London Stroud Green Restaurant Guide

When you want a meal rather than merely grabbing a commonplace sarnie, Max Halley’s eccentric Crouch Hill café is the place to go: try his ‘Et Tu, Brute? Murdering The Caesar’ for size – poached chicken, pickled grape and tarragon salsa, chicory, baby gem & parsley, garlic croutons, anchovy mayonnaise.

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.

“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).

“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”.

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”.