The brilliantly creative Portuguese chef Leandro Carreira closed Londrino partnered with seafood mini chain Bonnie Gull co-founder Alex Hunter to introduce an innovative seafood restaurant, fishmonger, and champagne bar in Chelsea. Here, a number of dishes take inspiration from Japanese cuisine — like clams chawanmushi with broad beans and squid with pine nuts and sake — as well as platters like crab with waffles and lettuce, and poached lobster with olive oil and pepper. Already a hit with one critic.

Given that Daniel Humm’s Davies and Brook has been open only three days, its inclusion is as much for the reputation — and hype — that precedes it. The three-Michelin-starred Eleven Madison Park chef’s London debut is being framed as a “sibling” to the 2017 “best restaurant in the world” in New York. It’s a dishes such as the famous roasted duck, which is dry aged in-house for 14 days and glazed with lavender and honey, will cross the pond

Dum Biryani’s founder Dhruv Mittal opened his second restaurant — in Mayfair. The only place in London that currently serves Lucknow’s Awadhi food. The rich cuisine of the Mughal empire is executed with great skill and commitment to tradition: in galawat kababs — lamb patties with the texture between pâtè and mousse; taar gosht — lamb legs are slow-cooked in (lamb’s) trotter stock for hours with dozens of spices; dal makhani — of whole green moong beans simmered in milk. Perfumed Awadhi biryani is as good as that which Mittal serves at Dum, while gilafi kulcha, a layered bread is almost impossible to find anywhere else in the city. A valuable addition to London’s already phenomenally diverse south Asian restaurant scene.

Peter Sanchez-Iglesias’ debut London restaurant is a rooftop stunner with a menu that takes sideways glances at Mexican cuisine from a suitably lofty Spanish vantage point. As this is 2019, there’s an *it* dish and it’s an oozy tortilla mattress to a duvet of caviar, but a beguiling mushroom bomba rice, blistered quails from the grill, and a lo-fi dessert of set cream, olive oil, and sea salt are the real stars so far.

The Xi’an Chinese cooking that has made Wei Guirong — an alumnus of Sichuanese restaurant Barshu in Chinatown — a star of London dining, this year got a new home in Bloomsbury. Master Wei is Guirong’s first solo project — following her joint venture, Xi’an Impression by the Emirates Stadium in Highbury, a tiny restaurant which has rightly earned cult status among lovers of regional Chinese food in the capital. At Master Wei, Eater London’s restaurant of the year, like at Xi’an Impression, the focus is on the region’s flour-foods, mianshi: peerless biang biang noodle dishes, with vegetables or beef and hot chilli oil; fine liang pi, cold skin noodles with a cool, refreshing, umami rich dressing, and the chef’s inimitable ‘burgers’ with a cumin-spiced beef or pork filling. That more restaurant goers in the the city now know and can access Guirong’s cooking is one of the industry’s very good good news stories this year.

Maybe Bao’s coolest restaurant to-date and Eater London’s best designed restaurant of the year. This restaurant, bar, and karaoke venue takes as much inspiration from Tokyo as it does from Tapei: a triumphant interpretation of those cities’ nightlife culture. Design-minded operators — Erchen Chang, Shing Tat Chung, and Wai Ting Chung — created one of the most original and energetic spaces of the year. In addition to Bao classics and the unmistakable parade of delightful gua bao, there’s small plates like beef, rice, and egg yolk; pork jowl with raw young leeks, and Sichuan oil, and stellar beverages which perhaps set this location apart yet further: softs include a playful, refreshing, and delicious grape soda with a thick cap of aloe foam; while on tap there’s Suntory whisky soda.

Tayēr + Elementary — a world-class cocktail bar in-the-making — became the permanent home for two of the city’s most genuinely exciting chefs. Zijun Meng and Ana Gonçalves’ TāTā Eatery, a four-seater counter in an ultra modern room, has been responsible for some of the city’s most exciting cooking this year. Their self-described “east meets west” cuisine has resulted in dishes like wild strawberry in mushroom broth with savoury sugar puffs; beef with gooseberry, black sesame and shiso; and aged, dried Dover sole with ginger, sake, and a wet herbaceous rice. Constantly evolving and innovating, so one to watch carefully in 2020.

Chefs James Lowe and Anna Higham, together with general manager, John Ogier, and backers JKS Restaurants, opened their second restaurant, to much fanfare. A bakery, wine bar, and restaurant on London’s historic Borough Market is the little sister to site to the Michelin-starred, World’s 50 Best recognised Lyle’s in Shoreditch. Higham’s austerely beautiful pastries — quince danishes, unimpeachable pains aux chocolat — give way to an orchestrated bustle come lunch and dinner, with a clam flatbread; scarlet prawns with zippy kosho; and a beguilingly Gothic anjou pigeon dish the stars on the menu thus far. One of the best of the year.

One of the biggest, if low-key, restaurant opening of the year, which has avoided the sort of over-hype one might expect for a chef, Johnny Lake and sommelier Isa Bal, who worked at the three-Michelin-starred Fat Duck in Bray for a decade. Trivet is not cheap, but it is refreshingly informal, smart, and accomplished, even if it might, in time, realise that London is receptive to a little more culinary derring do. At the moment, it is safely delicious, demonstrating self-assurance in the likes of Anglo-Franco roast chicken with vinegar sauce, a Middle-Eastern-meets-East-Asian inspired medley of scallops, sesame, pomegranate, and pickled buddha’s hand; and a Japanese-French dessert of layered potato puff pastry with sake and white chocolate cream, and sake and butter ice cream. It also has one of the most interesting and ambitious wine lists in the city — not wedded to the old-school, nor over-excited about the popularity of newer, fashionable low-intervention styles. “Agnostic,” says Bal. Wine, he says, just needs to be “good.” Expect this restaurant to grow into the new year.

This new Shoreditch restaurant was and remains a lot: Youporn pizza; cacio e pepe served out of a wheel of cheese; a lemon meringue pie almost comically large. What Parisian restaurant group Big Mamma’s London debut captured was a sense of hedonistic maximalism — to serve all of these things without irony or undercutting, and to revel in the accompanying fun. Its bright yellow exterior and surfeit of foliage in the heart of Shoreditch, moments from the Nobu hotel, also marked a new era in London’s formerly hipster-forward neighbourhood.

The New Israeli debut restaurant from Marc Summers, (formerly Berber & Q) and Helen Graham, (of The Palomar, The Barbary, and The Good Egg) is vegetarian without shouting about it. Indeed, in service of modern tastes but also in recognition of culinary tradition, plenty of the menu is vegan, too. Execution here is first-rate: in a pumpkin dip with harissa, preserved lemon, and verdant olive oil, in hummus lifted by brown butter, in crisp confit potato latkes with toum and Aleppo chilli; and ful medames enlivened with lovage pesto, yoghurt, and homemade malawach (flatbread). An exciting, steadying, hanging-plant-filled addition to an energised scene.