Best Indian Restaurants in London 2026

Two Michelin stars. London's finest Indian restaurant, and there is no credible argument for second place.

Gymkhana opened in 2013 and collected its first Michelin star the following year. A decade later, it earned a second — becoming the first Indian restaurant in London to hold two stars, and one of a very small number of Indian restaurants at this level anywhere outside India. The room is built around the aesthetics of the colonial sporting clubs that gave the restaurant its name: dark wood panelling, hunting trophies mounted with a deliberate archness, red leather banquettes in the basement room, and a main dining area with the quality of quiet authority that two-star rooms tend to achieve and that cannot be manufactured by design alone.

Chef Director Siddharth Ahuja, who grew up in Delhi and has led the kitchen since 2016, produces North Indian cooking in which tandoor is the technical heart. The kid goat methi keema with bhuna egg and tandoor-charred rotis demonstrates the kitchen's mastery of the kind of dish that takes a decade to get right — the keema's balance of fenugreek bitterness, fat, and spice is precise to a degree that most Indian restaurants in London don't attempt. The five-course tasting menu at £110 per person moves through crab, game, and aged beef with a progression logic that a French kitchen would recognise. The wine pairing at an additional £95 leans intelligently into French bottles rather than defaulting to the generic Indian-adjacent choices that most comparable restaurants reach for.

For a birthday dinner in London that communicates genuine ambition — not just expense — Gymkhana is the answer. The basement room in particular has the celebratory grandeur of a private members' club on the night everyone agreed to come.

A century of Indian cooking on Regent Street. The institution that made London's Indian dining scene possible.

Veeraswamy opened in 1926 on the corner of Regent Street and Swallow Street, and has operated continuously since — making it the oldest Indian restaurant in the United Kingdom and one of the oldest in Europe. It holds a Michelin star and maintains a dining room that has been restored to its 1920s colonial luxury: floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking Regent Street, ivory and gold interior, chandeliers, and a service team whose formality reflects the century of accumulated institutional knowledge behind it. Arriving here feels like entering something that exists outside the contemporary restaurant cycle.

The menu spans India's regional traditions with a depth that reflects a hundred years of adjustment and refinement. The Goan prawn curry — coastal-sweet, tamarind-sharp, served with Goan bread — is the dish that most visitors order and that most visitors discuss for weeks afterwards. The Lucknawi lamb biryani, prepared with the dum-pukht slow-steaming technique in which the vessel is sealed with dough and the rice cooks in the lamb's steam, is the kitchen's most technically demanding preparation and arrives at the table in a sealed pot that is broken by the waiter. The Malabar fish curry, using coastal spices of Kerala, demonstrates the kitchen's commitment to regional specificity rather than homogenised 'Indian cuisine.'

For a birthday that should feel genuinely special — rather than simply expensive — Veeraswamy's history provides the context that no newer restaurant can manufacture. A century of cooking is a fact that changes the atmosphere of the meal.

A Michelin star built around three kinds of fire. The most theatrical Indian kitchen in London.

Amaya has held a Michelin star since 2006 and remains one of the most important Indian restaurants in London's history — not for its longevity alone, but for the specific innovation that defined it at opening and that the kitchen has continued to develop over two decades: the use of three distinct Indian grilling traditions simultaneously, each visible from the dining room. The open kitchen features a tandoor oven, a sigri charcoal grill, and a tawa flat-top, and their collective activity provides the dining room with both the aromas and the visual theatre that make Amaya distinctly itself.

The tasting menu at £75 per person at dinner is the most accessible Michelin-starred Indian dining in London by a significant margin. It moves through the three grill techniques with pedagogical clarity: clay oven-roasted sea bass with Malabar curry leaf; sigri-charcoaled lamb seekh kebab with smoked yoghurt; tawa-seared scallop with kokum and ginger. The sharing format means orders arrive continuously rather than in structured courses, generating the kind of generous, spontaneous atmosphere that suits birthdays and group occasions. The wine list has been curated with attention to the specific flavour profiles of the food — less dependence on Champagne-or-Burgundy defaults and more engagement with aromatic whites and lightly tannic reds.

For a birthday group dinner in London that needs to feel celebratory and generous rather than ceremonially restrained, Amaya's sharing format and open kitchen energy is precisely right.

The only Michelin-starred restaurant in London specialising in coastal South-West India. A category of its own.

Quilon has held a Michelin star since 2008, making it one of the longer-tenured starred Indian restaurants in London. Its singular focus is on the coastal cuisine of South-West India — Kerala, Karnataka, and Goa — an area of Indian cooking defined by coconut milk, tamarind, curry leaves, and the spice profiles of trade routes that brought cinnamon and cardamom from the peninsula's interior to the sea. The room near Westminster is quietly opulent without ostentation: dark wood, gold accents, and a hush that suggests the restaurant takes its food more seriously than its décor.

The Malabar prawn curry — large tiger prawns in a coconut sauce sharpened with raw mango and tempered with fresh curry leaves — is the dish that most specifically defines Quilon's cuisine and that most North Indian-focused London restaurants could not produce with comparable authenticity. The lobster moilee, a coastal preparation using barely spiced coconut broth, lemon, and green chilli, is a demonstration that the South-West coastal tradition is capable of extraordinary delicacy. Appam — the lace-edged, bowl-shaped rice flour pancake — arrives with the curries and has the perfect structural geometry to scoop the rich sauces.

For a birthday dinner where the group wants something genuinely different from London's standard Indian restaurant experience — without sacrificing quality — Quilon's regional specificity is the distinguishing factor.

The Leela hotel group brings India's palace tradition to Mayfair. The Michelin star arrived within three years.

Jamavar opened in 2016 as the London expression of the Leela Palaces, Hotels and Resorts group — the Indian luxury hospitality company whose restaurants in Delhi and Mumbai set the standard for formal Indian dining in South Asia. The Mayfair room draws directly from this lineage: latticed brass screens, marble surfaces, embroidered silk panels, and the kind of service team that has been briefed on every dish's regional origin and preparation technique before the first cover sits down. It earned a Michelin star in 2019 and has held it since.

The kitchen covers pan-Indian cuisine with unusual honesty about its regional sources: a Rogan Josh from Kashmir prepared with the dried cockscomb flower (mawal) that gives the Kashmiri preparation its distinctive red colour without chilli heat; a Chettinad pepper chicken from Tamil Nadu built on the peppercorn and kalpasi spice base of that specific community; and a signature hunter's venison slow-cooked with mustard and aromatic spices in a style drawn from the Mughal court kitchens. The venison dish is the kitchen's most accomplished: gamey enough to be honest, spiced precisely enough to be Indian without erasing the animal's character.

For a client-impressing birthday or a formal Indian dining occasion in London, Jamavar occupies the correct position: Mayfair address, palace hotel pedigree, Michelin starred, and a room that communicates the right things without shouting.