Calling Merkato a restaurant is maybe a disservice to its vibe, so low-key and relaxed that diners could easily sink into it like injera into kitfo, a heady, melting pile of chopped raw beef in warm butter and mitmita, a spice blend of bird’s eye chillis, salt, and spices normally including Ethiopian cardamom and clove. First-timers should take a look at the fifty-fifty — which pairs hot or mild lamb, aggressively fried, with any of the textbook vegetarian dishes.

It’s beloved chain Dishoom, inspired by Mumbai’s Irani cafes. Get the bacon naan. Get the vada pav. Get the keema pav. Get the chef’s special — the part which is unique to King’s Cross — of lamb nihari.

King’s Cross is a railway station; people are hungry when they get off trains; people are susceptible to nominative determinist clarity when they are hungry. Enter Beer and Burger Store, which serves very good burgers and very good beers and decent chips and sees no reason to shout about anything else. It’s smashburgers here, with a monthly guest — currently a sloppy Joe vibe — and something called goop sauce which mercifully has nothing to do with Gwyneth Paltrow.

The Harts’ crop of restaurants yawns over Coal Drops Yard like an arriving commuter, but given Spanish star Barrafina and its Pastor Mexican restaurants exist elsewhere, The Drop gets the pick as both a reliable after-work drinking spot and a wine bar whose menu edges it into “worth the trip” territory. All the cheese meat olives and that are decent, but head for beef and marmite mayonnaise toast, roast potatoes, and rabbit pie to go with a glass.

James Ramsden and Sam Herlihy’s Pidgin is one of the most peripatetic restaurants in the city, so it’s fitting that their sandwich shop at the top of Coal Drops Yard hops from a prawn sandwich with prawn crackers, jalapeño, and pickled ginger, to a miso egg mayonnaise with truffle crisps, to a mortadella and taleggio number set off by a careful whisper of Thai basil.

Kaki enters into London’s noble blackboard menu tradition with a new range of specials, recent stand-outs bringing braised pork in oolong and soy to this canalside, Caledonian Road-side looker. Classically Sichuan dishes are the move on the main menu, and this is a place to bring a group, jumping in and out of dishes like the frogs whose legs are now on the table. If wishing to impress fellow diners or just look like a fool absolute boss, order the 800g — 1 kilogram seabass, which arrives colossal in a metal tray brimming with chilli oil and Sichuan peppercorn.

Hoppers’ third iteration departs from its Marylebone and Soho siblings with a focus on Sri Lankan’s coastal cooking and environment, retaining hits from its other menus — Jaffna lamb chops, bone marrow varuval — and adding prawns grilled until sticky scarlet with black pepper and curry leaf, and a kari of blue swimmer crab. Its success has also been predicated on a creditable drinks menu, and this continues with green papaya highballs, sour swizzles, and and witty punches, like a “Mangrove Dream” made with vermouth, gin, lemongrass and tamarind.

If Netil Market is the OG, Soho is the hypebeast, Fitzrovia is for the development nerds, and Borough Market was inevitable, then Cafe Bao finds the group on its most stylised form in King’s Cross, with a menu that pays tribute to yoshoku cuisine while kind of thumbing its nose at it with a 1970s vibe. An explosive Taiwanese “chicken Kiev”; a ham hock congee pie; a banoffee sundae — these all run deep on comfort but in an ironised fashion that only Bao can really pull off in such a spotlight.

Addis, resident for 19 years on Caledonian Road, is more self-consciously transportive than near neighbour Merkato, with a slightly greater focus on meat dishes rewarded with tibs, lamb, chillis and onions blasted with heat until fused; kitfo prepared three ways — raw, medium, or well done for cowards — and a neat example of seneg kariya, chilli peppers as long as fingers stuffed with onions and peppers and blistered till ready to prise open.

Biting into peek gai yud sai, fried chicken wings standing as proud as rabbits’ ears and stuffed with aggressively seasoned minced chicken, prawn, mushrooms, and glass noodles round the corner from King’s Cross feels like a small victory. Perhaps no more violence has been done to Thai cuisine and forced upon Thai restaurateurs in the name of appeasing “local taste” than any other cuisine in London, and Supawan’s enthusiastically friendly staff, homey vibe and uncompromising menu feels like a corrective.

Walking into Q’s Kitchen chicken shop and ordering chicken and chips would be like telling an in-demand football manager that their club hadn’t broken any financial regulations when they had. A grave and embarrassing mistake soon to be revealed in the press. The correct procedure is to walk past the staff at a well-known locally headquartered newspaper and look to the right hand side of the counter, where a small blackboard might promise biryani, beef paya glistening with molten marrow, and rarely — very rarely — chapli kebabs. Possibly the best-value lunch in the area.

A margherita at Pizza Union costs £3.95, will arrive in roughly 10 minutes, and it’s a properly decent, Roman-style assembly of sweet, garlic-raspy tomato, fragrant basil, and admittedly uncomplicated crust. There are pots of olives and marinated garlic, a nutella pizza dessert, and more interesting pizzas — yes, ‘nduja is here, relax — with fridges full of grab-your-own beers. Fast, casual, good: everything a near-station restaurant needs to be. Open for takeaway.

Nominative determinism is an underrated quality when it comes to naming restaurants, but this turquoise shopfront on King’s Cross Road goes all in. Certain details are a little mysterious — an intrepid visitor of premises license registers and company filings might deduce a connection to the famed Royal China Club — but the clarity of the prawn and chive dumplings, the soupiness of the xiaolongbao, and the slipperiness of the cheung fun are all undeniable.

Butter is at the heart of a croissant. Aux Pains de Papy founder Mathieu Esposito knows this, and the croissants at this très Français bakery on Grays Inn Road are the most faithful to France’s high bottom level for pastry and consequently one of the best in London. Honeycomb layers, a properly burnished exterior, and butter, so much butter. Best enjoyed warm on a mad dash down the road, with pains aux chocolats, croissants amandes, and a noble Paris Brest also worth a look.

Blow-out territory. Peter Sanchez-Iglesias’ rooftop looker at the area’s coolest hotel is the best of London’s newest nu-hotel restaurants, combining the city’s critics’ current obsession with “FuN ReStAuRanTs,” decent-to-excellent Spanish and Mexican dishes, and the kind of prices that are prohibitive to having a normal one and must lead to “having a normal one” instead. The tortilla with caviar is pretty but no-one in recorded history has ever eaten it, so rely on the deep-water shrimp on ice, mangalitza pork, and mushroom “bomba rice” instead.