The Counter is a weekly column from award-winning restaurant writer and broadcaster Jimi Famurewa. Sign up to get The Counter first, sent to your inbox every Tuesday.
Hello again.
If you are anything like me, then the hibernal mentality that accompanied the start of the year – the meals oriented around heirloom pulses, the cold plunge evangelism, the evenings sitting beneath a crumb-flecked blanket watching Industry characters do unspeakable things – is starting to lose its lustre. After the self-enforced drought comes the flood. And as February has progressed, and more hospitality businesses have either flung open their doors or started to build early buzz, I have become quite twitchy.
Naturally, this job and my natural inclination towards food obsessiveness mean my 2026 has hardly been a restaurant-visiting desert. Yet the last few weeks have been accompanied by a fluttery, antsy desire to seriously ramp things up. Pleading WhatsApp messages have gone out to friends. Online sample menus have been slobbered over. Restaurant names have been scrawled into my diary with hopeful question marks next to them.
The problem with all this frantic planning is simple: how to actually fit it all in? How can anyone possibly balance what feels like a glut of especially exciting hospitality openings without frittering away a week’s annual leave and an unjustifiable sum of money? I hesitate to use the phrase “time-poor”, lest I conjure an ideas meeting at a marketing agency, but I think there are many of us who have emerged into February with a social appetite that outstrips the hard reality of our weekly capacity.
The solution to this decidedly first-world-problem is, as it turns out, all around us. A concentration of openings on destination streets – often from the same, empire-building upstart restaurant groups – and the rise of wine bars, small plates spots, slice shops and glorified dessert windows, has created the perfect circumstances to fit a glass and a bite or two, at a handful of neighbouring spots, into one evening. A grub crawl? A bar safari? Counter-hopping? Whatever you want to call it, I had an epiphany – as I recently rolled blissfully from The Dreamery and Goodbye Horses towards Stable Wines – that this is currently one of the most fun ways to enjoy our city’s ever-growing, often genre-defying dining scene.
So, with the disclaimer that I have prioritised strips with the presence of at least one notable, newish opening (and that I have also assumed that you don’t need to be told about obvious, perennials such as Portobello Road, Columbia Road, Rye Lane or large tracts of Soho) here are some of my favourite spots for a highly efficient, hugely enjoyable gastronomic bimble. I genuinely would love to hear your suggestions too. Happy hopping.
The Essex Road Bar Safari
No one is really doing it like Goodbye Horses and The Dreamery founders Alex Young and George de Vos. Their unexpected riffs on a pub and a late-night ice-cream parlour, set a few steps away from each other on an Islington backstreet, have now been complemented by Stable Wines: an all-new, glass-walled wine shop, dominated by a ziggurat oak counter, that sits above a clandestine, stone-carved fever dream of a cellar bar. Guttering pillar candles. Ambient music drifting into converted bank vault booths. A creative small plates menu rigged with intensely comforting cheese toasties and raw beef on deep-fried fingers of hash brown. That wine pub Godet sits nearby – complete with a residency from Ling Ling’s – opens up the prospect of a few low-intervention bottles and modern Cantonese plates, followed by a stop either at Stable or Horses, plus a nightcap scoop or three at The Dreamery (try the malted milk and chocolate olive oil sorbet combo that’s like god’s own Malteser sundae).
The Lonsdale Saunter
People that live anywhere near Queens Park have probably grown accustomed to other food-literate Londoners asking them about Lonsdale Road: the pretty, festoon-lit mews that has long been home to a thriving and reliably vibey dining ecosystem. Sophisticated brunch mainstays like Milk Beach and Carmel have more recently been joined by Argentinean-inspired bakery Madre (open Sundays at the adjacent farmers market) and the very highly rated Don’t Tell Dad. Even better, you can now kick off with a pint and some parmesan churros at lovingly restored, Devonshire-ish boozer The Salusbury.
Tilbury Arch Trail
Even in the pantheon of railway arch culinary hotspots, Leyton’s Tilbury Road feels particularly impressive and varied. Natural wine at Swirl. Irresistible, terrace-worthy beef shin and porter pies from Win’s. Craft beers from both Libertalia Brewing Co and whisky specialist Chop Shop Tavern. Throw in an outpost of Walthamstow-born bakery Crumbs and the inventive, bucket list concoctions – particularly the blackberry jam-laced PB&J – at new wave ice-cream maker Chunk (which is currently closed for a winter break) and this run of singular, community-minded and lovingly run businesses is the kind of place to both restore your faith in London’s creative spirit and, inevitably, make you slightly curse the fact you don’t live in E10.
The Railton Run
For a while, Llewelyn’s – which has done its understatedly assured village bistro thing in Herne Hill for approaching nine years – was the kind of load-bearing establishment that almost singlehandedly props up an entire area’s gastronomic reputation. Pleasingly, the last 18 months have seen that change along the pedestrianised hub of Railton Road, and its surrounding, park-girding streets. Now there is Lulu’s (a spin off wine bar from the Llewelyn’s team), plus Sessa, a gently nostalgic small plates spot for everything from dippy breakfast eggs to gnarled, glossy squash fritters. There’s also Bird House Brewery’s likeable new railway arch watering hole and, just around the corner, Palestinian-inspired, doorstopper confections from Bunhead Bakery. The ultimate pro-move? Combine with a bracing dip at Brockwell Lido, some ackee and saltfish spring rolls, and a similarly bracing scotch bonnet Margarita up at the bar at 2210 by NattyCanCook.
Shoreditch Pizza Mile Plus
It’s genuinely exciting that the area around Bethnal Green Road and Brick Lane has become the unofficial centre of the capital’s ever-expanding universe of New York-inspired, by-the-slice pizzerias. Yes, you should pop into Paulie’s for the moreish chew of a piquant, puffy square of grandma-style burrata. Yes, you should also get a Beigel Bake-inspired salt beef pie from Short Road Pizza’s residency at The Scott Head, and brave the sceney scrum at Vincenzo's for, crisp, sturdy slices that – whether they are simple margherita or a playful riff on spanakopita – possess a genuinely life-changing freshness, tang and flavour complexity. But you should also augment all that Americana with a pitstop at beguiling little wine bar and deli Clara, plus a climactic stumble towards The Knave of Clubs for a Wet Feb-appropriate Guinness.
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