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Providores & Tapa Room
This place is split over two levels, with tempting tapas (tapas from around £3 to £14 ) grazers on the ground floor and full meals along the same innovative lines - Spanish and just about everything else - in the elegant and understated dining room above. It's popular enough to be frenetic at busiest times; don't come for quiet conversation over your plate of chorizo and chillies.
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Quality Chop House
Subtitled 'For people who love food' (as opposed to those who have stapled their mouths shut?) this chop house is a bit faux-retro for our tastes, but the food is good and harkens back to its past life as a workmen's caf with white-and-black tiled floor and wooden benches. But now the old-fashioned British staples like eel, sausage with bubble and squeak and salmon fish cakes (around £12 ) are set before a middle-class media crowd. There's a two-course set lunch weekdays for around £10 .
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Racine
Regional French cooking is the vehicle here and all-round, dedicated service to the customer the destination. Expect the likes of tête de veau , the classic French veal dish, grilled rabbit with mustard and smoked duck. Being French and very classic, dishes might feel heavy to some, but the sauces and the desserts are all spot on.
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Radha Krishna Bhavan
If you're a true curry junkie and neither Brick Lane nor Whitechapel will do, the capital's contemporary hotspot is in the suburban wilds of SW17 - or Tooting. Near Tooting Broadway and Tooting Bec tube stations, you'll find rows of neighbouring curry houses, from Bangladeshi to Sri Lankan, including Radha Krishna Bhavan, serving superlative Keralan cuisine.
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Ransome's Dock
Diners flock to this restaurant not because it's trendy or on the dock of a bay (rather a narrow inlet of the Thames) but for fresh and very thoughtfully prepared food: smoked Lincolnshire eel fillets with buckwheat pancakes and creme fraiche, duck breast with apple sauce, red cabbage organic lamb noisettes with roast root vegetables. Weekday two-course lunch is around £15 .
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Rasa
Flagship restaurant of the Rasa chain, this superb South Indian vegetarian eatery can't be missed - not with its signature shocking-pink façade! Friendly service, a calm atmosphere, jovial prices and outstanding food from the Indian state of Kerala are its distinctive features. If in doubt, don't bother with the menu and order the multicourse Keralan Feast (around £16 ). Rasa Travancore just across the road is more of the same, but with fish and meat.
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Rasa Samudra
This bubblegum pink eatery just up from Oxford St showcases the seafood cuisine of Kerala state on India's southwest coast, supported by a host - eight out of 14 main courses - of more familiar vegetarian dishes. The fish soups are outstanding, the breads superb and the various curries heavenly spiced. The same group runs the South Indian vegetarian restaurant Rasa in Stoke Newington.
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Red Fort
The Red Fort has always been a trailblazer; as recently as the 1980s it was one of the very few places in London offering genuine Indian cuisine. It still retains its edge with glamorous decor and such dishes as nizami kaliya (kingfish in a spicy sauce with curry leaves) and mahi tikka (smoked dorade with fresh mint, garlic and green chilli).
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Reubens
This central cafe/restaurant has all the Ashkenazi favourites: gefilte fish, latkes (potato pancakes) and sandwiches as well as more complicated (and filling) main courses. It's pricey for what you get but if you answer to a higher authority, it's money well spent.
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River Café
The restaurant that spawned the world-famous eponymous cookery books is a serious treat off Fulham Palace Rd, overlooking Barnes across the river. The simple, precise cooking showcases seasonal ingredients sourced with fanatical expertise. Booking is essential, as it's still a hot favourite of the Fulham set.
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Roast
Iqbal Wahhab of Cinnamon Club fame has perched this unique restaurant directly above Borough Market, so he won't have to go far for his raw materials. The focal point here is the glassed-in kitchen with an open spit, where ribs of beef, suckling pigs, birds and game are roasted. The emphasis is on roasted meats and seasonal vegetables, though there are lighter dishes from salads through to grilled fish.
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Rock & Sole Plaice
Its cutesy name notwithstanding, the approach at this no-nonsense fish and chips shop dating back to Victorian times is simplicity: basic wooden tables and decor and delicious cod, haddock or skate in batter served with a generous portion of chips. Another plus: it's now licensed.
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Roka
This stunner of a Japanese restaurant combines casual dining (wooden benches) with savoury titbits delivered from the robatayaki (grill) kitchen in the centre and modern decor, with the dominating materials steel and glass the colour grey. Sushi is around £5 to around £8 .
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Roussillon
On a quiet side street off Pimlico Rd, Roussillon offers such fine service, lovely muted decor and settings and fresh English ingredients dexterously cooked à la française that we're almost hesitant to show off this sparkling gem to the world. There's no à la carte; choose from among eight starters and main courses at lunch or dinner, or there's a more extravagant tasting menu (around £70 ) of eight courses. The Menu Légumes (around £60 ) puts vegetarian cooking in the Michelin league.
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Royal China
Though admittedly just one of four outlets of a chain, including the Bayswater branch (tel: 7221 2535; 13 Queensway W2; Bayswater), this is London's best Cantonese restaurant and excels in both standard and unusual dim sum, available daily from to . This branch has impressive Thames views, especially in the warmer months when tables are set out at the water's edge.
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Royal Exchange Grand Café & Bar
This cafe sits in the in the middle of the covered courtyard of the beautiful Royal Exchange Bank building. The food runs the gamut from sandwiches to oysters (from around £11 a half-dozen), fisherman's pie (around £19 ) and seafood platters (from around £27 ). It's the perfect place for an informal business meeting.
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Royal Teas
Royal Teas is not exactly vegetarian - you can get smoked salmon as part of a cream tea (around £6 ) at lunchtime - but they're mostly comforting meatless things like baked beans with melted cheese and Spanish-style eggs and lots of baguettes and soups. We come for the ginger cake served with cream or ice cream.
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Rules
Established in 1798, this very posh and very British establishment is London's oldest restaurant. The menu is inevitably meat-oriented - Rules specialises in classic game cookery, serving up tens of thousands of birds between mid-August and January from its own estate - but fish dishes are also available. Puddings are traditional: trifles, treacles and lashings custard.
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Sakura
This very authentic Japanese restaurant has something for everyone throughout the day - from sushi and sashimi (around £2 to around £5 ) to tempura, sukiyaki and a host of sets (around £9 to around £24 ). Just opposite is a small Japanese shopping centre with grocery store, cafe-restaurant and pub.
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Sarastro
Any place that bills itself as 'The Show after the Show' has got to be more concerned with entertainment than food. Come to Sarastro, behind the Theatre Royal and round the corner from the Royal Opera House, for opera music (piped and impromptu) and faux baroque decor that is camper than a bunch of Boy Scouts (think kitsch frescoes and fake 'opera boxes' adorning three sides of the restaurant). It's all quirky good fun and certainly a night you won't forget.
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SE10 Restaurant & Bar
This outwardly scruffy restaurant and wine bar west of the Cutty Sark DLR station tour hides a light, airy and very warm interior of yellows and gold hues. There's a good concentration of fish dishes - though you'd hardly even know the Thames was at the back door - and traditional British dishes (though with only one mean vegetarian option). The desserts are pure comfort food, especially the sticky-toffee pudding. Sundays host both a breakfast (around £4 to around £5 ) and lunch.
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Seashell Of Lisson Grove
This stylish place around the corner from Marylebone station is mostly about fish and chips (mostly the former) and must be doing something right. It's been in the business for more than 40 years. It does a brisk lunch and takeaway business as well.
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Shanghai Blues
What was once the St Giles Library now houses one of London's most stylish Chinese restaurants. The dark and atmospheric interior - think black and blue tables and chairs punctuated by bright red screens - recalls imperial Shanghai with a modern twist, and the menu is just as disarming, particularly the 'new style' dim sum served as appetisers, the pipa duck and the twice-cooked pork belly. There's a vast selection of teas, some of them quite rare. There's a three-course weekday lunch for around £15 and live jazz on Friday and Saturday nights.
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Shiok
Any place whose name means 'fantastic' in Malay slang gets our vote, especially when it serves chilli crab (around £15 ), Singapore curry and char kway teow (fried flat noodles) as authentic as this. The surrounds are comfortable in a 'minimalist canteen-style' kind of way. Come here for lunch or a mid-afternoon fix of rice or noodles.
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Simpson's-in-the-Strand
For traditional English roasts and joints (as in meat) from the trolley, Simpson's is hard to beat. It's been dishing up fleshy fare in a fine panelled dining room since 1848 (when it was called Simpson's Divan and Tavern). It's a gorgeous place, although something of a museum piece these days. Breakfast is available from weekdays.
