Archives: Restaurants & Cafes

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Smoking Goat

Got £3.80 in your pocket? Great. Because that’s all you’ll need for Smoking Goat’s lardo-fried rice. Aka the best fried rice in London. They cook down the back fat of outdoor-reared Tamworth pigs, then fry it up with rice, a little egg and a paste of chilli, garlic and coriander root. Plus whatever veggie offcuts are lying around. It’s the colour of autumn,

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The Counter at Sabor

So you like all your friends? Well, get ready to unlike them. Because although there are bookable communal tables up on Sabor’s first floor, if you’re into tapas, stick to street level. Here, they’ll officially seat up to four of you, but it’s a counter, so that would be weird. Instead, go with just one person you love (or like a lot). The kind you don’t

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Tandoor Chop House

There’s so much to love about TCH, I don’t really know where to start. So let’s kick off with the food. It’s basically a twist on what you’d get in an old-fashioned Brit ‘chop house’, only using Indo-Punjabi spices and swapping the grill for the tandoor. It’s meaty, fiery and smoky. Plates are small. Well of course they are. Then there’s the vibe. Picture

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Hoppers

There’s nothing like Hoppers in London. Sure, there’s good Sri Lankan food in certain pockets of the capital. But very few restaurants are exclusively Sri Lankan (most are South Indian and certainly don’t do hoppers, the egg-topped pancakes after which this Soho restaurant is named); the few exceptions are okay, rather than amazing. So the fact that Hoppers

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El Pastor

Take two things to El Pastor: a mobile phone and a list of local bars. This taco joint in a railway arch next to Borough Market doesn’t accept bookings and the wait can, at peak times, be up to two hours. But at least there’s no standing in the rain: they take your number and will text when your table is ready. So why all the

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Padella

Tell me if this sounds familiar: you love pasta, but never order it in restaurants because it’s something ‘you can just make at home’. But unless you own a pasta machine – correction, unless you own and

use

a pasta machine, rather than leave it in the back of a cupboard like a small-scale instrument of torture that enjoys

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The Bright

Heard of P Franco? It’s a super-cool Dalston wine shop that also happens to do a mean line in comestibles. Bright is from the same crew, but is a restaurant proper. And it’s the best thing to hit the neighbourhood since sliced bread. Sliced bread also happens to be the makings of the cutest thing on the menu – a meaty take on a fish finger sarnie, using

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The Barbary

So you thought you loved the

Palomar. You thought you’d be faithful and true. But that was before you met little sis the Barbary. It’ll make you want to quit your job, pack your bags, and run away into the sunset together. The Barbary, you see, takes everything that’s good about the Palomar but ditches the bits that don’t quite work (like the

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Roastery Coffee House

That coffee can be so awesome, you would only believe it when you drop into this coffee house in Banjara Hills. Housed in a bungalow, this coffee house has some of the most intriguing coffee names on its menu. But when you taste the real thing, you are justified in coming here. Behind every cup of coffee, there is an interesting tale and innovative ways

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