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 neighbourhood 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 the Sethi siblings behind JKS Restaurants, and took its first star in 2014. The conceit is the colonial-era gymkhana club: two levels of jade green and dark polished timber, ceiling fans, and a bar that is a genuine destination in its own right. The cooking is built around the tandoor and the grill, and the game dishes in particular are the reason people book months out.
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 and has carried one since 2005, which makes it the longest-standing starred Indian room in the city. It sits above Berkeley Square, and the 150-seat dining room is a different proposition from Gymkhana's: warm woods, soft metallic detail, and low light, closer to a salon than a club.
Chef Sameer Taneja runs the kitchen, and the cooking is modern Indian in the genuine sense, built on classical technique rather than fusion for its own sake.
Of the four it is the most reliably bookable, which on a given night makes it the most useful.
Jamavar
Jamavar is the Leela group's London room on Mount Street, Michelin-starred, and reaching a decade in the city 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 ranges wider geographically than its neighbours, drawing across regional Indian cooking rather than concentrating on one tradition.
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 group and the second JKS entry on this list, Michelin-starred, on Heddon Street.
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 rather than a formal progression. 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 rather than 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 rather than 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.
Two practical points. Lunch is significantly easier than dinner at all four, and at three of them the menu is largely the same. And the bar counters take walk-ins at some of these rooms when the dining room cannot, which is the standard route in for anyone who did not plan weeks ahead.
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