This sun-dappled Walthamstow cafe has always been a hit, but it’s gone up another gear with the arrival of former 40 Maltby Street chef Alex Vines, bringing in an elegant menu for the weekends. Slabs of chicken liver parfait bely a silken texture; skate flops lazily over asparagus; mussels take up a little tartlet with saffron and fennel.

A new European wine shop, cafe, and restaurant-bar for De Beauvoir, from one former partner and the current owner of Hill & Szrok, the butcher, provisioner, restaurant-bar on Broadway Market that has flourished during the pandemic. Currently, it’s a bottleshop serving excellent bocadillos and thick, bitter espresso; this is just its first brief life before full opening, but it’s a highly promising start.

Florence Mae Maglanoc and Omar Shah, whose Filipino dirty ice cream parlour Mamasons has been a runaway success, have scored another hit with Panadera. The bakery continues Maglanoc and Shah’s building of an identity that refracts Filipino heritage and tradition through London’s culinary kaleidoscope, with dishes like a mango float, ube French toast, corned beef hash sandos, and taho, made with silken tofu, sweet and syrupy brown sugar arnibal, and sago pearls.

Max Rocha’s deceptively simple, unfussy cooking belongs alongside that of the Anna Tobias, 40 Maltby Street, Rochelle Canteen, the River Cafe, and Quo Vadis, with a Continental accent. Modern modern British? Fried potato with cod’s roe and radishes, rare grilled onglet with peppercorn sauce and chips, or, at the weekend a whole roast chicken with chips and salad to share. There will be seasonal salads and tarts and wee snacks like fritters containing an anchovy and a single sage leaf. There are hints of Scandinavia in its look-and-feel, occupying as it does a new build location on the edge of the Regent’s Canal close to the trendy Broadway Market. Cafe Cecilia is cool, it is breezy, and it happens to also be very friendly.

The latest guise for this Taiwanese hit is a stylised ode to beef noodle soup in Shoreditch, itself coming in two guises: a beef butter-enriched short rib bowl in the Taipei style, and a lighter, Tainan-style broth with rarer beef rump. Boiled dumplings are given the modish treatment by using cull yaw, while crispy tripe and fried Ogleshield cheese rolls compete for top snack billing. One of the city’s most stylish groups is hitting the ground running for summer.

London’s best new dining room sits somewhere between an elegantly distressed Tuscan villa / decrepit British stately home / and fancy art collector London townhouse. It is stunning. On the plate, chef Florence Knight’s food is as clever as it is delicious; the menu a masterclass in variety and composition. The best thing about a dish of fried potato and eel must be kept as a surprise; a squid and tomato calamarata is playful and brilliant; a lonesome crab croquette is a small flavour bomb and textural triumph. Go.

Eataly, the Italian food hall behemoth that answers the question, “what if every commonly held belief about Italian food and culture, but al massimo?” has opened its debut London site in Liverpool Street. It is faintly ludicrous, in a benevolent way befitting of espresso cups slammed on bars and copious gesti, of you-know-which-brand spritz overflowing coupe glasses, of cannoli and of pasta and of pizza. So yes, it’s faintly ludicrous — but when was the last time an opening literally on Broadgate had even an ounce of vibe?

Marugame Udon, the London debut for a chain with hundreds of sites in Japan, might never hit the serene heights of Koya or the neighbourhood intimacy of somewhere like Kiraku in Ealing. But: the arrival of a huge, monied overseas player into a huge site vacated by a chain in decline (Wahaca) is probably a canary in the coal mine of London casual dining over the next five years, and if its competitors bring this dedication to consistency and quality, with noodles made daily and bowls starting at £3.45, then the city will be better for it.

Sumi, in Westbourne Grove, is sushi master Endo Kazutoshi’s version of a lower key restaurant, an analogue to his Michelin-starred restaurant Endo at the Rotunda in White City. But low-key here means beautiful brushed wood interiors that will hopefully welcome guests again soon, and a trio of bento boxes with superlative quality chirashi. One of the most luxurious takeaway options out there right now.

A new, big-ticket central London restaurant could hope for a little better of an opening team than Sally Abé, Emma Underwood, and Laetizia Keating, so it’s unsurprising that Abé herself picked exactly that trio for The Pem, at Conrad London’s St. James’s hotel. Having held a Michelin star at the Harwood Arms for two years, Abé is less one to watch and more one of the best chefs in the city, using this restaurant as a display of her vision for contemporary British food. Charred mackerel with salad cream; wild mushrooms with herb mousseline, truffle, and egg; and John Dory with bobby beans, brassicas, Exmoor caviar, and sauce Divine — a mousseline sauce which uses sherry for its reduction — display a confident and playful classicism.

London’s preeminent suya specialist relocated to Greenwich during 2020, selling its tozo, meltingly tender beef, guinea fowl, chicken, and lamb from a truck out of the Angerstein Business Park after its original Peckham location burned down. Now, Abdullahi Mai Kano is back in his Peckham Park Road home — but still sending those complex and delicious goods to postcodes across the capital and via UPS nationwide.