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This weekly column suggestions five restaurants to try during the weekend. There are three rules: The restaurants must not be featured in either the Eater 38 Essential map, nor the monthly-updated Heatmap, and the restaurant must be outside Zone 1.
Homies on Donkeys
This website has proudly pronounced Santo Remedio in London Bridge London’s “best Mexican restaurant.” It is. But there is now a better taco — in isolation — to be found elsewhere. Sandra and Smokey’s Homies on Donkeys is a tiny concession within Wood Street Indoor Market on the south side of Walthamstow, with five counter seats and long wait times for takeaways. But the pork butt taco, with pickled red onions on a blue corn tortilla, for £2.50, is not just worth the wait, it’s easily the most delicious thing to eat in E17. And it’s currently the best taco in the city. —Adam Coghlan
98-100 Wood Street, Walthamstow, E17 (Open: Tuesday—Saturday 11am – 5pm; Sunday (seasonal) 11.30 – 4pm)
Pidgin
It’s taken this ES Magazine restaurant critic an embarrassingly long time to get to Pidgin on Wilton Way, but perhaps that was fortunate, hitting the point where rising star Dan Graham (ex-Dinner by Heston Blumenthal, ex-L’Autre Pied) is doing unspeakably good things with celeriac, serving turbot with a dirty martini sabayon and even making herbes de provence ice-cream taste the right side of wonderful. One of my loveliest dinners of 2017. —Grace Dent
52 Wilton Way, E8 1BS
Duck Duck Goose
One for the Shipping Container Saturday crowd, in the clamour of Pop Brixton. Pegboard walls mark out one of London’s narrowest restaurants — the rest are, inevitably, next door — with an equally trim menu offering twelve modern expressions of Cantonese cookery. It’s in the school of native technique meets British ingredients that will be familiar to fans of Kiln, Smoking Goat and Som Saa, so expect salsify to be salt-and-peppered, ox tongue to be paired with chanterelles and chilli, and appetites to be sated. The Cantonese BBQ selection (duck, pork belly, pickles, plum, mustard) would also be a correct choice. —James Hansen
49 Pop Brixton, Brixton Station Road, SW9 8PQ
Soif
Terroirs' Battersea baby brother tends to get elbowed out of the family photos – more of a slog to get to than the Covent Garden original, lower on swank than the brand new one in East Dulwich. It's a shame, because this is a jolly place to scratch a small-plates-and-natural-wines itch. The weekend fondue-for-two deal (bubbling cauldron of cheese courtesy of Androuet in Spitalfields) is a steal at £14.50 a head, and they're serving roasted chestnuts — aka the true meaning of Christmas — throughout December. —Emma Hughes
27 Battersea Rise, SW11 1HG
Jin Kichi
A longtime favourite of Times columnist and North London enthusiast Giles Coren, Jin Kichi may be a little less shiny and fancy than the recent wave of high-end Japanese openings, but it’s no less worth a visit for that. The lengthy menu (and the presence on it of a “Hampstead roll”) may ring alarm bells, but there are gems here, too — in particular, the selection of grilled meats and skewers, cooked painstakingly over charcoal. Set B — involving chicken gizzard, liver, thigh and wing — is probably the call, although the salmon jaw, asparagus, and aubergine with bonito flakes are all worth a look too. When the winter wind howls off the barrens of Hampstead Heath, there’s really nowhere nearby cosier or nicer to be. —George Reynolds
73 Heath St, NW3 6UG