The staff canteen and breakroom at Apparel Tasker, a clothing factory in Bow, also happens to be one of London’s most interesting Italian restaurants. Over weekday lunches, Friday suppers, and regular pop-ups, chef Sophia Massarella serves deeply regional menus, traversing the boot and its islands from Umbria to Bari to Sardinia through wisely selected dishes with a strong sense of linguistic fun. Zuppa di finocchietti selvatici is not a soup, but a soak, of Sardinian flatbread, fennel, and cheese, muddled together and baked. Umbricelli’s thick earthworms of pasta are named after the Perugian word for the creatures, and the uova in trippa alla romana is eggs cooked like tripe, in a rich and rough tomato sauce. It’s the most mediocre omelette that makes the highest quality fake tripe, cooked until almost rubbery, with bubbles dispersed throughout, before being sliced into lengths.

It’s only a matter of time before the pasta boyfriends of the internet discover sugo finto, or fake sauce. The easiest way to add a semblance of mystery and romance to a familiar dish? Call it by another name. In this case, it’s the most ubiquitous of pasta accompaniments: sugo finto is essentially a tomato sauce, served in place of a meat ragu. Few could be so brazen. Only Rossodisera, which specialises in the cuisine of Italy’s Le Marche region, has dared. Spaghetti co’ lo sugo finto comes al dente, with a single basil leaf perched on top, but on a menu that includes a £2.50 supplement to get olive oil alongside the bread basket, it’s hardly the most audacious thing. There’s another branch in Covent Garden.

Anyone looking for imitation expertise should look to London’s Chinese restaurants, where the transformation of tofu and bean curd into various meat and fish alternatives builds on centuries of tradition and innovation. At Tofu Vegan, the range of faux chicken, duck, lamb, and fish preparations is impressive. On a menu that encourages suggestive comparison, though, it’s cartilage-like, wrinkled cloud ear mushrooms and wafer-thin tofu skin that capture the imagination. The most unusual of likenesses is that of the “fish-fragrant” sauces for aubergines, tofu, and deep-fried mushroom balls. This mysterious term is used widely in Sichuan cookery to denote any dishes dressed in a preparation of pickled Sichuan chillies, ginger, garlic, and spring onions; a combination most associated with the flavour profile of Sichuanese fish seasonings. At Tofu Vegan, diners should have the aubergines, caramelised and sweet, sour, and numbing, ripe to dissolve in their vivid orange sauce.

The necessity that brought Alheira sausage — a soft web of bread, garlic, paprika, and poultry designed to mimic pork sausage — into the world is of a different category to the other dishes on this list. Jews who had fled the Spanish Inquisition for Portugal, and found themselves persecuted once more in their new home, were the inventors of this unusual delicacy. A community in hiding, they created a poultry sausage that could hang from their ceilings, just as Christians dried and displayed their pork sausages. These days, the once clandestine recipe has been absorbed into, and transformed, by wider Portuguese cuisine. Many versions of the popular sausage now contain pork, and at Snack Bar Grelha Douro, this smoky horseshoe is best eaten with bread for cutlery, eyes glued to the football.

The diners at Bar Douro make for happy sardines, tucked in at the blue-tiled bar in tight rows, chinking green-tinted glasses in the golden light. As a celebration of Portuguese cuisine, the restaurant hedges its bets between classical approaches to dishes like bacalhau a bras — flaky salt cod tumbled together with shreds of fried potato and eggs — and culinary school reworkings of homely plates like feijoada, producing a menu that blows hot and cold. Bar Douro’s homage to Portugal’s unique garlic sausage is a solid star, though: Velvety croquetes de alheira sit in perfect formation at the four corners of an azulejo, plastered on with generous cushions of salty aioli.

The pull of Jenecheru on a Sunday in winter is strong: thick coats slung over the backs of chairs, hot crisp pies, glass bottles of Coca Cola with stripy straws, blonde and silky sopa de mani, and clove-heavy rice pudding. Most of all, though, the crowds are in it for the Sunday specials. The two heavy hitters are lechon al horno, roasted pork served in grid-formation with sweet potato, plantain, rice, huge-kerneled choclo corn, and fresh cheese; and falso conejo, false rabbit, a dish of deep-fried beef cutlets served in a sauce of tomatoes, peas, and onions. At Jenecheru, it’s accompanied by two types of potato — white, and white chuño, a kind of freeze-dried potato, as well as rice, tomatoes, and onions. The dish likely gets its name from its resemblance to lambreado de conejo, a fried rabbit dish, which might be served whole and regal, or in pieces, and dressed with the same sauce.

Pangrattato, once known as “poor man’s Parmesan,” is one of those imitation foods whose symbolism has mutated considerably over time, to the point, even, of becoming the clearer sign of luxury. In London, one of the simplest and most economical of uses for old bread has come to occupy an incongruously reified position. Fried breadcrumbs crop up in surprising places — as a chilli-oregano constellation topping for the Second City sub at Bodega Rita’s, say — as well as expected ones, inevitably found at pasta titans like Trullo and Padella. But nowhere celebrates them more than Manteca, where duck fat pangrattato is the cascading crown to fazzoletti, rendering the duck ragu it’s served with almost incidental.

Welsh laverbread, laver seaweed from Pembrokeshire, or “Welshman’s caviar,” is rarely mentioned on the menu at Michelin-starred seafood restaurant, Brat. That doesn’t mean that chef Tomos Parry isn’t using it, though. He just takes a guerrilla approach to injecting Welsh influence into the restaurant’s broadly Basque repertoire, and the ingredient is quietly pervasive. Brat uses both braised laver and fresh laver from West Wales, which the chefs process on site. It’s used in pil-pil sauce, served with kokotxas, plaice, clams, or cockles, or else it’s pickled and mixed with cucumber, to garnish Welsh Menai oysters.