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Café Corfu
Corfu is the best of a host of Greek restaurants in the neighbourhood. Décor is sleek and stylish, the delicious food feels light (modern Greek?) but fills, and there's more than retsina to slake your thirst. A belly dancer and DJ aid the digestion on Friday and Saturday nights and there's live Greek music on Sunday.
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Café on the Hill
Largely organic, this place has been a real hit with locals, who come here in droves. It's all you could hope for in a local café - seasonal menus, all-day breakfast, good coffee, light lunches, afternoon tea, relatively adventurous evening meals, newspapers and a welcoming atmosphere.
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Café Spice Namaste
Chef Cyrus Todiwala has taken an old magistrates' court just a 10-minute walk from Tower Hill and decorated it in 'carnival' colours; the service and atmosphere are as bright as the walls. The Parsee and Goan menu is famous for its superlative dhansaak (lamb stew with rice and lentils) but just as good are the spicy chicken frango piri-piri and the Goan king prawn curry. They make their own chutneys here. Another bonus is the little Ginger Garden behind the dining room that's open in the warmer months.
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Canteen
Voted the Observer Food Monthly 's Best UK Restaurant in 2007, this very stylish yet affordable eatery just west of Spitalfields Market has an all-day menu that will please almost every taste - from macaroni and cheese and shop-made pies to smoked haddock. The management and waiting staff are young and very keen.
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Cantina del Ponte
The general consensus is that the most affordable Conran establishment at Butler's Wharf is the most disappointing. Sometimes a lack of detail in the accompaniments just spoils a salad or pasta dish, at other times a meat or fish dish just doesn't turn out right. The pizzas generally pass muster, though.
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Cantina Italia
Though this funky little trattoria with modern art on the walls and a Sardinian connection does more ambitious secondi such as the stew-like stinco di maiale (around £14 ), most people come here for the fine pizzas (from around £5 to £9 ) and pasta (from around £8 to £12 ). Don't miss the linguine tossed with bottarga (cured mullet roe), oil, garlic, parsley and red pepper flakes.
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Capital
Of the five restaurants in London to have won two Michelin stars, the Capital behind Harrods department store is probably the least known - and so much the better. The modern yet warmth-inducing décor, the welcoming and accommodating staff and chef Eric Chavot's award-winning dishes - a large, glass plate like an artist's palate of duck preparations called assiette Landaise, pan-roasted lobster with crab ravioli, roasted fillet of venison served with pan-fried foie gras - all remain our secrets. And now yours. The tasting menu is around £70 (add around £50 for accompanying wines).
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Casale Franco
Still our favourite cheap and cheerful Italian on Upper St, Casale Franco offers the usual Italian comfort food (the pizza is excellent) in warm surroundings. Avoid sitting on the 1st floor (nowheresville) and kill for a outside table in the warm weather. Service is friendly and attentive.
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Cay Tre
As much as we'd like to, we cannot recommend any of the Vietnamese cafés or restaurants in Little Hanoi on Kingsland Rd north of here. Trust us; they smell more of faux than pho . Instead stay with your mates in Hoxton and head to the 'Vietnamese Kitchen' for classic Vietnamese beef noodle soup, banh xeo (a kind of pancake with prawns, chicken and vegetables) and wonderful pan-fried basa fish with lemongrass and shallots.
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Chakalaka
This South African restaurant done up in brash tiger patterns and colours serves springbok and kudu (both types of antelope), ostrich, zebra and other creatures that are usually seen grazing - not being grazed on - and is probably best visited on a dare. They also have bobotie (around £10 , a very South African dish of spiced minced meat baked with a bread custard topping, on the menu. Good selection of South African wines.
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Champor-Champor
Not surprisingly, a restaurant whose name means 'mix and match' serves up some unusual creations. East-west cuisine includes innovations such herbed ostrich sausages in Sichuan pepper and Japanese miso, veal cutlets crusted with coriander seeds, peppercorn-crusted lamb cutlets with peanut sauce, and several vegetarian options that the waiter will probably have to explain ('baked silk tofu with black vinegar', anyone?). Some dishes work, others don't. The eclectic décor - some Asian, a bit of African - is a delight.
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Chelsea Kitchen
This spartan place - part of the Stockpot empire which has branches all around town - has some of the cheapest food in London and is almost like eating out at a restaurant. Sturdy staples include the likes of French onion soup, spaghetti bolognese, lasagne and steak. Nothing too inventive, just good, hot grub.
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Cheyne Walk Brasserie & Salon
With a reputation for especially tender steaks, the focus of the food preparation at this brasserie is the large open grill in the centre of the ground-floor dining room. However, you might prefer prawns flambéed in pastis sardine with a delightful salad of green beans, pistachio and mint. The belle époque decoration is just this side of kitsch, with turquoise banquettes, red leather chairs, chandeliers and crystal lamps topped with pink shades. From the very red star-dotted upstairs cocktail salon are great views of the Thames.
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Chez Bruce
This eatery, though Michelin-starred, actually feels like a quality local than a flash restaurant. The restaurant's rustic façade, beside leafy Wandsworth Common, belies a modern interior. The fixed-price-only set-up means that there's fortunately no need to scrimp on desserts.
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Chez Lindsay
Offering a slice of Brittany at the bottom of Richmond Hill, Chez Lindsay's simply furnished dining room draws visitors with its wholesome Breton cuisine, comfortable ambience and river views. The house specialities include galettes (around £4 to around £10 ) with a myriad of tasty fillings, washed down with a variety of hearty (and very dry) Breton ciders.
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Chinese Experience
One of the new wave of Chinatown restaurants, this simple yet smart place presents a full range of Chinese cooking, from Cantonese to Peking to Sichuan. The staff are impeccably polite, and the prices are good value for the high standards. Definitely one of Chinatown's best.
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Chosan
This little Japanese restaurant whose name means Korea in Korean (go figure) doesn't look like much from the outside - or the inside for that matter - but it does turn out excellent sushi and sashimi as well as tempura and kushiage (more deeply fried than tempura) dishes.
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Christopher's
This sleek American bar and grill is housed in a vast Georgian mansion just off the Strand. Its interior is suitably grand, with a busy downstairs bar and a stylish upstairs dining room, where classic but clever dishes such as blackened salmon with jambalaya risotto are served up next to a wonderful array of gargantuan USDA steaks and surf and turf combinations. Brunch ( to ) at the weekend pulls in the crowds.
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Churchill Thai Kitchen
This leafy little restaurant in a conservatory behind a traditional English pub renowned for its Sir Winston memorabilia (and, bizarrely, chamber pots suspended from a great height) serves some of the most authentic (and reasonably priced) Thai food in west London. All dishes are uniformly around £6 .
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Chutney's
Although, like Brick Lane, the South Indian restaurants along Drummond St have seen a decline in standards, the drop is not so pronounced, and Chutney's continues to provide good, cheap all-you-can-eat vegetarian buffets.
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Cinnamon Cay
This neighbourhood restaurant offers a lively atmosphere, small open kitchen and Southeast Asian-influenced fusion. The Thai fish cake with mango salad and the sesame-crusted seared tuna with piperade are favourites and vegetarians are well catered for with such tasty exotica as Penang laksa with pumpkin, tofu and okra. Service is efficient and friendly.
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Cinnamon Club
Domed skylights, high ceilings, parquet flooring and a book-lined mezzanine - this just had to be a library in a former life - and the hushed, efficient staff only add to the illusion. The atmosphere is colonial club and the food modern - or perhaps palace - Indian. Set lunches of two or three courses start from £20 .
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City Miyama
This rather soulless Japanese basement restaurant serves some of the finest sushi in the City, which comes in both 'traditional' and 'new' styles. Set lunches, representing the best deals, are from around £13 to £25 .
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Clerkenwell Dining Room
Up there with Club Gascon and St John in producing some of Clerkenwell's best food, the Dining Room is a little less formal and expensive than those two. Chef Andrew Thompson's menu here, although regularly changing, sticks fairly closely to classic combinations with dishes like salmon with sorrel sauce and lamb with rosemary jus.
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Club Gascon
One of Clerkenwell's leading restaurants since it was awarded a Michelin star in 2002, Club Gascon takes a different approach to fine dining, with a selection of tapas-style portions (that would, naturally, leave an ordinary tapas restaurant for dust). They're arranged in five categories, one of which is entirely devoted to foie gras; order from about four per person. A set menu called Le Marché starts from £45 .
