream; Suffolk line-caught bass topped and gremolata; venison tartare with hash brown, chive and sour cream. The team look to the Mediterranean for inspiration without ever losing sight of their roots, so the Suffolk land and coast are well represented on the menu, which invites diners to order a ‘Kitchen Selection’ for two, four or six to remove the hassle of having to choose what to order at all. In 2024, the restaurant was awarded a Bib Gourmand for good quality, good value cooking – and might make a foodie pilgrimage out of Bury St Edmunds after all.

Address: Lark, 6A Angel Hill, Bury Saint Edmunds IP33 1UZ
Price: £££
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After opening multi-award-winning The Pool, also in Coleraine, Stevie and Rebekah McCarry opened the ambitious Lir at the Marina in 2023. Menus change daily depending on the catch brought in from local boats, the organic vegetables available from the team's growers and foraged goods from the team.

The tasting menu prepares ingredients thoughtfully, switching between whole fish butchery, fermenting, smoking and curing keeping in line with a nose-to-tail, zero-waste ethos. All of which is highly commendable, of course – but more importantly, the seafood is cooked in innovative ways, making up dishes such as Korean-fried ray wing or hake Kyiv with caper butter. Even Rick Stein is a recent fan (he visited for an upcoming BBC series). So many reasons to visit, and we haven't even touched on the element our judging panel swooned over the most – that view of the water over the Coleraine Marina.

Address: Lir, 66 Portstewart Rd, Coleraine BT52 1EY
Price: ££££
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There’s just one single-sitting 10-course tasting menu served at Lyla. This Georgian townhouse used to be home to Edinburgh icon Paul Kitching’s 21212 restaurant. After his passing, the space was offered up to another well-known name in the Scottish capital’s food scene, Stuart Ralston who – despite being at the helm of three successful restaurants already (Tipo, Noto and Aizle) – couldn’t pass up the opportunity to take on this legendary site himself.

The evening kicks off in the drawing room, where the 28 guests for the evening are offered a glass of Champagne. Downstairs, in the main dining room, the menu is an ode to produce from the Scottish Isles. Line-caught fish and sustainable shellfish, like halibut or local langoustines, are sourced from the surrounding waters and prepared in the open kitchen, so you can snoop on their precise preparations while you dine.

Address: Lyla, 3 Royal Terrace, Edinburgh EH7 5AB
Price: ££££
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Abby Lee never intended to kick-start a London love affair with Malaysian food. Despite growing up between Malaysia and Singapore, where she worked in her family’s bakery as a kid, it was Italian cooking that got her into the kitchen when she moved – alone – to the UK to study. And, for a while, that’s the path it looked like Lee would take. There was a period of formal training at Le Cordon Bleu, then a couple of years refining her skills at Michelin-starred Pasha Ristorante in Puglia. So far, so standard. But when the first wave of lockdowns forced her to shut her Spitalfields pop-up a few weeks after opening, Lee moved back to Malaysia to wait out the pandemic. Days turned into weeks spent cooking the dishes of her childhood with her grandmother and aunt, scribbling down recipes and rediscovering her own longing for these family dishes.

Four years have passed since the world shut down, and Lee has been back in London for a while. A phenomenally successful Peckham outpost, where she debuted a modern take on this heritage cuisine, has now been succeeded by a permanent Clapton restaurant. Unbelievably, Mambow 2.0 is bigger than its South London little sister, despite Lee and her team having just 20 indoor covers. Tables turn over quickly, and securing one is like a game of musical chairs. Worth it for the 100+ Sour (comparable to a Pisco Sour, made with coconut liquor, miso syrup and blackberry) you sip as you scan the menu and a slew of small plates (crispy pork lor bak; grilled banana blossom and prawn toast) start to arrive. Don't miss our dish to order, the incomparable black pepper chicken curry.

Address: Mambow, 78 Lower Clapton Rd, Lower Clapton, London E5 0RN
Price: ££
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So often, the sequel doesn’t live up to the original. Why mess with perfection? But Tomas Parry, of Shoreditch-meets-Basque-Country stalwart Brat, was never going to miss with his follow-up. Taking over a one-time burger restaurant on Beak Street in Soho, this new restaurant sits on the same site as Murray’s Cabaret Club, where the likes of Henry Kissinger, Princess Margaret, and Paul Getty hung out back in the day. Now, Parry and his team are serving up a fresh iteration of the British meets Basque cooking that made Brat one of London’s favourite restaurants when it opened in 2018. After a little more than six months of service, Mountain won a Michelin star in the 2024 guide.

Parry’s trademark Spanish barbecuing is present and correct here. The bigger dishes are fish- and meat-focussed – langoustine, John Dory, red mullet, Tamworth collar chop from his native Wales, wood pigeon, Jersey beef rib – but the team has given the spotlight to more vegetables than at the original, with small plates of pumpkin fritto and wild mushrooms. “All the staff are top of their game, menu fluent and fun,” we wrote when we added Mountain to our edit of the best restaurants in London soon after its opening. And the atmosphere, from the main dining room to the basement bar, makes this one of Soho’s liveliest restaurants right now, where you’ll spot A-listers dining discreetly next to eager London foodies.

Address: Mountain, 16-18 Beak St, London W1F 9RD
Price: £££
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Yorkshire is having a moment. We named the county one of the best places to go in 2024 thanks largely to a slew of impressive openings like The Abbey Inn, above, and this – a new restaurant from husband-and-wife duo Joshua and Victoria Overington. The Overingtons were behind York's Le Cochon Aveugle, which closed in 2022. In 2023, they returned to the area, opening Mýse in the quiet town of Hovingham. Mýse is the Anglo-Saxon word for ‘eating at the table’, and Joshua, who is at the pass, leads a team cooking the best produce available to them each day from only the best local small-scale producers, growers and farmers.

Diners choose from a tasting menu at lunch and supper (£95 per person and £125 per person respectively). There's a lengthy vegetarian menu, which isn't always a given in these parts – think broad bean porridge with confit ceps or slow-roasted beetroot with walnut wine. The superlative wine list has been curated by Keeling Andrew & Co, also behind Noble Rot in London, so we recommend splashing out and adding the wine pairing to any meal here, as well as ordering the specially created Myse 75, a riff on making-a-comeback cocktail French 75. A handful of bedrooms upstairs carry through the restaurant's muted tones, inviting those booking a table to extend their stay with a sleepover. It's as good a restaurant with rooms as they come. Clearly, the Michelin Guide agreed when they awarded Mýse its first Michelin star earlier this year.

Address: Mýse, Main St, Hovingham, York YO62 4LF
Price: ££££
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Liverpudlian chef Daniel Heffy's NORD has put plenty of meaning behind the name of his new restaurant – his Northern roots, for one, the use of local producers, and, rather curiously, the significant inspiration taken from Scandinavia. If a Scouse-Scandi mash-up wasn't on your bingo card for openings of the year, take comfort in the fact that it wasn't on ours, either. But here, Heffy is giving what he terms ‘travelled British food’ its time in the spotlight.

Decor is retro-swish, all green-pink curvy alcove seating. Clever crowdpleasers such as beer-battered cod Kiev or grilled mackerel, chive emulsion flood the menu, which proudly runs diners through the hyper-locality of the suppliers used (North by Sud-Ouest Charcuterie, 2.3 miles away; Edge & Sons Butchers in the Wirral, 6 miles away). The cocktail menu brings a dose of Scandi-chic to proceedings in the Mersey Beets (gin, beetroot, cassis, lemon), too. This unusual blend might not have been what we expected from this Michelin-trained chef, but we're glad it's what we got.

Address: NORD, 100 Old Hall St, Liverpool L3 9QJ
Price: ££
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At Ploussard, order the choux bun. Yes, there’s a whole menu to work through before you get to puddings – and work through it you should. But do not miss out on the choux bun. Made with rhubarb and tonka bean, it’s sweet and tart and fluffy. Curiously, we kept seeing choux buns appear on the menus of the restaurants which made this list, suggesting a trend for the old-school French dessert. Which tracks, because so much else about Ploussard, an unassuming neighbourhood restaurant and wine bar in Clapham, is bang on trend.

The menu changes with the seasons and is constructed entirely of sharing plates – black pudding and leek tartelette; chicken wings with morel and xo cream; a madeleine with comte and onion custard. The wine list is natural, low-intervention and bio-dynamic, three oft-buzzed-about words that will please any oenophile. The cocktail menu (order the smokey Sage Negroni) is thoughtfully considered, and the team collaborates with like-minded chefs such as Holly Wilcocks from Mountain. There are a lot of reasons to book. Just don’t forget what we said about the choux bun.

Address: Ploussard, 97 St John’s Rd, London SW11 1QY
Price: £££
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Pubs with great food are making a comeback. But this – the follow-up to Islington's The Tamil Prince – is doing something a little different. Like it's older sibling (the Prince opened in 2022), the Crown is a fellow Indian-eatery-meets-North-London-boozer from Prince Durairaj who formerly helmed Euston's (and Traveller editors') favourite cheapest nicest restaurant, Roti King.

Here, Prince Durairaj is cooking a broader range of slightly more elevated dishes taking inspiration from South Indian cooking that, thankfully, hasn't been over simplified for a Western palette. That means vegetarian uttapam, a pancake-like dish from the region, and moreish coconut prawn moilee. We were unsurprised but nevertheless thrilled to find Durairaj's trademark roti on the menu – “soft, buttery roti that tastes like the ultimate flour-based love child of a flaky Malabar paratha and a petal-soft rumali roti,” we wrote in our review in the best new restaurants in London. A table on one of the two floors here is a hot commodity, so book ahead and leave smug that you've just flipped the classic pub dinner on its head.

Address: The Tamil Crown, 16 Elia St, London N1 8DE
Price: ££
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Margot Henderson, the woman behind every Londoner’s favourite East End hangout Rochelle Canteen, made tracks for the country when she opened this pub-with-rooms in Somerset. Ingredients are gathered from farms and suppliers nearby, including the exemplary Brown and Forrest smokehouse and Westcombe Dairy, and greens are from no-dig guru Charles Dowding. But despite Henderson’s serious chops in the kitchen, this is no Down From London fine-dining take on the classic country pub. Sure, it’s beautiful inside, in that pared-back, effortlessly stylish sort of way that Rochelle Canteen pioneered all those years ago. But the menu is proper, all bowls of chips and cottage pie and grilled onglet.

Of course, the team haven’t been able to resist elevating dishes here and there, too. Mash that comes with smoked haddock is made with saffron; there’s a pretty starter of beetroot, goat’s curd and watercress; Maldon oysters are brought out by the trayful. The pudding list goes back to basics, though – Bakewell tart, sticky toffee pudding, sherry trifle – giving that final hit of pub-lunch nostalgia before the clever diners who booked one of the rooms upstairs roll off to bed for a snooze.

Address: The Three Horseshoes, Batcombe, Shepton Mallet BA4 6HE
Price: £££
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Named and inspired, rather curiously, by a hostelry of the same name in Patagonia, Welshman Bryn Williams (a much-loved chef on the London food scene and the man behind Odette’s in Primrose Hill) is using local produce in the kitchen of this slick Penarth spot. That kitchen opens for breakfast (miso-roasted mushrooms with tahini yoghurt or smoked salmon with dill, soft-boiled egg and goat’s curd) and lunch and supper (cured Welsh pork with buffalo mozzarella and blood orange, crab on toast, Welsh rarebit).

But this is a relaxed all-day restaurant, not a place for fine dining. This means the kitchen is open, the service style is unfussy, and the bar menu sits front and centre. There’s Cwrw Otley pale ale on tap, and Merywen gin from North Wales and Brecon vodka in a cocktail menu that might include Aperol Sours or Espresso Martinis. Follow suit and order drinks first, with flurry after flurry of small plates arriving to extend a late lunch into the evening.

Address: The Touring Club, 4 Washington Buildings, Stanwell Rd, Penarth CF64 2AD
Price: ££
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Price key:

£ - roughly £30 or less per person
££ - £50 or less per person
£££ - £100 or less per person
££££ - more than £100 per person