The critics love them, so get in quick with your reservation at the season’s hottest openings.

Five years ago Mr Jöel Robuchon, a French chef with more stars than the heavens, did a surprising thing. The 28-Michelin-starred cook declared that the culinary capital of the world was not Paris nor New York, Copenhagen, Barcelona, San Sebastien or even Tokyo, but London, a city which 30 years before was known primarily for its soggy chips and boiled beef.

The city had changed immeasurably, he said; it was now without peer in terms of both the breadth and quality of its restaurants. In 2011, eyebrows in Paris and New York shot skywards with this pronouncement. “London, really? Isn’t it just, you know, all ersatz curries and arthritic waiters?” was the general tenor of the response.

London is high up on the culinary tree, that surprise now itself seems a surprise. In the past six months, 132 major restaurants have opened in the capital. Three – Yosma, Fucina and Jikoni (see below) – opened in the past month within a few streets of each other in Marylebone. It is fair to say, London’s dining scene is having a moment. Again.

As with all things though, lots of choices means lots of decisions, but at MR PORTER we always like to help, so we have selected the very best of the recently opened establishments for you. Get booking.

_**What to order: **_the menu changes by the day, but order the Burmese wild ginger and short-rib curry, if it’s on

Mr Ben Chapman’s restaurant has at its heart a series of wood-burning, brick-and-render kilns, which he built with his bare hands. He spotted them on a research trip in northern Thailand, shipped them over and for a fraction of the price of a standard restaurant oven and rebuilt them.

This is, to say the least, an unusual set-up for a central London eatery, but then, this is an unusual place, with all his meticulously researched Thai and Burmese dishes cooked in clay pots and woks on the glowing embers of the barbecue (there’s no gas supply at Kiln).

Its sister restaurant, Smoking Goat, was also a hit in London when it opened in 2014, but Kiln’s garnered even more breathless reviews, with Ms Fay Maschler giving it five out of five in the Evening Standard. As she put it, Mr Chapman’s “dedication, assiduous research, creativity, insistence on well-bred ingredients, his admission that ‘none of it is verbatim Thai food’, tied to an understanding of conviviality and all for less than the price of a pizza, is the reasoning behind the five stars”.

**Brewer Street, Soho **

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What to order: Partridge, wild mushrooms, hay baked apple and chestnuts

When darlings of the London restaurant scene, Messrs Will Lander and Daniel Morgenthau, opened Portland last year, the dining classes swooned and it was laureled with a Michelin star in the latest guide. So when they opened a more casual sibling, Clipstone, up the road in Fitzrovia, with a menu of sharing plates, flat breads, cured meats and vegetables, there was a sharp intake of breath – could it live up to its sibling’s standard? It didn’t. It surpassed it. Mr Jay Rayner of The Observer wrote, “It being 2016, you will have to navigate the business of small plates, and the announcement that dishes will come to you when it suits the kitchen. With food this assured I’m willing to take it on the chin. From the short list of cold cuts comes a plate of lardo, the cured back fat of the pig, served at room temperature so that all is softness and silk; it’s a trip to the lingerie department for the tongue.” Don’t let the school-room chairs and pared-back white interior deceive you – it’s a place to luxuriate in.

**Clipstone Street, Fitzrovia   **

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What to order: Lamb Cutlet Zuzu

Only the queue is cause for complaint at this gem on Neal’s Yard. But you can see why people are so desperate for a table at The Barbary, sister restaurant to equally well received, The Palomar. After tasting the octopus, with its pomegranate molasses and lemon chickpea accompaniments, we’d happily queue round the block in the drizzle. And queue you must, because there are only 24 covers, all of which are arranged around a central horseshoe bar, behind which the chefs work.

Ms Marina O’Loughlin, writing in The Guardian, describes its charms like this: “the chefs are behaving like chefs and the food they’re cranking out is utterly glorious. Plus, it’s quite thrillingly alien… We’re told The Barbary’s menu reflects the former Barbary Coast (Morocco, Algeria, Libya and Tunisia), which translates into a series of lyrical culinary arcana…”

Neal’s Yard, Covent Garden

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What to order: the dim sum, which is presented like a Mr Jackson Pollock painting, and the steamed club sandwich

Mr David Muñoz is the marathon-running, mohawk-toting superchef behind Madrid’s three-Michelin-starred DiverXo, a gastronomic temple said by those in the know to be successor to El Bulli. His new 100-seat joint, StreetXo, is in Mayfair and although only a couple of weeks old, already has a waiting list for tables which is longer than Mr Elton John’s Christmas card list. The food is both unashamedly technical and shocking to the senses. One cocktail features a swizzle stick with a flame-grilled prawn on the end, which is meant to be eaten, post-swizzle. The music is loud, the art is neon lit and the waiters wear straightjackets. Mr Muñoz describes his food as “brutal,” a “gunshot to your head,” “like porno TV,” the sort of lurid terms you want from a chef who can’t escape the moniker “enfant terrible”. After visiting DiverXO in Madrid and tasting a dim sum basket, Mr Anthony Bourdain declared in The New York Times: “I love my wife, I love my daughter, and then I love this”. High praise, indeed.

Old Burlington Street, Mayfair

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What to order: Ravioli of langoustine

Chef Mr Philip Howard toiled for 17 years to maintain the two Michelin stars of his fine-dining restaurant, The Square. But he has emerged from beneath the weight of all those tablecloths and amuse-bouches with a more relaxed joint in Chelsea – and a focus on vegetables, salads, grains and fish caught on a line (meat is quite properly considered a treat here). The location, on the former site of Restaurant Tom Aikens, in Chelsea means it is deep in red-chino territory, but ignore all that – the food is sublime. As The Sunday Times’ Mr AA Gill puts it: “[The meal] started with mackerel soup, poured over eel at the table. The first mouthful transported me back to the incredible precision of manufacture, the intense extraction of flavours balanced with a balletic elan — just perfect. There was a salad of roasted vegetables, cashew hummus, curry oil and shallots... all the textures and tastes were made to tiptoe harmoniously onto the palate.”

Elystan Street, Chelsea

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What to order: spiced scrag end pie, of course

On paper, Jikoni, is a confusing affair. It does, after all, fuse British, African, Middle Eastern and Asian influences in just a single-paged menu. Inspired by the chef (Mr Gordon Ramsay favourite) Ms Ravinder Bhogal’s upbringing in Kenya, in practice, somehow, it all makes beautiful sense. We love the place down to the last tassel of its chintzy, well-travelled decor, and we are not alone. As Mr Giles Coren noted in The Times: “Jikoni, says Bhogal, is a tribute to the family food of her childhood… and it must have been a hell of a childhood and a hell of a family for this was some of the most delicate, beautiful and delicious Indian food I have eaten in years, in one of the loveliest spaces you could ask for.”

Blandford Street, Marylebone

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