Dining Out 039: The Dining Out Awards 2024
It's the taking part that counts but winning is really, really nice.
* This article first appeared in the A Very Dining Out Christmas zine and now I’m sharing it for everyone to read, as the last Dining Out of the year. Thanks for all your support in 2024, and see you next Thursday for the first review of 2025! *
2024 has been an interesting year for the London restaurant “scene” (lol) – French cooking is properly en vogue again; during the summer, the food of Greece, Cyprus and Turkey felt like it was getting a real look in on seasonal ‘modern European’ menus that usually skew more Italian and Spanish; loads of restaurants started doing crisps (thank god); food influencers rose to the peak of their powers; and more than ever, as the noise around a certain Bittern attests, social media and the eating habits it encourages remains the great divider.
Amid all of that, however, the most important thing is the food. I have eaten some wildly good stuff in 2024, so I wanted to take a second to highlight a few places I’ve really loved this year and tell you a bit about why, hence: The Dining Out Awards, wherein accolades range from BEST OVERALL MEAL to the coveted BEST CHIPS. Because I am but one woman, and I can’t eat everything (difficult as that is to accept), to help me judge I have enlisted the opinions of my friends Daisy Jones, Angela Hui, Lucas Oakeley and Imogen West-Knights, whose contributions you can read alongside mine below. Read on for the full list of champs – obviously it’s the taking part that counts, but winning is really, really nice.
BEST OVERALL MEAL
Rita’s
I have done a frankly Henry VIII-level amount of eating this year but if I had to pick a favourite meal, there is one that stands out head and shoulders above the rest as the most memorable. On my 30th birthday, after having birthday cake for breakfast, I went for a solo lunch to Rita’s in Soho. I sat in the window, ate anchovy-heavy Caesar salad with fries and southern fried chicken and a mini martini, and quietly welcomed in a whole new decade of my life. What I like about Rita’s is that even if it’s grey outside (which it was), there’s a level of glamour about the place, and that’s naturally how I wanted to feel that day. The food, which could loosely be described as “American staples given a bit of zsuzh”, is always interesting but it never really loses those comforting curves. It’s generous cooking. On my birthday, I ordered correctly – which is when you get what you *want* and not what you think you *should* have – and I had a strong, sweet cocktail for dessert. It was perfect and I’ll remember it always. – LO’N
BEST TAKEAWAY
Matoom Thai Bistro – Prawn and Pineapple curry with riceberry
I checked my Deliveroo history the other day (don’t do this btw, it’ll only make you feel like a troll creature) and there was one dish I had purchased in 2024 no less than 15 times. And that was the prawn and pineapple curry from Matoom Thai Bistro in Forest Hill, crucially – crucially – with a side order of riceberry. Riceberry is this red-coloured genetically modified rice from Thailand that tastes sort of nutty and sweet, and is supposed to make your life longer or something, and you can barely get it anywhere in this country. But anyway, something about the very specific way in which the magic rice absorbs the acidic-sweet coconut broth of the curry just gets me every time. – Daisy Jones, author, Features Writer @ British Vogue and Watandar stan
BEST PIZZA
Dough Hands at the Spurstowe Arms
People love “Best Pizza in London” discourse and they also love saying, with folded arms, in the same tone of voice you use when you’re talking about scaffolding: “It’s Crisp. Crisp is the best one.” And yeah Crisp is great – it’s magnificent, in fact, and that’s before you even mention the garlic dip – but it’s not the pizza that makes me most excited about pizza in London. That feeling is reserved for Dough Hands, who is currently on the ones and twos at The Spurstowe Arms in Dalston. I’ve been a Dough Hands truther since before Dining Out started, when I’d go as often as I could to their residency at the Three Colts Tavern, and I love how their pizza has evolved. These days, it feels like a decisively London style pizza, inspired as much by the oily abandon of neon-lit takeaways on the Kingsland Road as it is by NYC “pies”. Also, everywhere does a “hot honey” pizza but Dough Hands’ one, which is sweet and rich, and on which the toppings slide around like obstacles in a round of Takeshi’s Castle, is my very favourite. – LO’N
BEST SEAFOOD
Rambutan – Devon Crab Curry Kottu Roti
The word “kottu” roughly translates from Sinhalese as “chopped”, and that’s what all the ingredients in this dish are. You’ll typically find kottu roti mixed street-side in Sri Lanka, chopped up using two large bench scraper-sized knives, but at Rambutan you’ve got to put in some of the work yourself. After you’ve mixed the lumps of sweet crabmeat with diced-up savoy cabbage and slightly sticky, slightly chewy shreds of roti, you’ve got to exhibit a bit of restraint and let it sit for a few minutes so the flavours can get to know each other.
The result of that patience – which is difficult to maintain when the smells of the restaurant are giving your nostrils the sexiest strip tease of their life – is a plate that has salt, fat, acid, and heat in spades. It’s important to know that three of my favourite things on the planet are seafood, curry, and bread. So, in many ways, this dish was a perfectly executed balance of everything I love on a single plate. And you can’t beat that. – Lucas Oakeley, restaurant maven, author and lovely man
BEST MISE-EN-PLACE
Bar D4100
Earlier this year I wrote for the Guardian about the use of the phrase “neighbourhood restaurant” as a marketing term – essentially deployed to make everyone involved feel a bit better about gentrification. In the process, I covered a few places that actually *do* feel like they genuinely serve their neighbourhoods, and one of those is Nunhead’s Bar D4100, home of Dinner For One Hundred. The bar is truly for everyone – the drinks prices are affordable, their events cater to everyone from singles to families, and they make space to spotlight local chefs cooking all types of cuisines. When it would be so easy just to coast on a certain type of young, south-east London punter, Jake and Jacob make a conscious effort to include the whole community, and their restaurant is a brilliant environment to be in as a result. I just love it. – LO’N
BEST SNACK
Good Measure – Candied Five Spice Nuts
Right so, this will sound like I’m being a bollocks, but I gave this a lot of thought and the best thing I ate this year was a bar snack. I am already generally of the opinion that a bar snack is the kind of food with the most potential for delight, especially if it is free with your drink. The bar snack in question here was £4, at Good Measure in Tooting (the new cocktail place underneath Daddy Bao) and it was simply sensational. “Candied Five Spice Nuts”, they say on the menu, but I don’t know what they could have called these nuts that would capture how sick they are. Just nuts, I hear you say. Yes and no. These nuts, sweet and spicy and salty, crunchy outside and oily inside, rocked my shit so hard I am still thinking about a little bowl of “just nuts” months later. All the bar snacks at Good Measure are great (crisps that taste like fried wonton wrappers, for instance) but these nuts? These literally just some nuts? Paradigm shifting. – Imogen West-Knights, author and newly-reminted food enjoyer following the removal of her gallbladder
BEST PUB FOOD
The Cow
It’s The Cow, it’s still The Cow, and for me it probably always will be The Cow. I love the cooking there – love the simplicity, love the way the flavour is always cranked right up because it has to stand up to a pint. Again, when I think about memorable dishes of the year, I can’t help but dwell on the steaming tangle of chilli-laden crab linguine I was served up at the back of the bar there on a Friday night in February. It was loud and a good quarter of the crowd were wearing flat caps, there was probably an Oscar winner somewhere in the room, and every now and then a very, very hazardous-looking flame would go up from the open kitchen. Pair that bumping atmosphere with a pint of prawns, the deep ooze of bone marrow, the cool slip of a few oysters, and a Guinness that makes you understand what a good Guinness is, and I think you get real magic. – LO’N
BEST CHIPS (AND BEST EVERYTHING ELSE TBF)
Hill & Szrok
For the sake of not sounding like a broken record, where I fear I am boring readers to death by frequently waxing lyrical about my favourite restaurant, Singburi, I will refrain. Plus, it feels cruel to recommend a place closed for the rest of the year. Instead, I’ll focus on Will Gleave’s exceptional food. Gleave has an impressive CV under his belt with stints at 40 Maltby Street, Brawn, and Bright, and is now at the top of his game, collaborating with Jake Couch at Hill & Szrok – Broadway Market’s butcher-by-day, achingly cool low-intervention wine bar and restaurant by night. It’s one of the best meals I’ve had this year in London and it’s one that keeps swirling in my brain.
I first encountered Gleave’s food when he was shaking pans at the pivotal P.Franco wine bar in Clapton – the squid noodles with XO sauce, crab, smoked haddock still permanently etched in my mind since my first visit in 2017. On a muggy August evening, sitting with friends surrounded by hunks of meat hanging in the window, squinting at the handwritten blackboard and carefully picking up the dainty stacked soused mackerel with gooseberry and jalapeño starter – an electrifying and genius combination (or, as Jonathan Nunn annoyingly but rightly calls it, an ‘English Gilda’ in his excellent review).
There was also a refreshing cold nectarine soup with fluffy clouds of sheep’s ricotta, providing much-needed palate cleanser relief from the heat and a mangalitza pork collar with apricot kasundi (Bengali fermented mustard paste) that was so tender, so juicy and so perfectly cooked that I’m sure I heard angels sing at that moment. We mopped up every last morsel, crumb, and sauce with butter-lathered soda bread and glisteningly beautiful golden beef fat chips, which we ordered three rounds of – because these chips really were that good. – Angela Hui, author and potato connoisseur
Dining Out is written by Lauren O’Neill and illustrated by Lucy Letherland. Weekly reviews are free to read every Thursday, and you can follow us on Instagram here, but if you’d like to see more, you can subscribe for £5 a month or £50 a year, to get extra content every second Sunday.
Click below to see paid and free subscription options, and thanks very much for reading.