Core by Clare Smyth

Clare Smyth opened Core on Kensington Park Road in 2017 after a decade running the Royal Hospital Road kitchen for Gordon Ramsay; the dining room was awarded three Michelin stars in 2021 and has held them every year since. The cooking is relentlessly British in source — Cornish turbot, Isle of Mull cheese, the famous potato-and-roe course built around a single Highland tuber — and the room itself is the quietest of London's top tables, so the food carries the conversation. For the audience, this is the Notting Hill booking that retires the question of whether the trip needed a Mayfair night.