The 99 Best Restaurants in London, Part 2: No 75–41
The Vittles 99 continues. By Jonathan Nunn.
Today’s newsletter covers numbers 75–41 of the Vittles 99. Part 1 of the list, covering numbers 99–76 was published yesterday. The remaining restaurants will be announced over the rest of the week, with the No 1 restaurant announced in Friday’s newsletter. You need to be a subscriber to read the whole list – you can sign up for £7 a month or £59 for a whole year.
Also a quick reminder that we still have copies of Issue 2 left, and that it will arrive before Christmas if ordered this week. If you pre-ordered Issue 2 in the UK and haven’t received it yet, please get in touch with us.
75. Roketsu
Despite its being the single biggest outsider influence on modern Western fine dining, true kaiseki has never really taken off in London. In the last 30 years, both sushi and ramen have become explicable, commonplace, but kaiseki remains as impenetrable as a koan: painterly, full of symbolism and radically seasonal in a way Natoora can only dream of. A meal at Roketsu, a tiny ten-seater room in Marylebone run by Daisuke Hayashi, is probably the best place in London to experience it. The illustrated key to the hassun course, detailing a tableau of tiny bites, can feel a bit like reading the DVD clues David Lynch gave for Mulholland Drive: baffling and oddly beautiful. In January, when I last visited, these included batons of burdock, herring roe like popping candy and a single cured metallic sardine. You don’t need to be told, though, that the sly film of translucent radish on top of a duck broth symbolises a frozen pond: it’s just sort of breathtaking.
74. Antepliler/Antepliler Doner/Antepliler Ciger & Beyran/Antepliler Kunefe
Picking a Green Lanes ocakbaşi is like supporting a football team: you get to choose once and then you’re stuck with it for life. Antepliler is an exception, because it offers something the others don’t. When its founder Ahmet Üstünsürmeli opened it in the early nineties, it was as a baklava shop; since then, he has added shopfront after shopfront of specialised businesses, from the main restaurant and takeaway lahmacun to, in quick succession, an offal specialist (now reopened after a decade hiatus), kunefe shop and doner restaurant. The result is that, across five businesses, you can pick and choose some of the best dishes on the street: İskender, cut thin from two vast and trunkless legs of lamb and covered at the table with hot melted butter; thin skewers of liver and sweetbread, served St. John-style with a punchy parsley and onion salad; and its unimpeachable lahmacun, as close to a true North London pizza style as we’ll ever get.
73. Saffron Kitchen
I once lamented to the LA Times’ restaurant critic Bill Addison about the lack of great khoresh – Iranian stews – in either of our cities’ restaurants, but that was before Saffron Kitchen miraculously opened in Finchley in 2024. The khoresh here rotate daily and read like a greatest hits of every province’s favourite dish. On lucky days you might find the viridian seafood stews of the south where owner Sam Hoseyni is from, like ghalieh meygoo, a Gordian knot of marine funk, sweetness and acidity; or northern dishes from Hoseyni’s wife Sima Valipour, including koofteh tabrizi, a Tabriz speciality of two huge rice-bound meatballs, each about the size of a baseball, stuffed with plum, barberries, fried onions and a single walnut. Every weekend, you’ll see older men with bald pates who all look like Salman Rushdie ordering bowls of kaleh pacheh, a lamb head soup most younger Iranians will tell you they can’t stomach. Make sure you finish with Saffron’s housemade bastani: saffron ice cream, frozen clotted cream and pistachio, a whole world in a scoop.
72. Nissi
Like dim sum restaurants, Cypriot tavernas in North London seem to exist on a spectrum: at one end are places that prioritise good food, and at the other are those that deliver great vibes in rooms covered in New River bougainvillea. Andy Panayiotou and Carlos Charalambous’s Nissi is slightly too prim for a proper, vibey Palmers Green taverna, but the food is even better than anything I remember from my childhood. At some tavernas you fill up on too many bought-in dips that bloat you before the fish arrives; at Nissi everything is timed to the second, from the dips and vegetables (fasolakia that actually tastes of the bean; salty, intense tarama) to the hot starters (a globe of kolokithokeftede that collapses like a soufflé; unimprovable fresh calamari). The fish course in particular is a barnstormer – a small gang of crispy red mullets, and a skewer of swordfish so burnished by the grill that the char forms a second skin. On food alone, this is the best taverna in the city.
71. Sollip
There is a version of Woongchul Park and Bomee Ki’s Korean-ish restaurant that I would want to eat at every week, which is a strange thing to say about a restaurant as intricate and corseted as Sollip. It would involve a large portion of Park’s sot-bap (which arrives seething in a cast iron pan, with a layer of crispy rice ready to be scraped out with a paddle), and a side of something barbecued – perhaps a pork jowl glazed in doenjang, with a layer of fat as thin as the gel in an After Eight. Then there would be a course of Korean teas with Ki’s magical desserts, ending with an oozing black sesame madeleine or a Wicked-Witch-of-the-West-green mugwort madeleine. However, this is London, so this lunchroom–teahouse hybrid doesn’t exist. Instead, Sollip has to be content with its Michelin star and operating one of London’s most elegant tasting menus, while I have to be content with Sollip being a once-a-year treat.
70. Phở Thuý Tây Café
Thúy Nguyễn may not serve your favourite phở in London, but she serves mine: a quiet, unassuming northern-style phở with a crystalline broth that I could drink for breakfast. Since Nguyễn first opened Phở Thuý Tây in Deptford in 2013, she has been a flagbearer for dishes popular with young Vietnamese students in Hanoi and now in London – steaming goat hot pots with plastic bags of rau răm, or intestines dipped in mắm tôm, a bureaucratic grey paste that tastes like the funk of a thousand prawn heads reduced to the density of a neutron star. Now the restaurant has moved again, from Old Kent Road to Surrey Quays, I have gravitated away from offal and towards Nguyen’s simpler cooking, like the crispy noodles bound together into round, rösti-like pucks, the cinnabar-warmth of the thit kho, or her unadorned phở. And as more Vietnamese students come to the UK looking for home comforts, Phở Thuý Tây increasingly looks like the future.
69. Vasantha Vilas
If you’re stuck for choice on what to order at this East Ham Tamil canteen, whose menu runs longer than some religious texts, then Vasantha Vilas offers a salve for the indecisive. The first is the mini tiffin, which gives you a dosa whose edges taste like a toasted cheese crisp, a lightly-spiced vada, two idli, a selection of chutneys, and (my favourite) pongal, which has the stiff consistency of a cream-heavy rice pudding. The second (if you ignore the Indo-Chinese and north Indian stuff) is the south Indian thali, which gives you six faultless vegetable curries (usually okra, spinach, beans and something else), whose complexity is only undermined by the likelihood that your favourite single bite will be the taste of plain white rice covered in a teaspoon of sweet ghee. Owners Kannan Murugan and Mohamed Thasleem have recently expanded the restaurant into Surbiton and Orpington, which means that Vasantha Vilas may soon be our own homegrown Saravanaa Bhavan.