The Best Indian Restaurants in London 2026
London holds four Michelin-starred Indian restaurants, all in Mayfair. Gymkhana, Benares, Jamavar and Ambassadors Clubhouse compared, and how to get a table at each.
The best Indian restaurants in London 2026
London has the best Indian fine dining of any city outside the subcontinent, and it is not a close contest. Four rooms hold Michelin stars for Indian cooking, all of them in Mayfair, all within a short walk of one another.
That concentration is recent. For most of the twentieth century Indian food in Britain meant the neighborhood curry house, and the idea that it belonged in a starred dining room was not taken seriously. That changed over roughly two decades, and the result is a category where London now sets the global standard.
Here are the four, what separates them, and how to get a table.
Gymkhana
Gymkhana is the flagship, and since 2024 it has held two Michelin stars, a distinction almost no Indian restaurant anywhere has achieved.
It opened in 2013 on Albemarle Street from siblings Jyotin, Karam and Sunaina Sethi, and took its first star in 2014. The conceit is the colonial-era gymkhana club: two levels, from ground-floor booths suited to a working lunch to a red-toned basement room with a clubbier, colonial-India mood for a longer dinner. The cooking is built on tandoor and slow-cooked curries with seasonal British produce and game, and the tandoori masala lamb chops with walnut chutney have been the signature since it opened.
This is the hardest Indian reservation in London and one of the hardest of any cuisine. Treat it as a booking that needs planning, not one you make in the week of.
Benares
Benares holds one Michelin star, regained in 2021 under chef Sameer Taneja and held every year since. It sits above Berkeley Square, in a room of warm woods, soft metallic accents and low light, closer to a salon than a club.
Chef Sameer Taneja runs the kitchen, and the food is modern Indian built on seasonal British ingredients and precise technique, from tandoori dishes and regional curries to a tasting menu that changes with the seasons.
Of the four it is the most reliably bookable, which on a given night makes it the most useful.
Jamavar
Jamavar is a Michelin-starred Indian restaurant on Mayfair's Mount Street, reaching a decade in London in 2026.
The interior is the most restrained of the four: embossed deep-green wallpaper, olive and tan leather, brass detail, and a blue private dining room that is one of the better private spaces in Mayfair. The menu spans the celebratory flavors of the north and the spice-led traditions of the south, ranging wider geographically than its neighbors.
It is the strongest of the four for a dinner that has a purpose, and the private room is the reason.
Ambassadors Clubhouse
Ambassadors Clubhouse is the newest of the four, Michelin-starred, on Heddon Street, and in 2026 became the first Punjabi restaurant in the UK to win a Michelin star.
It draws on undivided Punjab and on Bombay, and it is deliberately looser than Gymkhana: a bar-led room with a house-party sensibility, designed around sharing. If Gymkhana is the club, this is the clubhouse, and the name is not accidental.
For a group that wants the cooking without the formality, this is the one.
Why London and not somewhere else
The question visitors ask is why this happened here and not in Mumbai, Delhi, or New York, and the answer is worth knowing because it explains what you are eating.
Britain has the longest continuous relationship with Indian food of any Western country, and by the 1980s it had produced an enormous, mostly Bangladeshi-run curry house trade that made the food ubiquitous and, in the process, made it cheap. The category was everywhere and taken seriously nowhere.
What changed was a generation of chefs and operators who refused the terms of that trade. They cooked regionally, not to a single homogenised menu, sourced at the level any other fine-dining kitchen would, and priced accordingly. The first Michelin stars for Indian restaurants in London followed in 2001, and the four rooms on this list are the mature version of what that opened up.
The practical consequence for a diner is that these kitchens are not doing elevated versions of curry-house dishes. They are cooking regional Indian food with the technique and supply chain of a European starred restaurant, which is a genuinely different thing and the reason the category is worth the money.
How to choose between them
- Gymkhana if the meal is the occasion, and you can book far ahead.
- Benares if you want a starred room with a real chance of availability.
- Jamavar if the dinner has an agenda, or you need a private room.
- Ambassadors Clubhouse if the group is more interested in the night than the ceremony.
Booking notes
All four sit within a ten-minute walk of each other in Mayfair, which makes a change of plan straightforward if one falls through.
One practical point. Lunch is significantly easier than dinner at all four, and at three of them the menu is largely the same.
Every restaurant here has its own page with the current booking link and the timing that
actually works. Outside Las Vegas the restaurant's own platform holds the reservation, not us, but the page tells you where to book and when the window opens.
Browse every London restaurant
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