3 Best Restaurants in Kensington, London

This lively Israeli-Levantine restaurant offers excellent Middle Eastern tapas (plus influences from Bulgaria, Serbia, Greece, and Turkey) at relatively friendly (by Kensington standards) prices and has become a firm neighborhood favorite. Start with fluffy Yemeni challah bread and move onto a grilled eggplant "steak" with black tahini, pine nuts, and pickled tomatoes, a charcoal-grilled mushroom "shawarma" that incorporates a lima bean cream and asparagus (hot dishes are cooked in the open kitchen's wood-fired oven), or a duck breast salad with a pomegranate-and-ginger vinaigrette dressing. A  three-course £30 set lunch offers good value. This is the kind of place where you're expected to share plates and eat with your fingers, and if you have something dribbling down your chin, no one will mind.

This hole-in-the-wall restaurant, a neighborhood favorite for more than 30 years, is an amazing bargain for this pricey part of town, serving good basic Chinese food at reasonable prices. Standouts on the extensive menu include ma-po tofu, barbecued pork with noodles, and seafood ho-fun. It’s not fancy, but service is fast.

Here at one of London's top Japanese restaurants, head chef and cofounder Yasuhiro Mineno creates fresh, colorful, and exquisite sushi, sashimi, salads, and carpaccios. Tofu foam-topped miso cappuccino comes in a Victorian cup and saucer, while nigiri might include signature flourishes such as truffle shavings on fatty tuna. But there's a lot more than sushi here, including sensational small plates such as Robata-grilled black cod marinated in soy sauce. The £16 salmon nigiri set lunch is a relatively affordable way to sample Yashin's below-the-radar brilliance.