Head chef Drew Snaith has taken over the building that once housed Pidgin and things are going rather well. At Sesta, silliness sits comfortably alongside seriousness, with nduja-scotched olives, coastal cheddar and cider scones, smacked cucumber drizzled with sweet raspberry hot sauce, beef ragu toasties and funky-looking prawn and stone bass dolma with ouzo butter. It’s food dreamed up deep in the middle of a Saturday night session and then bought into reality with little concern for judgement from the purists.
Every week, a frankly silly amount of brilliant new restaurants, cafés and street food joints arrive in London. Which makes whittling down a shortlist of the best newbies a serious challenge. But here it is. The 20 very best new restaurants in the capital, ranked in order of greatness and deliciousness. All of them have opened in the past 12 months and been visited by our hungry critics.
So go forth and take inspo from this list, which features everything from mighty modern Korean cookery at Miga in Hackney, Brit/Thai mashups at AngloThai in Marylebone, deep fried olives at Sesta in London Fields, hip fish bar Tollington’s in Finsbury Park, Oma and Agora’s Greek-ish cuisine in Borough Market, rightly hyped Mayfair spot The Dover, the Whitehall wonder that is Kioku, British bistro classiness at Sael in St James’s, and fire and fish at Lita in Marylebone. This list is updated regularly, so check in often to find out what we really rate on the London restaurant scene.
Leonie Cooper is Time Out London’s Food and Drink Editor. For more about how we curate, see our editorial guidelines.
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