On 13 January 2024, after 56 years, Le Gavroche served its last dinner. It was the first restaurant in Britain to hold three Michelin stars, in 1982, and for most of a generation it was the answer to the question this page asks. Michel Roux Jr shut it because he wanted his weekends back, and nobody has quite replaced it.
What has replaced it is a whole category. A tasting menu in London now means handing a kitchen four hours and, at the top of the market, close to four hundred pounds a head. You do not choose the food. You choose the chef, and then you choose a date, sometimes three months out.
Seven rooms worth that arrangement, in descending order of stars.
The Ledbury
Three stars since 2024, and a complete argument in London for the whole idea. Brett Graham reopened in February 2022 after 22 months dark, and came back cooking from his own farm: deer, Jersey cows, Iberian pigs, raised for this kitchen and no other. Eight courses, £285.
The catch is the diary. Reservations open 90 days ahead and are gone the day they appear, so put a reminder in your calendar rather than trying your luck on a Tuesday afternoon.
The Ledbury: 127 Ledbury Road, Notting Hill, London W11 2AQ, Tel. +44 20 7792 9090, theledbury.com
Core by Clare Smyth
Three stars since 2023, when Clare Smyth became the first British woman to run a three-starred kitchen. Core opened in 2017 and now offers a choice many rooms at this level refuse: Core Seasons at £275 for what the year is doing, or Core Classics at £265 for the dishes that made the name. Wine pairings are £175.
Take the Classics on a first visit. Signature dishes exist for a reason, and the point of coming here is to eat the ones that earned those stars.
Core by Clare Smyth: 92 Kensington Park Road, London W11 2PN, Tel. +44 20 3937 5086, corebyclaresmyth.com
Related: Top Michelin-starred restaurants in London
Ikoyi
Two stars, and the top price on this list: around fourteen courses for £380. Jeremy Chan founded it with Iré Hassan-Odukale in 2017 and built a no-choice menu on fermented and bitter West African flavours. This is not a hedge or a fusion. It is a whole grammar of cooking that few London kitchens have touched.
If the price defeats you, the express lunch is £150 for the same hand. Booking is the sport: the diary opens on the first of each month at noon, for dates two months out.
Ikoyi: 180 Strand, London WC2R 1EA, Tel. +44 20 3583 4660, ikoyilondon.com
The Clove Club
Two stars, Isaac McHale in the kitchen, and a dining room inside the Grade II listed Shoreditch Town Hall. No London restaurant eats in a finer set of proportions. You still do not pick the dishes here, just the night, and the night decides the bill: menus run from £185 to £285 depending on when you come, with lunch at the lower figure.
That spread is the useful thing. Come midweek at lunch and you eat two-starred food for less than a Saturday supper elsewhere on this page.
The Clove Club: Shoreditch Town Hall, 380 Old Street, London EC1V 9LT, Tel. +44 20 7729 6496, thecloveclub.com
Related: London’s best champagne bars
Restaurant Story
Two stars. Tom Sellers opened it in April 2013 at 26, had a star within five months and the second in 2021, and has spent the years since making the format stranger rather than safer. Nine courses, unannounced, and the restaurant asks you to allow up to four hours.
Read that as an instruction rather than a warning. This is not a dinner to book before the theatre.
Restaurant Story: 199 Tooley Street, London SE1 2JX, Tel. +44 20 7183 2117, restaurantstory.co.uk
Kitchen Table
Two stars since 2018, and as near as London gets to eating in the kitchen without being in the way. James Knappett cooks at a horseshoe counter with the room seated around it, so the meal is a conversation as much as a menu. It begins with canapés in a lounge before you take your stool.
The diary works differently again: a whole month of tables is released at once, three months ahead. Wine pairings start at £175.
Kitchen Table: 70 Charlotte Street, Fitzrovia, London W1T 4QG, Tel. +44 20 7637 7770, kitchentablelondon.co.uk
Related: London’s best game restaurants
Pied à Terre
One star, and the one on this list you might actually get into this week. David Moore opened it on Charlotte Street in 1991 and still runs it. That makes it the longest-standing independent Michelin-starred restaurant in Britain, outliving every group and every backer to come through this postcode since. Lunch Wednesday to Saturday, dinner Tuesday to Saturday, shut Sunday and Monday.
It is not the fashionable choice here and we would still send you, particularly for a first tasting menu. Thirty-odd years of doing the same thing well is its own kind of theatre.
Pied à Terre: 34 Charlotte Street, London W1T 2NH, Tel. +44 20 4600 7467, pied-a-terre.co.uk
One piece of advice the list cannot carry. Book the restaurant before you book anything else in the day, because at this level the table sets the date and not the other way round. And if you are wondering where HKK went, the Hakkasan Group shut it in October 2017, so cross it off whatever old list sent you here.