The way Londoners speak of New Malden is like the way the British talk about Ireland. They know it’s close, they know it will do them good to visit, they constantly chide themselves for not going, but they never actually go. Part of the problem is that very few people apart from locals go there enough to compare the restaurants, to find out what each one specialises in, who is on the rise and who is in decline. Imone is currently, by a head, the best Korean restaurant in New Malden. The modulation on the banchan betrays a level of care that few places anywhere in London are putting in — a kimchi not fridge cold and not over-fermented but just below body temp, a seasonal pickle like courgette or spaghetti strands of radish that snap with a refreshing acidity. The best dishes on the menu are fish based. Saengsun jjim is a showstopper, a whole whiting in a deeply savoury, spicy sauce, leavened by herbaceous and bitter chrysanthemum greens, while maeungtang has a cleanness and restraint that the very best Korean broths have, backed by a dry anchovy kick and more pearlescent fish. Get on that train.

Korean fried chicken has historically been too sweet, too dry, too wet, undercooked, overcooked, battered incorrectly and just generally put through the wringer in London. Chick and Beers is maybe the first to nail it. There are those who will instinctively go for the sweet and spicy yangnyeom as a matter of principle, the kind of people who will order anything on a menu with five chilli symbols next to it, but this is more sweet than spicy. Instead the simple fried is the best option to start with, plainly seasoned, but worth searching in between the bones for. Really it’s the ganjang —soy — that is worth the journey, the batter sweet enough to be redolent of the honey cornflake cakes that every primary school child has attempted to make, yet saved from overwhelming sugariness by the pungency of garlic and crisped onion, the batter pitched somewhere between craggy and hyper-glossy. A new menu luridly promises fried sticks of spam, an innovation which, when it comes, will make Chick and Beers New Malden’s destination restaurant.

Walking into Tooting’s markets is like entering a time warp to 2009, when foodies from all over London were flocking to an embryonic Brixton Village, dining at small restaurants taking advantage of low rents. What’s happened to Brixton can be a warning sign for Tooting, but for now modern British and small plates sidle up to diaspora cafes eking out a living at what Jonathan Gold would call the “centre of entry-level capitalism.” Chef Jojo Manalo is one of these cafes: one of three tiny Filipino spots in the market, and currently the best. A regular caterer for Chelsea Football Club, Manalo’s food tends towards the homestyle items even London’s more progressive Filipino chefs miss — a whole whiteboard of -silogs, the breakfasts of sticky garlic rice and fried eggs. Pair them with magenta bullets of sweet longanisa — longsilog — made in house, or oily white fish, split in two and crisped up on the grill — bangsilog. The whiteboard promises specials like pork nilaga, whose soothing garlic and white pepper broth adds necessary levity to rich mains and an astonishingly good kare-kare. Oxtail disintegrates from the bone and melts into sauce sweet with peanut butter and briny from a concentrated, salty hit of chilli and shrimp paste. There are many great dishes in the market, but Manalo’s kare kare is worth a journey all of its own.

There are two schools of thought when it comes to pizza. One says that pizza is a beautiful marriage of bread, tomato sauce, mozzarella and basil, and that all attempts to improve on this have been fools errands. This school also thinks that vanilla is the best flavour of ice cream, and that the invention of salt and vinegar crisps may have been a step too far. The second is those who view the success of a pizza in terms of how many of the toppings would make an Italian nonna cry. Antonio Pellone, with two generations of pizzaiolos behind him on Lavender Hill, may look like the former but is secretly the latter. Yes his margherita is great, his cornicione blistered and his dough both light and digestible, but it’s the second menu of sauceless white “gourmet” pizzas where he shows his mastery. An outstanding signature pizza cossets folds of fatty mortadella offset by the sweetness of a pistachio pesto, hot pink and lemon yellow, perhaps a tribute to Mr Blobby. Or the bufalina gialla, a dance with acidity, lactic from the buffalo mozzarella, malic from sweet yellow datterini, and citric from a spritz of lemon zest. These are inventive, playful pizzas, one degree away from trad but flawlessly executed — even a nonna might laugh, not cry.

Around Streatham rail station, a Little Mogadishu is slowly building, reflecting an influx of Somali immigration, with Somali Town the most promising of all the cafe/restaurants in the cluster. There’s little to announce it as a restaurant, apart from a kitchen in the back but get talking to the owner who will let diners know what he has on the go: normally a choice between chopped meat, steaks and fish served with either rice or pasta — a reminder of that Italian colonial influence. Maraq is provided gratis, a plain, brown cloudy broth of exceptional savouriness, with acidity provided by chunks of lemon. A chopped beef braise comes with onions and the right ratio of lean to fatty meat, with a half portion of rice cooked in meat stock and a half portion of red sauce spaghetti for the indecisive. Three things to note: one, this is best eaten with hands; two, the green bottle on the table is a chilli sauce called basbaas and should be used liberally, and three, don’t be surprised to be served a banana with the meal — how to use it is entirely the diner’s prerogative.

Roti Joupa’s greatness is no longer a matter for debate, but as one of the few Trinidadian places in London which is part of the canon it’s important to know how to navigate it properly. As expected from the name, Roti Joupa specialises in the Indian side of Trinidad and Tobago’s cuisine, reflecting owner David Parey’s heritage. Pliant rotis are folded over each other as vehicles for curried meats and vegetables, but to come here and only order this would be missing half the fun. It’s actually all about the snacks, which immaculately juggle sweet, sour and savoury. So first of all, order the hot doubles, two fried bara, cumin scented chickpeas and shredded cucumber, with tamarind and pepper sauce on the side. Then the macaroni pie, hot and gooey, and crucially, flooded with tamarind sauce so it’s equally sweet and salty. It may be London’s only truly great mac and cheese. And then for the mains, not the regular roti but the buss-up-shot, a tangle of torn paratha, buttery and caramelised, to have with mashed pumpkin, again glistening with tamarind. If there’s a reason to go to Clapham, it’s this.

Acre Lane, that stretch of road between Clapham and Brixton, is often ignored but contains a few areas of interest for those who love food — among them Khamsa for Algerian and newcomers Mikos for a rare sighting of gyros south of the river. The standout is True Flavours, a relatively new (by Jamaican standards, at less than 10 years old) takeaway joint that is permanently busy whether people are inside or not. In the know residents will phone ahead for chef Junior’s cooking, knowing that the warm rack in the back is not for patties but a catalogue of takeaway orders. Oxtail, jerk chicken, fried chicken, fried fish, brown stew chicken — each and every one of these is likely to run out after a canny phone order is placed, but there will always be another tempting option or a small wait for a fresh batch to be made in the well-seasoned cooking pots. The most popular item by far is the pepper steak, charred and singing with thyme, slow cooked until the meat breaks down, served with rice and peas and “jerk pasta,” a massive opportunity missed by a certain celebrity chef.

One of the best places for restaurant recommendations is diaspora Twitter. Someone will post, “where are all the good London (insert country here) restaurants at?” rolling the dice on a game of one upmanship which always ends in someone saying they don’t exist. One such game in 2015 got a pre-fame Michael Dapaah — of ‘Man’s Not Hot’ notoriety — tweeting “Safari, Gold Coast, Asafo.” The holy trinity of south London’s Ghanaian restaurants. Streatham Hill’s Asafo is a nice contrast to the others, as low-key as Gold Coast is raucous. Kelewele is outstanding, demonstrating that it’s Ghanaians who understand most that the plantain’s innate sweetness must be tempered with spice and char, coming squidgy and almost burnt, like little chunks of sticky fudge dusted with chilli, to pick at while waiting for mains of soups and stews. The wonderfully named Palaver sauce comes with spinach instead of cocoyam leaves, and is so dense with texture and flavour from thickening egusi, beaten egg, and dried fish that it doesn’t need any meat. Then, the bowl of peanut soup, that arrives overflowing with lava-like palm oil, with astonishing depth of flavour coming from cow foot and tripe. If Kate’s Cafe rules the East, and Sweet Handz the North, then it’s Asafo flying the flag for Ghana in the South.

Italo could so easily be just another middle-class convenience store selling high quality produce unattainable to half the people who live nearby. What it actually is is something much more radical than that: a deli which is entirely subservient to the needs of the close-knit, mixed-economy community of Bonnington Square. There’s a bohemian aspect to Charlie Boxer’s deli, started 10 years ago with friend Luigi Di Lieto (of the family who run the equally excellent Di Lieto) that could veer too much towards luvviness if it wasn’t for the generosity, a place where the staff seem to know every customer’s name and vice versa, where the food has no genre except “stuff you want to eat”, and where there’s never too little parmesan dusted over a plate of pasta. Breakfasts are full Englishes with Italian accents — a Tuscan sausage here, cheesy polenta there, an egg and bacon bap but it’s pancetta on panuozzo, but elsewhere expect to see unpretentious cooking of the Arabella school, like pease pudding, chicken soups, haggis on toast, meatloaf. Don’t leave without a copy of the charming Italo booklet which sums up its spirit, documenting new produce, community activities, and services for hire.

If Western breakfasts were any good then nutritionists wouldn’t have to remind people to stop skipping them all the time. Of course there is a place for a fry up, for that rare perfect croissant, but otherwise Asia has Europe bang to rights in the “things people actually want to eat in the morning” stakes. One of the great world breakfasts is halwa poori, a dish that for Desi-tongues has the Proustian force of a thousand madeleines. The key is the interplay of four simple and perfect parts, all of which Karachi Cuisine in Norbury nails: a soothing, spicy chana, a potato curry medicinal with turmeric and fennel seeds, ambrosial semolina halwa, sweet and sandy with ghee and sugar, and pneumatic tissues of poori, slightly crisp and covered in a thin film of oil. One portion, with a spiced omelette or half fried eggs and a cup of Pakistani chai on the side and that’s enough food until dinner. Karachi Cuisine only does halwa puri on weekends until 2pm, but outside of that it’s an offal specialist. Try the kata-kat at dinner, a spicy dish of chopped brain, heart, kidney and testicles that is quite literally nose to tail eating.

Once upon a time, before Brixton Village, before Pop Brixton, before Franco Manca and Honest Burgers, there was a small stand outside Las Americas Butchers selling hot and fluffy corn arepas fresh off the griddle with just a lick of salty butter for accompaniment. It was one of the great London street food vendors. That stretch of road was bought by Mike Ashley and is now a Sports Direct. While Brixton has become a “foodie” mecca, it hasn’t fully reckoned with those left behind. One of the few Colombian restaurants in the arcade still left from before its regeneration is El Rancho del Lalo, where empanadas are dense as bricks, stuffed to bursting with strands of spiced pork and fried to order so the casing satisfyingly cracks and spills out its contents. An excellent rendition of the Colombian national dish ‘bandeja paisa’ comes as an enormous platter of meat and protein, including standout crispy chicharron and kidney bean stew. The gentrification continues apace, but El Rancho still outflanks units selling food at twice the price.