My favourite London Italians in 2025

From the Tiber to the Thames

If there’s a cuisine I know best in the world after British, it’s probably Italian.

It was the first food I really learnt to cook in earnest, and certainly the first I became confident enough in to improvise and cook creatively. I’ve studied the language for a good few years ago, and try to visit most years, meaning it’s got a good shot at being the country I’ve travelled the most widely too. Half my cookbook collection covers pasta one way or another, and knowing a little of the language even means I can stumble through cooking from Italian recipes, rather than those bastardised for Brits.

Helpfully, London also has a lot of Italian restaurants, in part because it has a lot of Italians — a 2021 study by the Italian Consulate estimated there were 150,000 Italians in London alone, and some studies have put the figure even higher. The impact of Brexit on those numbers is still a little unclear, but it’s good reason to think that plenty still remain.

London’s Italian food is very different to, say, New York’s. While Italian-American has its own distinct culinary history, Britalian has never had quite the same cachet, predominantly limited to spag bol and classic caffs. I don’t want to do it down, but it does mean that most of the best Italian food in London doesn’t have especially historic roots. The really good stuff tends to have opened in the last few years or decades, and for the most part aims at authentic recreations of Italian food, increasingly regionally, with a focus on small plates of pasta that we can thank/blame Padella for.

The city also has a strong line in Neapolitan pizza, and a growing interest in the East Coast American stuff. For sanity’s sake I’ve decided to set that aside for now, so this is really more of a best-Italian-but-not-pizza list.

Brutto, EC1

I’ve written before about Brutto, Russell Norman’s excellent Florentine spot in Farringdon. It offers a rabbit ragu that I’m annoyed to admit bests my own, enormous T-bone steaks for the carnivores in your life, and a £5 negroni that feels like the only sensible way to start a meal.