Uyghur cooking is a tactile activity, the traces of which come out pleasingly in the eating: there are noodles or leghmen, uneven with the memory of hands deftly tugging and pulling at the dough, and boiled dumplings or tugur, with moon craters across their skin and the ghosts of fingertips pinching them snugly together. At Etles, a cosy living room of a restaurant in Walthamstow, those hands belong to chef-owner Mukaddes Yadikar. Finish a meal of noodles, dumplings, and delicate cumin-spiced lamb skewers with a bowl of Uyghur milk tea that’s rich, malty, and sweet-salty like good popcorn. 

All the cooking at Dilara is done behind the takeaway counter, so customers who stay in and sink into the leather dining chairs are in for a visual treat: chefs pulling long pliable noodles for leghmen, marjan qorimisi (diced noodles with beef), and the popular large plate chicken served with potatoes and noodles. There is an extensive dumpling offering too, including tugure, Uyghur manti, and samsa. The latter is a little pastry ball that arrives at the moment where it can hold its filling no longer, and the pastry cracks rebelliously, spilling lamb and sweet onions onto the plate. 

Lias Khan Din’s inconspicuous Kashmiri takeaway on Ridley Road has been open since 1995. While the surrounding area has changed rapidly, Din’s menu and his head chef have been constants over the years. Go early when the market is creaking to life, for a spiriting breakfast of paratha stuffed with spicy egg and onion omelette or for a helping of nourishing, sweet dal. At lunch, biryani, saag, dal and balti curries wait in a dozen silver trays to be scooped out with long spoons and piled generously onto rice. Rotating specials include matar paneer (pea and paneer curry) on Tuesdays and Thursdays, and lamb shank on Saturdays, which keep the canteen both interesting and reliable.  

Some of the best Kurdish-run restaurants in London can be found on Edgware Road, where many serve both Iraqi and Kurdish cuisine. Lunch or dinner at Kurdistan Restaurant is best feasted on sharing plates of kubbah and falafel, whole grilled fish, mixed grilled kebabs and koftas. Flatbreads, bubbling like molten lava, are ferried attentively straight from the tannour to the table whenever someone’s basket starts to run low. These fine breads are best eaten immediately (before they cool and become brittle), dragged through a pool of thick, warm, and spicy foul medames or a well-muddled shakshuka. 

Lurra – meaning earth in Basque – specialising in ripe steaks, is no rustic Basque tavern. It’s a bright and gleaming retreat on Seymour Place, with a herb-bordered dining courtyard rivalling Safin’s poison garden. The short menu goes for impact: whole-grilled turbot and octopus alongside famous aged Galician beef steaks. The wine list offers no less than three different Vega Sicilia wines and tops out at £720 for a bottle of Dominio de Pingus. For Basque fidelity, there are also bottles of txakoli and sparkling cider. It’s perhaps just the kind of Basque restaurant one would expect from two ex-City workers with a love of fine dining and a strong aesthetic eye. A more relaxed menu and dining experience can be found just across the road at Lurra’s sister restaurant, Donostia. 

Yada’s has given up its intimate-but-hard-to-locate Peckham railway arch for a glass-fronted restaurant on the main beat of Rye Lane. Like Nandine, cousin Yada Baban too comes from a tradition of southern Kurdish cooking. Bread – a point of pride for Kurdish cuisine – varies from region to region, from tagine-baked naans to stone-baked flatbreads. Even as Yada’s stays faithful to an Iraqi-Kurdish staple with fluffy samoon hajari bread, the new menu reveals a strong Persian inflection too. Finjan – like Iranian fesenjoon – is chicken on the bone, cooked until it falls apart tenderly in a rich stew of pomegranate molasses and walnuts. Many of the mains are accompanied with a vegetarian version of ghormeh sabzi, made with lentils rather than the more usual kidney beans.

Wherever he has lived and cooked – New Delhi, Singapore, London – Rohit Razdan has devoted himself to celebrating the cuisine of his native Kashmir. At his Putney restaurant, Razdan serves up traditional and celebratory dishes such as gushtaba or lamb meatballs in a light and mild yoghurt sauce; kabargah, lamb ribs that have been cooked in milk and then deep fried; dum aloo, baby potatoes in red chilli yoghurt sauce; and nadru kebab, made with lotus root and fennel seeds. Many of these dishes are features of the Kashmiri wazwan, an elaborate multi-course meal served at weddings and festivals. At Razdan’s restaurant, all are welcome to the feast.  

Cristina Ruiz grew up in San Sebastián, eating her baker grandfather’s apple cake, while elsewhere in the city, Juan Mari Arzak and Pedro Subijana were pioneering the New Basque Cuisine. Now, she owns Tokova, which is part of the night life of Tooting’s historic Broadway Market (by day, it’s still grocers, fishmongers, butchers, and a pet shop). Ruiz’s restaurant is all about good-humoured food, ranging from the playfully absurd – skewers of chorizo suspended over a flaming ceramic pig – to the straightforwardly delicious, a winning trifecta of duck egg, blood sausage, and paprika migas (breadcrumbs). Celeriac curled in a manchego and Idiazábal sauce would rival any good cauliflower cheese. And there’s just a sprinkling of the old New with a dusting of dehydrated olives.