The A406, aka the North Circular Road, is London’s liminal space, lined with strange shops with singular stories — all the way from Ace Cafe where bikers used to race to Hanger Lane and back before the jukebox finished a song, to Gokyuzu’s massive Chingford ocakbasi. Before long, Jaaneman Sweet Centre’s story will be fully told. On an unloved stretch of concrete and semi-pedestrianised road between Palmers Green and Arnos Grove, Nalim Bapodra has spent the last 33 years mastering the art of mithai — Indian sweets — specifically dense fudge-like burfi made with milk, milk powder, and sugar syrup. As the week goes on, the most popular flavours — chocolate, pistachio, and almond — sell out, so try to get there early. Bapodra generously encourages customers to sample, sometimes forcing whole pieces on them in the manner of an eager uncle: Make sure to save room for his more savoury mithai like mohenthal, a grittier sweet made with gram flour and fragrant with saffron.

Tucked away in the no-mans land around the Emirates Stadium, Wolkite Kitfo rivals Xi’an Impression for the most unlikely place to get a pre- or post- game snack. The speciality here is the Ethiopian dish of kitfo, a blend of beef and mitmita, a mixture of chillis, spices and salt, served either raw or barely cooked with warm butter so it melts on the tongue. Apart from the traditional kitfo side dishes of gomen (collard greens) and salted cheese, there are plenty of firmly spiced meat or pulse stews and tibs to mop up with sour injera or the lesser seen cocho/qocho, a flatbread made from the false banana plant. Service here is exceptionally friendly and staff will be more than happy to guide beginners through the menu and the wall artwork, which depicts the intimate tradition of gursha, honouring someone by feeding them with your hands.

Not the first Xi’an restaurant in London, but certainly one that has made the most of promoting Shaanxi cuisine and launching central Chinese food into the U.K. mainstream in the same way Xi’an Famous Foods did for New York a decade earlier. Three of the city’s iconic noodle dishes are made here by Wei Guirong: thick biang biang noodles, shot through with chilli oil and Sichuan peppercorn and balanced enough that it doesn’t need any meat accompaniment, wiry and sour Qishan noodles, and the liangpi mian, refreshingly chilled and poly-textured with the wise option of adding sesame sauce. Make sure to get at least one rou jia mo, a PacMan flatbread stuffed with meat, and maybe one dish from the surprisingly decent and completely inauthentic Anglo-Chinese section.

No cuisine wears the influences of colonialism as much as Mauritian, a fascinating collision of Chinese, Indian and French cuisine built on waves of slavery, indentured labour and migration. North London’s Turnpike Lane was the original focal point for the Mauritian community, and Le Chamerel, a small cafe/restaurant on the lane itself, is the only business remaining. It covers much of the island’s diverse culinary ground, tending towards Indian influences. Fried snacks are ideal for takeaway or for starters — meat samossas, gateau piment (irregular spheres of yellow split peas spiked with cumin and chilli) and gateau arouille, fragrant and sweet with taro root. Rice shows two of its many faces as riz frit (a fried Chinese preparation) and biriyani, but better still are the array of pre-made curries to be mopped up with roti. Choose king prawn rougaille, with its Provençal origins, or the spicier octopus vindaille, a cousin of vindaloo derived from the Portuguese-Goan dish of vinha d’alho. This is still the only place in London where it makes perfect sense to order bouillabaisse for starters, fried noodles for mains, and gulab jamun for dessert.

Hala means ‘aunt’ in Turkish — a name that’s reflected in the generosity of the home-style food, and by the sight of Turkish aunties making gozleme in the window every morning. In recent years, owner Eren Korkmaz has overseen the refurbishments to keep them in the Green Lanes arms race and now, like Antepliler, Hala has become a triple shopfront behemoth. Luckily quality has not been compromised: diners in the mood for meat should try the adana kebabs, kaburga (ribs) and pirzola (chops), mopped up with bread blessed with the juices and fat from the grill, but groups should make room for the excellent versions of icli kofte and manti dumplings instead of ordering starters. Solo eaters should also consider the paca corbasi; the Platonic ideal of a meat soup taken to its rich, buttery extreme, only achievable by careful stewing of gelatinous sheep’s foot.

Edmonton is home to grand Turkish restaurants, palaces larger than most of Green Lanes or Dalston’s finest, but it’s at one of the smallest places on the strip where two of London’s great late-night snacks are located. At Ponders End’s Neco Tantuni, finely chopped flesh and fat are stuffed into cigarillos or sandwiched into cubano-like subs respectively. For those who want an even more profound tantuni experience there are four ecstatic words: brown butter iskender tantuni, in which two tantuni are baked then drenched in caramelised butter, tomato and yoghurt. Kunefe here is also excellent, caramelised but not overly sweet, and balanced enough to take without adornment of cream. A small tip: the whole family who run Neco can make any of the items superbly, but if the wife makes the tantuni, it’s just that little bit more transcendent.

Although Palmers Green to Wood Green is still the epicentre for London’s Cypriot restaurants, as the diaspora has become more affluent they have moved more firmly into Enfield and Barnet’s suburbia. Kouzina by Southgate’s UFO station fuses both the old- and new-school of London’s Cypriot and mainland Greek cuisines. One side of the menu lists sheftalia with blackened crusts of caul fat and grilled pork souvlaki, a mixed grill wrapped in expansive Cypriot pita. On the other, the lesser seen Greek gyros, with crisp shaved pork, tzatziki, and flatbread to be squeezed. And of course, chips on top. This region of Zone 4 arcs like a gyros ring, curving across north London from Enfield to Oakwood in a seam of spits, smoke, and coal.

Between Dalston’s shabby mangals and Harringay’s increasingly bougie dining rooms, Newington Green can sometimes get forgotten. Unjustly so, as this source of Green Lanes is home to London’s most eclectic Turkish food scene, from pide and lahmacun one dish specialists to uncompromising seafood only restaurants like Sariyer Balik. 01 Adana is not a specialist, but this ocakbasimanages to send out accomplished food from all sections of the menu, from its in-house made gozleme, to liver stews, through to meats — chops and laterally cut ribs, salty and well seasoned down to the bone that the meat can practically be sucked from, and of course the titular adana, which are within London’s god tier of minced kebabs.

The fourth and latest shopfront of Antepliler’s empire specialises in all things doner, where two vast and trunkless legs of chicken and lamb rotate in the window throughout the day until they’ve been worn down to thimbles. The quality of the meat here is a riposte to every single white boy who has tried to launch a ‘posh-kebab’ shop: nutty and sweet, it has neither the homogeneous texture nor pallid colour of lesser versions. Make no mistake though, this is not health food. Iskender is brought to the table with a final artery-clogging piece of theatre: hot melted butter is poured from brass jugs with the solemnity of a baptism, anointing the mix of doner, strained yoghurt and tomato sauce with a velvety gloss and turning the cubes of bread into gooey vehicles for a heart attack. After it all bring on kunefe from next door, wiry kadayif pastry stuffed with cheese, fried in skillets until molten, then doused in syrup and pistachios: order at least a triple dose of strong, unsweetened tea to cut through the richness.

Green Lanes’ hidden gem Cyprus House is located away from the bustle of the main road on the ground floor of a Turkish-Cypriot community centre that could easily be mistaken for a residential house. From Tuesday to Thursday it is only open for lunch, serving home cooked Cypriot meals — caul-fat encased şeftali kebabs made from minced lamb and offal, souvlaki, and molohiya, the mucilaginous bitter leaf that offers a taste of home for nostalgic palates. On Friday and Saturday mezze is £20 per person, which encompasses an almost endless but impeccably rhythmic parade of cold starters, seafood, vegetables, fish and meat. The highlight? A whole lamb’s head with the flesh and fat pulled from the bone, served with a globe of brain and soft tongue meat. Booking is very much advisable.

A fixture of Arsenal match day, Sweet Handz can often be found filled with Ghanaian Gooners either celebrating or drowning sorrows with pints, or else snacking upstairs. Kelewele, blackened fried plantains, provide sweet foils to jollof rice enlivened with peanuts and hot sauce and tsofi. To taste tsofi — turkey tail — once is to immediately wonder whether the West has been habitually mis-preparing the turkey, a bird so often denigrated for its dryness. With a glut of glorious unsaturated fat surrounding its tail, when fried this delicacy is sweeter and richer than the best fried chicken. It’s no wonder tsofi has technically been illegal in Ghana since 1999 due to its impact on the nation’s cholesterol levels.