The 2025 World's 50 Best Restaurants awards, announced in Lima, Peru, brought a bruising night for London: just one entry, its worst showing on record. In previous years the capital reliably claimed two to four places, but this time only Ikoyi made the cut, landing at number 48 — a steep slide from its 15th-place peak last year.
Ikoyi, the two-Michelin-starred project from chef Jeremy Chan and co-founder Iré Hassan-Odukale, has been quietly rewriting the rulebook since 2017. From a copper-clad dining room at 180 Strand, Chan builds tasting menus around rare African and Asian spices married with top-tier British produce — think grilled turbot with egusi miso, Nigerian-inspired suya with creamed peas, and his signature lobster head smoked jollof rice. Hassan-Odukale says the rankings have a real commercial effect: after hitting 15th, bookings spiked and the restaurant stayed busier for a year, while the visibility also helped recruit kitchen and front-of-house talent.
Here's the twist: London's real star of the list isn't even based in London. At number 28 sits Trèsind Studio in Dubai, chef Himanshu Saini's 20-seat Palm Jumeirah dining room and the world's first Indian restaurant awarded three Michelin stars (2025). Saini's group opened Trèsind Mayfair on Hanover Street in May 2026, near Oxford Circus, with Saini supervising executive chef Amit Bagyal.
It's not a clone of the Dubai original, but much of the menu carries over. The £138 tasting menu tours India's regions with contemporary flair: the theatrical Khichdi of India, a rice-and-lentil dish with ingredients from across the country presented on a map; a mushroom chai with truffle milk powder; and kosha mangsho, a rich slow-braised Bengali mutton curry. If that's too much of a commitment, there's a £42 lunch and a shorter £75 menu, plus downstairs cocktail bar Tryst mixing drinks with Indian regional ingredients.
Worth remembering: the 50 Best list is voted on by roughly 1,100 industry insiders and inevitably reflects where they've been eating. Hassan-Odukale, for one, points to London's rise of upscale-casual spots like Mountain and Impala — great cooking without fine-dining prices — as the brighter side of the city's scene. Either way, Trèsind Mayfair is the obvious booking for anyone chasing world-class Indian food without a flight to Dubai.
Story first reported by Condé Nast Traveller UK.
