There’s something in the air. Within the last fortnight, Isaac Rangaswami released his 20 best dishes of the year so far on Wooden City, elusive Instagram über-influencer @newmiyamoto unleashed hundreds of stories onto the timeline taken from the last four months of eating, and Ruby Tandoh announced the new, updated version of her ice cream guide. Is the turning of the seasons and the promise of renewal prompting us to take a look back at the year we’ve left behind? Or is it simply that it’s the new tax year and everyone’s accountants are demanding evidence to justify their spiralling tax-deductible restaurant expenditure?
We’ll never know. But for completely unrelated reasons, I now think it’s a good time to take stock of my Q4 2025/26 eating. Regular readers of this column may have spotted that I’ve been on a break since last year – the restaurant critic’s equivalent of a rest after a torn ACL – but for the last couple of months I’ve slowly been working my way back into first-team training, revisiting old favourites and ticking off some long-overdue destinations. Here are the 25 of the best things I’ve eaten in that time.
But first! If you are a Vittles subscriber there’s about a 50% chance that you have good reason to be in Highbury this Saturday and Sunday and will be looking for somewhere to eat or drink. As a small gift, I’ve put together a map of restaurants, takeaways and pubs within a 10-15 minute radius of the Arsenal parade route. Note: some of these places may be closed on the Sunday if they are on the parade route itself. You can view the map here.
Thanks so much to my friend Kasia T for the extra recommendations!
Chocolate nemesis at The River Café Café
Everyone seems to have their own River Café hack to reduce the cost of a meal there, from ordering half portions of pasta to getting someone else to pay for you. My own hack is to just walk 20 metres past the main dining room and go to the Café Café. Ice creams are half the price of the restaurant. The cakes and tarts are around £10, which is about what it costs from any south London bakery these days. They are also the same desserts as the main restaurant: Ruthie Rogers is not baking two different nemeses a day for the VIPs. As Warhol said: all the nemeses are the same and all the nemeses are good. The President knows it, Wyclef Jean knows it, and you know it.
Embarrassingly, I had never actually tasted the nemesis until it was brought home to me, half squashed, in a takeaway container. What I didn’t quite realise until I had it is how shockingly acidic it is, from the dark chocolate in the cake to the lactic tang of the crème fraîche. The texture – more mousse than cake – is kind of miraculous. That you can now eat it like this has turned it from one of the least accessible of London’s legendary dishes to the most.
Seekh kebab at Raavi Kebab
I go through cycles of British Library-adjacent lunches, and these days it’s Raavi, which is my favourite of all the South Asian restaurants on Drummond Street. There will usually be a man in the window supervising a small, robata-sized grill, and if he’s there he will almost certainly be tending to a portion of seekh kebabs – three chubby, malformed mince kebabs that have blistered and blackened from the heat (please see the photo, it says more than my words can.) I do think good seekh kebabs are something of a lost art in London, with common crimes being heavy spicing, overworked meat and careless cooking - none of which apply here. This, a portion of dun-green saag, a ghee-slicked naan and all the fixings are a perfect quick lunch.
Red mullet at Oyster Shack & Seafood Bar
A month ago, I went on one of those perfect spring walks from Theydon Bois – where I was accosted by the local Reform candidate, who, with a hopeful twinkle in his eye, persuasively told me ‘We’ve got Suella, we’ve got Yusuf’ – through the wildness of Epping Forest and then down to Gina’s in Chingford (more on this later). In the middle, I stopped by at Oyster Shack & Seafood Bar, where the queue was about an hour long.
In the last few years, Oyster Shack has become the mainstay of hidden gem reels, but we shouldn’t hold this against it: it is genuinely brilliant, far better than it needs to be, particularly if you order well. The family that runs the shack are proper seafood people, and you’ll know if you make a good order because they’ll comment on it. Avoid any of the deep-fried frozen seafood (and also the bacon and scallop sandwich, which is nice but not really what you should be here for) and just go for whatever specials they have on: red mullet (‘lovely fish’), fat scallops swimming in spiced butter, razor clams, tranches of monkfish or whole turbot. The red mullet, perfectly cooked, with samphire, was not much higher than the price you’d get it for at a fishmonger.
Salt and pepper prawns at 148
I have a huge soft spot for 148, a Chinese restaurant and takeaway on Lordship Lane (Dulwich, not Wood Green). For one, it was the original location of Nico Ladenis’s Chez Nico, and therefore an important address in London food history. I also like that it does delivery in-house, and you must resort to the old ways: phoning up, placing an order, paying an old guy with a car cash in hand at the door. Everything here is good, but the salt and pepper dishes, with power chords of MSG, white pepper, chilli and garlic, are paragons of the form.
After the paywall: Honduran baleadas in Peckham, Iranian kebabs in Dulwich, Hunanese food in King’s Cross, Chinatown’s best noodles, my favourite London burgers and fish and chips, and recommendations across Hounslow, Nunhead, Clapton, Sydenham and more.