London’s Italian food scene runs from a 77-year-old Soho café that inspired a Pulp song to a converted oil storage facility on the Thames where a future prime minister once washed dishes. It takes in a Highbury trattoria that’s spent fifteen years quietly topping “best of London” lists without a shred of TikTok marketing, and the pasta bar its founders opened afterwards that now has queues stretching round Borough Market by midday. Here are the eight best Italian restaurants in London worth seeking out in 2026.

Opened in 2010 by Tim Siadatan and Jordan Frieda, Trullo has spent over a decade as one of London’s most quietly consistent restaurants, named Time Out’s best restaurant in the whole of London in 2025 to mark its 15th anniversary. The room is deliberately unfussy — stripped floorboards, plain white walls, net curtains — with nothing to signal its reputation beyond the name itself, taken from the conical stone huts of Puglia.

The pappardelle with slow-cooked beef shin ragù is the dish most closely associated with the restaurant, alongside a menu that changes twice daily depending on what’s good at market that morning. An all-Italian wine list, mapped by region and starting at a genuinely reasonable price point, rounds out a meal that regulars describe as never having slipped in fifteen years of trying.

Trullo — 300–302 St Paul’s Road, Highbury East, London N1 2LH | trullorestaurant.com

Padella is Trullo’s younger sibling, opened by the same pair, Tim Siadatan and Jordan Frieda, on the strength of a shared dream to run a proper pasta bar. Passers-by can watch the day’s pasta being hand-rolled in the window before it’s cooked to order, and the restaurant has arguably done more for London’s appetite for fresh pasta than any single opening of the past decade — it holds a Michelin Bib Gourmand and has since expanded to Shoreditch and Soho.

The pici cacio e pepe and a rich beef shin pappardelle are the two dishes diners build a visit around, chosen from a deliberately tight menu of around eight seasonal options. The Borough Market original doesn’t take bookings — queue via the QR code or the Dojo app from late morning, and expect a wait at peak times.

Padella — 6 Southwark Street, Borough Market, London SE1 1TQ | padella.co

Bar Italia has occupied the same Frith Street address since 1949, opened by the Polledri family and still owned by Veronica and Anthony Polledri today. The café sits beneath the building where John Logie Baird first publicly demonstrated television in 1926, and its late-night neon glow has made it a fixture of Soho folklore — Pulp’s 1995 song “Bar Italia” describes it as the place “where all the broken people go.”

There’s no fine dining pretension here — espresso, cannoli, panini and a football-mad, football-screening atmosphere are the whole point, and the café stays open into the early hours most nights, making it as much a post-club stop as a daytime coffee spot. It’s less a restaurant than an institution, and one of the very few places in London where three generations of the same family still run the till.

Bar Italia — 22 Frith Street, Soho, London W1D 4RF | baritaliasoho.co.uk

Ciao Bella first opened on Lamb’s Conduit Street in 1983, and current owner Felice Pollano took over in 1999, keeping the restaurant’s reputation for boisterous, unpretentious Italian dining fully intact. Its famous covered terrace — erected in the early 1980s and one of the first of its kind on the street — has been drawing a mixed crowd of Bloomsbury locals, Great Ormond Street Hospital families and the occasional politician (Boris Johnson among the more notorious regulars) ever since.

Classic trattoria dishes — pasta, antipasti, arancini, panna cotta — are the order of the night rather than any single standout, and the atmosphere, often described as chaotic in the best possible way, is really the reason people keep returning after four decades. It’s not the place for an intimate dinner, but it’s hard to beat for a loud, cheerful family gathering.

Ciao Bella — 86–90 Lamb’s Conduit Street, Bloomsbury, London WC1N 3LZ | ciaobellarestaurant.co.uk

The River Café opened in 1987 as the staff canteen for architect Richard Rogers’ practice, housed in a converted Duckhams oil storage facility on the north bank of the Thames. Co-founded by Ruth Rogers and the late Rose Gray, it earned a Michelin star in 1997 and has been credited with more or less introducing modern seasonal Italian cooking to Britain — a role that’s since made household names of chefs including Jamie Oliver and April Bloomfield, both of whom trained in its kitchen.

The wild mushroom risotto and a chocolate Nemesis cake dense enough to have its own cult following are the two dishes most associated with the restaurant, alongside a Dover sole and a John Dory smoked in the restaurant’s own wood stove. Ruth Rogers has run the restaurant alone since Gray’s death in 2010, and its Thames-side garden remains one of the most sought-after outdoor dining spots in London.

The River Café — Rainville Road, Hammersmith, London W6 9HA | rivercafe.co.uk

Artusi opened on Bellenden Road in 2014, headed by chef Jack Beer, formerly of the Clove Club, and named after Pellegrino Artusi, the 19th-century Italian food writer whose fortune as a silk merchant funded his passion for cooking. It arrived just as Peckham’s Bellenden Road was becoming one of South London’s most-watched food streets, and Artusi’s success has since spawned a Deptford sibling, Marcella, and a Soho branch.

Fresh pasta made daily is the backbone of a short, blackboard-chalked menu that changes constantly — a sardine and saffron spaghetti and a braised beef short rib with polenta are typical of the kind of seasonal, ingredient-led cooking the restaurant built its name on. Bi-fold doors opening onto Bellenden Road make it a popular spot to watch the street go by over a negroni before dinner.

Artusi — 161 Bellenden Road, Peckham, London SE15 4DH | artusi.co.uk

Lupa opened in mid-2025 a short walk from Trullo, the result of a friendship between Carousel co-founder Ed Templeton and actor Theo James, whose wives met walking on Highbury Fields during lockdown. Head chef Naz Hassan, previously of the much-missed Pidgin, runs the 28-cover corner room, which leans hard into Trastevere-style osteria styling — butter-yellow walls, café curtains, candlelit benches — to bring Roman comfort food to North London.

Carciofi alla romana (artichokes braised with herbs, white wine and garlic) and a hearty guanciale-laden pasta are the dishes most singled out by early reviews, alongside a tiramisu regulars call one of the best in the city. The wine list is almost exclusively Italian and the portions are sized for genuinely hungry diners rather than polite grazing.

Lupa — 73 Highbury Park, Highbury, London N5 1UA | lupa.restaurant

Bocca di Lupo opened on a quiet Archer Street corner behind the Apollo Theatre in 2008, the work of chef Jacob Kenedy and his partner Victor Hugo, and has barely put a foot wrong since — it was named Time Out’s best London restaurant in its opening year and holds a Michelin Bib Gourmand. Every dish on the menu is labelled with its Italian region of origin, letting diners walk deliberately through Piedmont, Sicily or Le Marche across a single meal, or scramble through six at once.

The menu changes twice a day depending on what’s good that morning, but a rustic pork and foie gras sausage with farro and porcini and a burnt almond granita are among the dishes that keep reappearing on “best of” lists. Sit at the marble counter facing the open kitchen if you can get it, and finish with a walk across the road to Kenedy’s own gelato bar, Gelupo.

Bocca di Lupo — 12 Archer Street, Soho, London W1D 7BB | boccadilupo.com