Address: Kolae, 6 Park St, London SE1 9AB
Price: $$
Book online
Lark
Bury St Edmunds, Suffolk
What to order: Suffolk lamb sweetbread with Café de Paris butter
After leaving Suffolk’s Michelin-starred Pea Porridge, James Carn has set up his own restaurant with his wife, Sophia. A restaurant this good is a bit of a coup for market town Bury St Edmunds which hasn’t traditionally been at the top of foodies’ must-travel lists. Small but sweet, with poured concrete floors and bags of light flooding in, and a focus on dishes made for the table to share.
Best to order a selection, then: plump chicken thigh with girolles and Madeira cream; Suffolk line-caught bass topped and gremolata; venison tartare with hash brown, chive, and sour cream. The team look to the Mediterranean for inspiration without ever losing sight of their roots, so the Suffolk land and coast are well represented on the menu, which invites diners to order a ‘Kitchen Selection’ for two, four, or six to remove the hassle of having to choose what to order at all. In 2024, the restaurant was awarded a Bib Gourmand for good quality, good value cooking—and might make a foodie pilgrimage out of Bury St Edmunds after all.
Address: Lark, 6A Angel Hill, Bury Saint Edmunds IP33 1UZ
Price: $$$
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Lir
Coleraine, Londonderry
What to order: Korean-fried ray wing
After opening multi-award-winning The Pool, also in Coleraine, Stevie and Rebekah McCarry opened the ambitious Lir at the Marina in 2023. Menus change daily depending on the catch brought in from local boats, the organic vegetables available from the team’s growers and foraged goods from the team.
The tasting menu prepares ingredients thoughtfully, switching between whole fish butchery, fermenting, smoking, and curing keeping in line with a nose-to-tail, zero-waste ethos. All of which is highly commendable, of course—but more importantly, the seafood is cooked in innovative ways, making up dishes such as Korean-fried ray wing or hake Kyiv with caper butter. Even Rick Stein is a recent fan (he visited for an upcoming BBC series). So many reasons to visit, and we haven’t even touched on the element our judging panel swooned over the most—that view of the water over the Coleraine Marina.
Address: Lir, 66 Portstewart Rd, Coleraine BT52 1EY
Price: $$$$
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Lyla
Royal Terrace, Edinburgh
What to order: the set menu is decided for you, so trust the process
There’s just one single-sitting 10-course tasting menu served at Lyla. This Georgian townhouse used to be home to Edinburgh icon Paul Kitching’s 21212 restaurant. After his passing, the space was offered up to another well-known name in the Scottish capital’s food scene, Stuart Ralston who—despite being at the helm of three successful restaurants already (Tipo, Noto, and Aizle)—couldn’t pass up the opportunity to take on this legendary site himself.
The evening kicks off in the drawing room, where the 28 guests for the evening are offered a glass of Champagne. Downstairs, in the main dining room, the menu is an ode to produce from the Scottish Isles. Line-caught fish and sustainable shellfish, like halibut or local langoustines, are sourced from the surrounding waters and prepared in the open kitchen, so you can snoop on their precise preparations while you dine.
Address: Lyla, 3 Royal Terrace, Edinburgh EH7 5AB
Price: $$$$
Book online
Mambow
Clapton, London
What to order: black pepper chicken curry
Abby Lee never intended to kick-start a London love affair with Malaysian food. Despite growing up between Malaysia and Singapore, where she worked in her family’s bakery as a kid, it was Italian cooking that got her into the kitchen when she moved—alone—to the UK to study. And, for a while, that’s the path it looked like Lee would take. There was a period of formal training at Le Cordon Bleu, then a couple of years refining her skills at Michelin-starred Pasha Ristorante in Puglia. So far, so standard. But when the first wave of lockdowns forced her to shut her Spitalfields pop-up a few weeks after opening, Lee moved back to Malaysia to wait out the pandemic. Days turned into weeks spent cooking the dishes of her childhood with her grandmother and aunt, scribbling down recipes and rediscovering her own longing for these family dishes.
