London Paddington Restaurant Guide

2021 Review: “Perfect coffee every time” keeps caffeine fiends crawling back to this small and serious chain. “Baking from Fortitude Bakehouse is a good complement”.

2023 Review: There’s an intriguing background to this quite smart venue near Paddington station, founded as a meeting place for international journos and snappers, and whose walls display iconic news photographs from around the world. Feedback has shrunk over the pandemic period, with the odd unsettled report, but it has in the past offered a useful dining option in this thin area, so we’ve included it but without a current rating.

This family-run “stalwart” of the Earl’s Court-South Ken dining scene (and its ‘Noor Jahan II’ Bayswater offshoot) has built a strong following for its “consistently good” Indian dishes over the past 60 years – and the smattering of celebs and royals among its guests (Angelina Jolie, Prince William…) has not gone to its head: “after all this time it remains your typical curry house”.

2021 Review: Canalside in Paddington Basin, and with massive windows providing water views, this large bar/restaurant – occupying the high-ceilinged ground floor of one of the area’s blocks – has an attractive, if not super-individual, semi-industrial design. Feedback is limited on its gastropub-ish dishes, but suggests it does what it does well.

2022 Review: Hidden beneath Smith’s Bar & Grill in the Paddington Basin development – a spring 2020 Peruvian newcomer named for the Ayllu community of the Inca Empire, and serving Peruvian-Japanese fusion dishes and cocktails.

“Authentic and sensibly priced dim sum, a cut or two above the quality of many traditional Soho joints” (and with “some stand out dishes”) has carved a good reputation for this Cantonese basement, below the shiny new towers of Paddington Basin. (Its ratings, though, are not as high as once they were; and one or two reporters feel “it still hasn’t fully recovered its shine post pandemic”).

2021 Review: The “scruffy basement of a pub” in Bayswater is the setting for what some in the fooderati believe to be “hands-down the best authentic Thai cooking in London” – “food like you’d have in Thailand”. Top Tip – “the bbq pork neck is melt-in-your-mouth”.

2021 Review: A “wealth of wines by the glass” and “tasty nibbles”, help make this growing group of self-service wine bars a “fun way to try a selection of vintages from a multitude of small producers”. At the Battersea Power Station branch’s school you can educate your palate towards Wine & Spirit Education Trust certification and watch wine being made from grapes grown in Oxfordshire and Surrey.

“Don’t be fooled by the 1990s looks – standards are right up to snuff!” This “old-fashioned, well-spaced, very comfortable” Indian near Edgware Road has – for decades – won surprisingly high scores for its “consistently good, traditional dishes of high quality served by knowledgeable waiters”. It remains “highly recommended” but its ratings have been a bit more up-and-down since the pandemic; and the odd report says “a bit more consistency would be appreciated: the food can be excellent but can also be mediocre”.

Mathew Carver’s floating ode to the cheeses of Britain and Ireland is a 96 ft double-decker barge moored in Paddington Basin that delights turophiles with cheese-based meals accompanied by a “nice selection of wines at a reasonable price”, with simpler cheese boards and toasties available in the afternoon. The group also operates a cheese conveyor belt in Seven Dials and a new cheese and natural wine bar, Funk, in Shoreditch.

2021 Review: “Don’t let the shabby interior put you off” – this “wonderful, simple Iranian café” off Edgware Road serves “excellent and authentic Persian dishes” including “superb lamb”. “I love this place” – “small, squashed and full of character”, it all but defines “cheap ’n’ cheerful” (“and BYOB”).

No less a figure than Queen Azizah of Malaysia (while she was over for Charles’s coronation) cut the ribbon for the May 2023 opening of this first European venture from one of Malaysia’s leading restaurant groups – a steakhouse in Craven Road, Paddington, that takes its name from the meeting of Eastern and Western food cultures. No alcohol is served and the meat is fully halal, with cuts flavoured by infusion in Asian marinades. Reports please!