The Counter: Jimi Famurewa’s Top Not-Very-New Restaurants of 2025

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Hello team.

The warp-speed nature of food media’s end-of-year schedule can be a little disorientating. Christmas special power rankings drop in late November; annual awards emerge in early December; then there’s crystal ball-gazing predictions and restaurant previews for the new year. The upshot of all this is that, although 2025 is only just finishing, it feels like we are spiritually almost already in February.

And yet, here I am. Barrelling through the bleeping train doors of December to breathlessly proffer my take on a dining year. With that in mind, I offer this gastronomic highlight reel with a crucial twist: only one of the featured restaurants or food businesses that I’m pulling out for special recognition actually opened in 2025. Yes, I encountered lots of hugely impressive newcomers in the last 12 months – I am especially thinking of The Shaston Arms, Marjorie’s, Martino's and Legado but most of them have got plenty of attention either here or elsewhere. Novelty inevitably pulls focus in hospitality; newness exerts a gravitational pull. Yet it has never been harder to sustain a business for even a year after the dust has settled and the hype-cycle has moved on.

Here, then, are some of my favourite, longer-established spots from the year of eating and drinking. I hope that, amid 2026’s scramble over the culinary world’s shiniest new toys, you find time to acquaint or reacquaint yourself with them. These places may no longer have their box-fresh lustre, but they have lost none of their thrilling potency or sparky, lived-in charm.

The hinterland between Fulham and West Kensington – an area far more interesting and socially varied than its vaguely red-trousered reputation might suggest – is a suitably unexpected location for this compact espresso bar rigged with all manner of energising surprises. Exceptionally consistent, dialled-in coffee? Impish sibling founders cracking jokes behind the counter? A minimalist design aesthetic of low-slung wood and decorative workwear outfits hung on a back wall? All that and more emanates from this little, light-filled site on the corner of Normand Road. Okay, it opened in February 2025, but I think it still counts as a fallen-between-the-cracks spot deserving of wider appreciation. If the squidgy, caramel-glazed ginger loaf is on the counter, order a thick slice and thank me later.

2025 was the year that restaurant owners of all levels started engaging in the kind of wild, price-slashing discount wars that 1990s furniture salesmen would be proud of. Even so, I can’t really think of a better embodiment of the set menu’s golden age than the steak night, curry night and workers lunch offerings (all £15) at this stylishly rumpled Hackney Road pub. Hereford skirt with chips and salad. Lamb keema pav with potato buns. Pork and prunes beside a silky hillock of god’s own mash. 10 years into its life, Tom Harris and Jon Rotheram’s spot must be protected at all costs.

One of my pet theories is that very few neighbourhood caffs are actually worthy of long pilgrimages – trips to E Pellicci or the Regency Cafe bring history, quality and social media clout but there is almost certainly a barnacled old greasy spoon in your actual neighbourhood doing similarly brilliant, largely unheralded things with fried slice, bubble and squeak and specials board lasagnes with chips. Sema’s, wedged on a busy road between Catford and Lower Sydenham, is my version of this, a Turkish-inflected local stalwart with generous, sharply rendered breakfasts, rotating, stodge-forward specials and the companionable burble of 24-hour news on the telly. ‘Dan’s curry’ is the stand-out order: a genuinely remarkable, profoundly comforting mass of tender chicken and spice-warmed, luridly orange sauce that taps a direct line to a lost mode of lovingly mistranslated Anglo-Indian cuisine. A special place.

2025 was a banner year for Rovi, the flagship temple to plant-loving Levantine abundance that Yotam Ottolenghi launched on Berners Street in 2018. In September, there was the unveiling of a freshly grill-focused menu and monochromatic new visual identity, a soft reboot of sorts, toasted with a raucous, typically starry harvest party. By complete coincidence, a few months earlier I had found myself bearing down on a celeriac shawarma pita: Rovi’s signature, lavishly filled two-hander of root veg and stewed Tunisian greens slow-cooked down to a point of rich, flavoursome succulence so intense it is almost supernatural. There were other, spring-loaded highs (delicate chicken koftas enlivened by coffee and ancho chilli; artfully rubbled pieces of warm chocolate chip cookie with mint). But it was this dish that felt like an encapsulation of a true modern classic having the best sort of seven-year-itch.

This place – a subterranean ruin bar, live music venue and after-hours club hidden near Cambridge Circus – is one of those venues that I hype up so frequently that it implies some shady deal or devastating piece of kompromat. It cannot be helped. Below Stone Nest, launched in late 2021 by Jackson and Frank Boxer and studiously tweaked ever since, is one of those perfect, break-glass nightlife options that possesses the sort of clandestine, matchless vibe that will impress basically anyone you haul there after failing to get into Lost. Even better? Though the young Londoners that pile in for wee-hours Negronis often seem, uh, post-food, there is also a menu stocked with sexy, intensely craveable small plates (a perfect ham, cheese and boudin noir bikini; fried lengths of potato with tahini and mojo rojo; an undeniable, Baltic jolt of White Russian soft serve) that are far, far better than they need to be.

It took me longer than it should have to get to 64 Goodge Street: Woodhead Restaurant Group’s two-year-old revivalist bistro set amid the chaotic, student-friendly jumble of one of London’s most slyly confounding restaurant streets. I had been somewhat primed for the thrumming, fathomless sophistication of head chef Stuart Andrew’s classically French, Michelin-starred saucework; the great flowing cascade of bisque, sauce Albufuera and chicken jus cloaking cod and salsify. But what I hadn’t been ready for was the clarity, balance and sheer technical brilliance of the desserts. That 64’s choux à la crème – a thrusting little puff of featherlight pastry, walnut and coffee cream, all dancing the knife-edge between delicate and decadent – isn’t better known feels sort of criminal. Go. Gorge. Make sure you leave room for pudding.

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