Looking For The Best Indian Restaurant In North London? Here's What To Look For

1. Does The Menu Know What It Is?

The single biggest signal of a good Indian restaurant is a menu with a point of view.

A kitchen serving two hundred dishes is not cooking two hundred dishes well. It is holding a freezer of pre-made sauces and changing the protein. You can taste it — every curry arrives with the same base note underneath, differing only in heat and colour.

A restaurant that has decided what it is will have a shorter menu, dishes that are specific rather than generic, and a handful of things it is genuinely known for. Look for regional specificity. A menu that says "Lamb Curry" tells you nothing. A menu that says Lamb Laal Maas — a Rajasthani dish built on red chilli and garlic — is telling you the kitchen knows where the dish comes from.

At Bonoo we serve modern Indian tapas — small sharing plates rather than one large main each. Fewer dishes, each one built properly, designed to be ordered across the table so you taste six things instead of one.

2. Where Do The Ingredients Come From?

This is the question almost nobody asks and it changes everything about how food tastes.

Indian cooking is often assumed to be forgiving — that heavy spicing hides ingredient quality. The opposite is true. Spice amplifies what is underneath it. Good lamb becomes extraordinary in a slow-cooked curry. Poor lamb becomes stringy and grey no matter how much garam masala goes in.

Ask, or check the menu. A restaurant sourcing British meat, fresh vegetables and proper dairy will usually say so, because it costs them more and they want you to know.

3. How Do They Cook It?

Method matters as much as ingredients, and it is visible in the food.

4. Are The Vegetarian Dishes An Afterthought?

This is a brilliant test even if you eat meat.

India has the richest vegetarian cooking tradition on earth. A kitchen that treats vegetarian dishes as an obligation — three sad options tucked at the bottom of the menu — is telling you it does not really understand the cuisine it is cooking.

A serious Indian restaurant will have vegetarian dishes that stand on their own. Not "the vegetarian option" but dishes a table of meat eaters would order anyway, because they are among the best things on the menu.

5. What Do Recent Reviews Actually Say?

Not the star rating. The words.

A four-point-five average tells you very little. Read the last twenty reviews and look for specifics. People naming individual dishes is a good sign — it means something was memorable enough to remember by name. People describing the room, the service, the feeling of the evening is a better sign still.

Be wary of a restaurant whose glowing reviews are all three years old. Kitchens change. Chefs leave. What was excellent in 2021 may not be excellent now. Recency matters more than volume.

6. Is It Somewhere You Actually Want To Sit?

Food is most of it. It is not all of it.

Half the reason to eat out rather than order in is the evening itself — the room, the noise level, the sense of occasion. A restaurant that has thought about lighting, spacing and sound has thought about your experience, not just your order.

This matters especially in North London, where a lot of the best Indian food has historically been takeaway-led. There is nothing wrong with that. But if you are choosing somewhere for a date, a birthday or a proper evening out, the room is part of what you are paying for.

Where To Find Us

We opened in Hampstead in 2016 with a simple idea — that Indian food deserved the same care, sourcing and presentation as any other cuisine in London, and that it was better shared than served in single large portions.

Nine years and four London Curry Awards later, we are still doing the same thing, now in two North London neighbourhoods.

Both restaurants are fully halal certified, with vegetarian and vegan dishes throughout the menu rather than confined to a corner of it. Open seven days a week from 5pm.