Hatfield, International Restaurant Guide

“An oasis in North London” for 25 years – Austrian-born Julius Oberegger’s “excellent local restaurant” in Whetstone is “the closest to fine dining without going to the West End” – with a “well prepared and imaginative menu” that skips round the world from fresh Jersey rock oysters and English rack of lamb to chicken Milanese, wok-fried noodles, and chilli and soy-glazed tofu.

Spacious and lavishly kitted-out gastropub in a “lovely setting on Totteridge Common” – billed as a ‘country pub in London’, its menu ranges from pizza, burgers and steaks to Sunday roasts. The food is “decent” by most accounts, if “not cheap”, but it’s a “pleasant” place to visit.

2023 Review: With an all-day menu that bounces happily from the Caribbean and Mexico to the Isle of Man and Thailand, Juliette Banner has provided up-beat service in Crouch End for more than 30 years. “A Banners breakfast is the perfect cure for a hangover” – and you can also earn one with the “great cocktails”. The “authentic American-style burgers” must have attracted Bob Dylan, the bard of Americana, whose 1993 visit is commemorated with a plaque – you can even book the table he sat at!

A “great location” – on the Kenwood side of the Heath – means you need to book for this ancient (1585) pub, which also boasts a “good menu”, affordable prices and cute garden in summer. Need an excuse to go? Tell people you’re on a literary pilgrimage (Keats, Byron and Dickens all caroused here).

A pub has stood on this leafy site on the road to Golder’s Green for three centuries, and was made famous by Edwardian music-hall star Florrie Forde as a ‘little nook down near old Hampstead town’ where Cockneys would head on a day trip. These days a “stalwart still going strong”, it offers a “good-value set lunch in the dining room” (2 courses for £20.95; 3 for £24.95).

Grade II listed pub in posh Highgate (whose former patrons include Dickens). Run by Young’s, the gastropub fare is solidly rated, but the chief highpoints include its attractively updated period charms, big outside terrace and cosy dining conservatory with large skylight.

“Still a great pub to have as a local” – Giles Coren’s favourite gastropub and one of our annual diners’ poll’s highest rated in north London is well-placed for a stroll on Hampstead Heath and thronged at the weekend. It is also the “kind of gastropub where you can still just have a drink”. Its ratings staged something of a comeback this year: “the cooking remains good”: in particular “dinner is stunning and good value”. (If you’re an out-of-towner, consider staying in one of their seven guest rooms).

“A great little bistro” in Gospel Oak, behind the Royal Free, which is “always packed to the rafters with people from the surrounding area who have been coming for years”. The straightforward food is of diverse inspirations – “good value and plentiful” – and “staff are attentive and friendly”. Now in its third decade, it makes no effort to modernise – but so what? It’s a place where “you could eat every day”.