Rules

Britain's oldest Indian restaurant — open on Regent Street since 1926 and now in its hundredth year.

Northern Chinese on level 33 of The Shard — the view-room and the dish where guests in town for a single weekend take their out-of-town parents.

JKS Restaurants' two-Michelin-star Indian on Albemarle Street — Trishna's older Mayfair sister and the standard against which the rest measure themselves.

Beirut's Mireille Hayek inside Harrods — the polished Lebanese set-menu room that translates Em Sherif Beirut's standard for SW1.

Sam and Sam Clark's Exmouth Market Moorish room — the 1997 landmark that taught London Spanish-and-North-African cooking.

Fergus Henderson's nose-to-tail manifesto since 1994 — the white-walled Smithfield room that wrote modern British cooking.