Janda Diner, Peckham

It's important to point out about Janda Diner that it's a very different restaurant at lunchtime than at dinner, and if that you only go for the short small-plates selection in the middle of the day you're not really getting the full experience. I admit I have only been to Janda Diner once, and it was for lunch, so there's much more about the place that deserves attention than I can report on. However, Janda impressed in so many different ways at once that I feel duty bound to write about it anyway, as I'm convinced that a return to try the bigger evening menu would only cause me to be even more embarrassingly effusive.

It's a smallish, bright (at least in the middle of the day it is) and attractively minimalist spot - that's the first thing you notice about the place. The second thing you notice are the prices - nothing over £7, and an extremely reasonable wine list involving a bottle of sparkling for £35 which we obviously ordered immediately. This is the kind of value that's so rare in London in 2025 you may reasonably have assumed it had disappeared completely, but here we are anyway browsing a menu that looks like it had been priced back in 2012.

Of course low prices are not the same as value, and none of it would have mattered at all if the food was disappointing but without fail, everything we ate was astonishingly good. First to arrive was this colourful pile of all sorts of vibrantly fresh fruit and veg, involving jackfruit, kholrabi, apple and carrots boosted with tamarind, chilli and lime. It tasted like the bright tropical sun on a plate, and lifted the mood in much the same way.

Next we had these cute little skewers of ayam (chicken - one of the few bits of vocab I remember from a time working in Indonesia), beautifully grilled to tender inside and with delicate flecks of char outside. Spritzed with lime they were simple, attractive and supremely easy to enjoy.

Masak Lemak scallops came with a surprisingly generous amount of seafood for £7, the char grill presumably responsible for the gentle touch of smoke, and topped with a superbly rich and complex turmeric curry. The amount of effort that had gone into everything despite the tiny amount they're asking for it is quite something.

Sea bream ceviche was, just like everything else, beautiful to look at and a joy to eat. The fish was bouncy and fresh, full of flavour and not overwhelmed by the delicate sour tamarind dressing. Chargrilled pineapple on top added a lovely extra sweet and smoky note too.

You probably don't need to know anything more about the mackerel than is obvious in the picture above - absolutely expertly cooked to preserve a buttery, crisp skin, the neat fillets of fish came in a clear consommé which had a remarkably powerful sour and savoury flavour. A few slices of okra and herbs added some extra colour and crunch. It cost £7.

We finished with two neat little mouthfuls of Nasi Lemak Bungkus - a fried patty of rice topped with a sambal of cucumber, egg, anchovies and with peanuts for extra texture. For some reason this didn't turn up on the bill, which I've only just noticed, so thank you to Janda Diner if that was intentional and apologies if it wasn't.

But clearly, an extra £3 per person still wouldn't have stopped Janda from being an absolute steal. At twice the price, this food would still be worth travelling across town for - an intelligent, vibrant take on modern Malaysian street food that makes you want to jump on a plane to Kuala Lumpur. But at £34 per head - including, remember, that bottle of fizz - it becomes something approaching essential, the kind of place you'll end up banging on about to every person you meet for weeks after. And as anyone who's met me in the last few weeks will agree, that's exactly what I've been doing.

So the only obvious thing to do next is go back for the longer (and, admittedly slightly pricier but I'm sure still top value) dinner menu and discover yet more of the joys of modern Malaysian food. I haven't been as excited about a small plates restaurant in South London since I stumbled across Chishuru all those years ago. And we all know what happened to them next. So get yourself to Janda as soon as you can, before the rest of the world cottons on. Because right now, this place is a gem.

10/10

Little Cellars, Camberwell

Having enjoyed the original Peckham Cellars very much, I eagerly jumped on a very kind invitation to their new Camberwell offshoot. Little Cellars is aptly named - there's a couple of high tables for 6 in the middle of the room and 8 lower seats arranged looking out of the two downstairs windows - and I'm afraid when I saw how closely to each other complete strangers were expected to sit, my heart did sink a bit. But whatever you might think about communal seating, it's really the only way a venue this size is going to make any money without charging double for the menu, and actually in the end we were perfectly happy occupying a couple of seats at the end of a row, looking out onto Camberwell High Street.

The menu at Little Cellars is, much like its sister restaurant, an unbeatable mix of small plates served at very reasonable prices, and the occasional eye-catching premium larger dish for those who fancy splashing out. So, for example, we have these lovely cheddar beignets, hot out of the fryer, a crisp, greaseless crust giving way to an ethereally light, fluffy cheesey interior. This is a bit of pastry work worthy of the very best restaurants in town, and in fact were a lot nicer than the Comté gougères I had at a recent meal in Claridge's lobby restaurant. Yeah, I'm name-dropping. Get over it.

Charcuterie - all Italian - were of excellent quality and, at £10, a pretty generous portion for the money.

Terrine was way bigger than you had any right to expect for a measly £8, with plenty of interesting textures including just enough fat to loosen it in a very appealing way. If I'm going to be brutal, there wasn't quite enough salt in the mix, and as always seems to be the case, the restaurants that season all their dishes perfectly have salt and pepper on the table that you never use, and whenever you need extra seasoning there's none available. Still, this was still a very good terrine (and plenty of cornichons too).

But a dish that needed no extra seasoning - and in fact was unimprovable in every way - was the beef bourguignon. I'm always wary about ordering classic French dishes in British restaurants, because it's a style of cuisine that leaves absolutely no wiggle room. It has to be made perfectly, down to the last detail, or the whole house of cards comes falling down. This dish was absolutely perfect, from the tender chunks of melting beef shin, to the glazed baby carrots and shallots, to the thick, beefy red wine sauce studded with bacon. Underneath it all, a supremely smooth and buttery mash that, on its own as a side, would have been worth the trip to Camberwell alone. So now, one of my favourite dishes in London is served (sometimes, at least) in a little neighbourhood restaurant in Camberwell. I did not see that one coming.

Instead of the sweet desserts, which didn't really seem too exciting - I find panna cotta to be a dessert served by restaurants that don't like desserts - we had a cheese course. For £10 (there's that value again) we were served immaculately kept room-temperature Langres (always a winner), St Maure (a fruity and firm goat's) and - best of them all - Bleu de Causses. This is a cheese, rarely seen in the UK, matured in caves in the Roquefort style not in Roquefort but in the Gorges du Tarn, a magical part of the world where medieval villages cling to the side of precipitous stone cliffs while birds of prey soar and call overhead. If you ever get a chance to try Bleu de Causses - or indeed travel to the Gorges du Tarn - you should absolutely take it.

This was an invite, so we didn't see the bill, but I worked out with a couple of negronis to start and a couple of glasses of wine the bill would have come to about £50pp, which is a real bargain relative to what you might expect to pay for food of this standard somewhere more central. And yes, I had a couple of minor faults to point out but then that's just in the interests of documenting a more fully rounded experience - I still bounced away from the place high on the memory of that beef bourguignon and the cheeses.

We finished, and in fact began, our evening over the road at a charming - and rightly popular - little wine bar called Veraison wines, where the enthusiastic staff offered to keep a bottle of wine in the fridge between aperitifs and post-dinner. Already a fantastic place to eat and drink - I'm sure you already all know about Silk Road, Camberwell Arms, Forza Win, Stormbird, Theo's and the Crooked Well - Little Cellars is yet another reason to take the 171 bus from Elephant (or however you choose to travel, other transportation methods are available) and deserves to bring a whole new set of food lovers to the area. Now if you could please open in Battersea, you'd have my eternal gratitude.

9/10

I was invited to Little Cellars and didn't see a bill. Apologies - again - for the poor photos, I'm still on iPhone backup.

Wyatt & Jones, Broadstairs

Compared to some of the places I've visited in Kent over the years, Wyatt & Jones is a relatively easy expedition. Despite being the best part of two hours' journey from Victoria, it's neither buried deep in the single-lane-road countryside (the Compasses) or in a suburb of Tunbridge Wells stubbornly unserved by public transport (Tallow), so all that extra money you've saved on deeply unreliable local taxis can go towards your restaurant bill.

Not that Wyatt & Jones is particularly spendy. I'd estimate that had we been paying the bill per head would have come to about £70, deeply reasonable for anywhere serving food of this standard never mind a restaurant in the centre of one of the prettiest and busiest coastal Kentish towns. Broadstairs is - you'll know if you've been - a fantastic place to spend a hot summers day, and a window table at Wyatt & Jones offers the most beautiful (not to mention entertaining when trying to guess which hapless tourist is going to have their ice cream nicked next by a seagull) view over the beach and harbour to accompany your tasteful selection of BSP (British Small Plates).

We began with chargrilled sourdough dipped in hot potted shrimp butter, and if there's any better start to a meal with a sea view then I want to know about it. The bread was toasted only to give it a slight crust - fortunately inside it was soft and squishy enough to soak up an obscene amount of salty shrimp butter with each dip - and the little shrimp were bouncy and fresh.

Oysters (Jersey rocks) were served in two ways - one 'au naturel' although accompanied by a quite impressive house sriracha, and one with 'Hogwash' dressing, jalapeno and mirin. In both cases the oysters themselves were stellar - generously proportioned but lean and minerally, with a lovely sweet aftertaste. And while the natural serving were easily enjoyable, the Japanese flavours of the 'Hogwash' made even more of the oysters, to great effect. Time was I would have always chosen oysters un-mucked-about with; lately I've had more fun with inventive house dressings.

Tuna tartare came as three generous mounds of sesame-slicked raw tuna beneath shiso leaves. You pick up the leaf like a kind of upside-down taco, and eat the tartare by hand, the shiso and spices provided in just the right strength to not overwhelm the seafood.

Smoked eel croquettes were cute bitesize spheres of heavenly thick, eel-spiked bechamel which disappeared in record time. It's worth noting that not only was all the food at Wyatt & Jones seasoned perfectly and texturally just-so (nothing dry or overcooked, nothing underdone) but every technique, whether it was a rich bechamel or the occasional bit of deep frying, was pulled off perfectly. It was all just so easy to enjoy.

Dorset crab tostada, not content with having a lovely amount of white crab meat next to neat dollops of avocado purée and mayonnaise, but was topped with a half a battered soft-shelled crab to add extra texture and seafood punch. It worked brilliantly, a familiar set of flavours perhaps but in my experience a set of techniques not at all trivial to get right.

Scarlet prawns made up for their being from Argentina (I suppose any seafood restaurants need to be a bit flexible with their sourcing these days) by being dressed in Kentish rapeseed oil and cooked so perfectly the tail flesh lifted out in one satisfying chunk. Also, I realise frozen prawns are always going to be a less expensive option than fresh, but I think £10 for two giant specimens cooked this well and dressed so elegantly is an absolute bargain.

Final dish of the savouries was a giant mangalitza pork chop, cooked to very slightly pink next to the bone and with the little elements of fat crisped up nicely alongside. The mustard butter and taragon dressing was a delight, and the giant blackberries were fun, but this was really all about the mangalitza, king of the piggies and treated to a basically perfect grilling.

Alongside the pork, a side of 'layered crispy potatoes', an impressive bit of spudwork you've probably spotted in some form or other if you've been eating out in the UK in the last few years. Whilst not quite as spectacular as the version at Quality Chop House, it still had a very satifying flake to it, and the aioli was pleasingly powerful.

It's impossible not to enjoy freshly fried doughnuts, and even without the house Nutella (sorry, chocolate and hazelnut sauce) these were crunchy on the outside and soft within, and utterly charming. The sauce, though, made the whole thing all that more decadent.

Even more startling though was this beautiful puck of white chocolate cheesecake, the delicate shell of which broke to reveal a soft fluffy filling and a layer of sweet mango jam. Again, it was not only sweet and biscuitty in all the right proportions but the technique to produce that cheesecake "truffle" with the mango centre must have taken quite a while to perfect. Impressive stuff.

It is my curse (I know, I know, poor me) that it seems the further away from home I travel (recently Weymouth, and Norfolk not to mention Lancashire, the Peak District and Cornwall) the better experience I have. I won't repeat the tired clichés about Non-London British food finally finding its feet - this happened a good half decade ago, or even more - but I will say that when you can go to a small town and find not just one but two or three very decent places to eat (Wyatt & Jones own the lockdown smash Flotsam & Jetsam next door, and I'm reliably informed that the Table is another Thanet destination restaurant) never mind interesting natural wine bars and local breweries, it all points to a regional food scene rapidly approaching serious maturity.

Wyatt & Jones may have to rely on a steady stream of hungry tourists to fill out the booking sheet in the summer months, but unlike various other seafront places it nevertheless feels like a proper serious restaurant, aware of the responsibility it has to the local community (any Broadstairs local will tell you how chuffed they were to have Flotsam & Jetsom to cater them through the grim lockdown months) as well as to the wider foodie dispora. It is thanks to this rather diverse customer base, then, and not despite it, that it works so well. Anyone could come to this picturesque seafront spot and have a quite wonderful time. I certainly did. And I'm pretty sure so will you.

9/10

I was invited to Wyatt & Jones and didn't see a bill. As mentioned above though, you're probably looking at about £70/head including booze and service.

Madame D, Spitalfields

I like to think I can put up with a great deal of discomfort in the pursuit of good food - noise, queues, darkness, annoying useless hand dryers instead of paper towels - but if there's one thing guaranteed to ruin my evening it's the dreaded phrase "communal seating". I don't care how many people you think it's necessary to shoehorn into your shoebox of a restaurant in order to turn a profit; there is absolutely no excuse for forcing people to squeeze in next to each other like tube passengers to eat their dinner. It's awkward, uncomfortable and completely counterproductive to the most basic levels of hospitality. If two strangers' elbows are clashing while they tuck into their starters your tables are too close together, simple as that.

With that in mind, Madame D's couldn't have got off to a worse start. Initial delight that they were able to fit the two of us in on a busy Wednesday night turned to despair after we saw where we'd be sitting - in the middle of a desperately overcrowded row of tables so close together that someone deciding they needed the toilet necessitated the whole table being pushed out into the middle of the room. I'm sure the extra £50 from a two-header made all the difference to that evening's profits, but is it really worth winding your guests up so much to achieve it?

Anyway, rant over - for now. I mention this only because the food at Madame D's is so good that it deserves a nicer environment in which to enjoy it. A much nicer environment. Naga chilli beef puffs weren't anywhere near as hot as the involvement of the fearsome naga would suggest, just full of meaty beefy flavour and surrounded by nice soft pastry.

Prawn crackers - presented in what I hope is an ironic plastic bag and not just picked up from the local cash'n'carry - came with an interesting Newari-pickle coleslaw (not as good as the Darjeeling Express Newari pickle, but not bad) and a genuinely lovely szechuan pepper sauce studded with pickled prawns, which impressed with a complex set of flavours and a good hit of chilli offset with cooling tomato. I'm not entirely sure why this snack, more often than not offered for free in Thai restaurants, cost £8.50, though. Maybe they were very expensive prawns.

Hakka chilli paneer was another rich and satisfying set of flavours and textures, fresh vegetables and fearsomely hot chillies, studded with bouncy, salty cubes of cheese. It's abundently clear that the guys behind Madame D's (just as they proved at Gunpowder) are experts in constructing and presenting lively, characterful small plates Indian cooking. It's just a shame it has to be enjoyed while attempting to tune out the conversations of three different sets of diners within easy earshot.

The one large dish we ordered was this masala lamb noodles, served in a tiffin tin, and topped with a fried egg. Sort of an Indian-spiced spaghetti Bolognese (I'm sure they'll hate me saying), it was, like all the food that had come before, confident and inventive, rather unlike anything I'd seen before in London (other than the odd set of flavours at Darjeeling Express), and endearingly quirky.

Unfortunately despite the food - and the supremely attentive service, it has to be said - being so good, all everything else about Madame D's made us want to do was to wolf it all down as quickly as possible and get the hell out of there. Still, at quieter times, and perhaps if you managed to snag a table whose proximity to fellow diners was somewhat less than intimate, there's the potential for a really bloody lovely time to be had. So perhaps it's best, for the sake of my blood pressure, I just focus on the positives. Like those naga beef puffs, or the hakka chilli paneer. Lovely, calming, quiet, hakka chilli paneer.

7/10

Flora Indica, Earl's Court

We're constantly being told that 2017 is the Year of the Taco, and while I'm obviously delighted with this development, especially if it means more places like Breddos opening, it seems to me that a bigger story is what's happening to Indian food in the capital. It may not be just coincidence that January has already seen me post on two separate and equally exciting (in their own way) Indian restaurants; first the high-end Jamavar with its elegant and sophisticated take on the classics, then Kricket with its innovative English-Indian small plates concept.

And now here's Flora Indica, a restaurant that defies easy explanation but for the sake of categorisation you may as well think of as "Experimental Indian". They describe themselves as "one-of-a-kind" and they're not wrong - the menu is a barrage of Indian words and unusual ingredients that, as it turns out, are only intermittently useful at predicting the food that eventually arrives at the table. But despite the almost wilfully obscure nature of the concept, I can't deny that things like "Green Banana Kali Mirch | Banana Chips | Smoked Garlic Yoghurt" or "Venison Gilafi Sheek | Coriander Chilli Sauce | Spiced Fig" do sound exciting as well as weird, and if you never quite know what you're ordering, well, perhaps that's entirely deliberate.

Plus, I don't think it's possible to order badly at Flora Indica; every single one of the fourteen or so (savoury) dishes we tried were at least good and at best brilliant. Unfortunately for them, a restaurant is more than just the food, and I'll get to the issues with service and value in a bit, but meantime have a look at this "Baby Bitter Gourd Tak a Tak", which was a very cleverly balanced dish, the slight bitterness of the vegetable offset by a sweet pumpkin soup.

Achari Tender Broccoli also went down well, in a mildly sharp and spicy dressing and dash of sour cream. You may think that's not a huge amount of food for £5, just five small twigs of broccoli, but at the time it didn't seem so much of an issue, probably because they tasted so good.

We'd ordered these "poppadums" as we sat down, but they only appeared with the rest of the starters as someone apparently forgot to put the order through. Interesting things though, apparently puffed cassava with a little pot of house bitter pickle.

Naan with hemp seeds and Red Leicester cheese was excellent, the kind of British-Indian fusion I can very much get behind. It would have been more enjoyable without our overly familiar waiter interrupting with unneccessary chat ("So how was your weekend, guys?") but perhaps he was just embarrassed about having forgotten to put the poppadum order through and was overcompensating.

Opening weeks jitters could also account for the bizarre decision to fill a vacuum wine cooler almost to the brim with ice then precariously balance a bottle of wine on top of it, an arrangement that had no more effect on the temperature of the wine than not using the cooler at all.

Still, amidst the warm wine and the annoying interruptions, we still had the food, albeit not much of it. "Malwani Prawn" (3 of) were beautifully bouncy, dressed in a gentle spiced chutney and topped with mooli spaghetti.

Pulled Gressingham duck came in the form of a neat little tower of chilli-spiked meat, topped with a gram flour "cheela" (pancake) and a dollop of coconut chutney. This, too, was a genuinely lovely and intelligent bit of cooking.

Salmon trout was timed perfectly to just-pink inside, and had a wonderful flavour. £8 got us just about enough for a single mouthful, but again it was hard to be disappointed with anything other than the amount of it.

Sweetbread "shikampuri" (kind of a fish cake/kebab hybrid) was another brave experiment that completely worked. A lurid pink, earthy beetroot sauce complimented the offal notes of the kebab very well, and almost made you forget you were paying the best part of a tenner for a few grams of food.

I don't mean to labour the point about the portion sizes, but the fact the food was all so good just made you want even more of it, and though getting to try more of the menu was hardly a hardship on the one hand, we were very aware of the costs mounting up. Even the dishes from the "curries" section of the menu, with their heftier price points, contained only a smidgen more product, but again what was there was stunning. This chicken tikka came in a sauce best described as Heinz Cream of Tomato Soup made by God himself, so incredibly rich and packed full of flavour you could hardly imagine it being improved upon at all.

And this rogan josh, three or four pieces of beautifully tender lamb in another exquisitely constructed sauce, almost chocolately in its intensity. Also pictured, a black dhal which though not quite as perfect as the version at Jamavar, still did its job well, and a butter naan, light and bubbly.

So yes, someone at Flora Indica knows how to cook. And I'll gloss over the slightly more mundane desserts - I don't think I've ever had a very good dessert in an Indian restaurant (sorry) - because what came before was so enjoyable. Above is some kind of beetroot pudding which I'd rather forget about, and I believe we also had something involving pineapple.

The bill came to just under £50 a head, which I guess isn't a vast amount of money but it's still enough to put things like the dodgy service and small portions in a slightly more critical light. Only just enough though, because as I hope I've made clear, this is some of the most exciting and innovative Indian food London has to offer, and if you're any less of a grumpy misanthrope than me (which would be just about everyone I think) you may find a chatty waiter the least of your worries. Or, indeed, a vacuum cooler full of ice. Flora Indica has, despite its flaws, plenty to recommend it.

8/10