London Finsbury Park Restaurant Guide

This “great local Italian with homemade pasta the big draw” is a well known Finsbury Park stalwart under “friendly” Neapolitan-born owner Paola. “While the surroundings may not be glamorous, the food is very well prepared and authentic”, providing a true taste of southern Italy and Sicily.

This “tiny, unbookable but excellent” Finsbury Park stalwart has been a source of “great home-cooked Korean and Japanese food” for 15 years. It’s good value, too, which means it gets “a little crowded”. Cash only!

“Fabulous pizza” – “quick, fresh, delicious”, and “impeccably made with original toppings” – makes this London-based group “a Friday night favourite”, with 14 outlets across the capital and counting. Founders Johnnie Tate & Nick Buckland last year secured investment designed to boost their presence to 40 sites over five years.

A Finsbury Park fixture for almost 30 years, this particularly friendly and lively Italian welcomes a loyal crowd for pizza, pasta and a decent selection of main dishes.

Firmly on the map for East End hipsters – from the same stable as Westerns Laundry – this very stylish, post-industrial, all-day café/bakery in Newington Green comes complete with metal-topped tables, painted brick walls and concrete floor. It provides “a tempting menu that changes daily. Sometimes daring, often unusual and always delicious. The ambience is warm and the staff are welcoming. Love it!”

This 15-strong London noodle chain (now with branches in Brighton, Birmingham and Bristol) is “a good stand-by” – perhaps it’s “not as good as some of its competitors”, but it is widely seen as “good value”: in particular “the lunch-time meal deal” is a winner.

“Conveniently close to Finsbury Park tube and the Picturehouse Cinema and Park Theatre”, this “modern and stylish Scandi mid-century-inspired café is comfortable” and “spacious”. But ratings have slipped a tad since it opened two years ago: “Frame Café frustrates me, as it started off brilliantly, but I feel it just slightly misses the mark now: recommended for the convenience of its location and the quality of its food, but prices are on the steep side for the area”.

On Finsbury Park’s Stroud Green Road, this Japanese-style curry specialist is a new (October 2023), slightly larger sibling to an older, more ‘hole-in-the-wall’ style sister operation at Coal Drops Yard in King’s Cross. No survey feedback as yet on its choice of three sauces (beef, mild chicken and lentils) to accompany its signature breaded chicken katsu, but when Hideaki Yoshiyama’s original branch opened, it attracted the interest of The Financial Times’s Tim Hayward who found its “stretched and battered foodway, reconstructed with the kind of rigour I find irresistible”.

“Heaving footie pub” near the old Highbury stadium in Finsbury Park – now an “excellent all-rounder for food, service and fun atmosphere... if you can get a table”. Chefs Jamie Allen & Ed McIlroy (aka Four Legs, the duo behind Tollington’s, see also) provide a steady flow of “tasty and interesting small plates, including a good selection of seafood” – but it’s impossible to ignore their Dexter burger, which “oozes cheese and fat and flavour”.

“A clever British take on Spanish tapas” with “superbly executed fish-led dishes” in a “quirky converted fish ’n’ chip-shop setting” – this Finsbury Park yearling was launched by the team behind The Plimsoll nearby in a blaze of “social media buzz and some very favourable press reviews” that left some wondering, “Does early extreme hype help or hinder these sorts of places?”. “Yes, it’s quirky and interestingly set up, but the food is solid without being close to a Barrafina”, while “the tables are quite small for a menu based on sharing” (“I wanted to like it more, but the sharing plate concept doesn’t work so well when you’re perched at a bar with a couple of your mates”). Top Menu Tip – the “much-feted chips bravas”: “all they are cracked up to be”.

“It’s always busy” at this welcoming Vietnamese restaurant, north of Finsbury Park as you head towards Crouch End, thanks to its “friendly staff and authentic cooking” (including a good number of options for veggies and vegans). Top Menu Tips – pho noodle soups and the bun cha (grilled pork with vermicelli noodles).