London’s Mexican food scene has grown from a single Covent Garden cantina in 1982 into one with two Michelin stars of its own, a 10th-floor rooftop dining room overlooking King’s Cross, and a Barrafina-family taqueria serving tacos under a railway arch by Borough Market. Here are the eight best Mexican restaurants in London worth seeking out in 2026.

Kol opened on Seymour Street in 2020 as chef Santiago Lastra’s debut solo restaurant, after he worked on the Noma Mexico pop-up in 2017 and spent time cooking at the Tate Modern. It won its first Michelin star in 2022 and has held onto it every year since.

The menu is broadly Mexican in spirit but built almost entirely around British produce, resulting in dishes like langoustine tacos with sea buckthorn and kohlrabi ceviche that don’t try to replicate Mexico City so much as reinterpret it. A ground-floor tortilla factory and open kitchen give diners a view of that process before anything reaches the table.

Kol — 9 Seymour Street, Marylebone, London W1H 7BA | kolrestaurant.com

Decimo occupies the 10th floor of The Standard hotel in King’s Cross, opened by chef Peter Sanchez-Iglesias after running two Michelin-starred restaurants, Casamia and Paco Tapas, in Bristol. It holds its own Michelin star for a menu that’s now firmly Mexican, having moved on from its earlier Spanish-Mexican format.

The room is filled with cacti and succulents, with a DJ adding to the buzz and commanding views over the city and the St Pancras clock tower through floor-to-ceiling windows. Head chef Paola Arenas, who’s spent a decade working in top kitchens across the Middle East and the Americas, now leads the kitchen.

Decimo — 10 Argyle Street, King’s Cross, London WC1H 8EG | decimo.london

Cavita opened on Wigmore Street on 6th May 2022, the first London restaurant from Mexican-born chef Adriana Cavita, who previously worked at El Bulli and Pujol. It’s since become one of the most consistently recommended Mexican restaurants in the city.

The menu runs from raw dishes like hamachi tostadas to full street-food-style tacos, all built around punchy, vibrant flavours rather than a toned-down version for a London audience. A separate downstairs mezcaleria adds an agave-focused drinks list to match the food upstairs.

Cavita — 56 Wigmore Street, Marylebone, London W1U 2RZ | cavitarestaurant.com

Santo Remedio was run by husband-and-wife team Edson and Natalie Diaz-Fuentes out of a small Shoreditch site before a crowdfunding campaign funded its move to a bigger, more central Tooley Street home near London Bridge, where it now trades as Santo Remedio Asador. The menu draws directly on Edson’s time in Mexico City, Yucatán and Oaxaca.

The Asador format leans into smoky, grilled specialities and signature cocktails alongside the dishes that built the restaurant’s name in the first place, including its famous grasshopper-topped guacamole and soft shell crab tacos. Beef short rib with mole negro remains one of the standout orders.

Santo Remedio Asador — 152 Tooley Street, London SE1 2TU | santoremedio.co.uk

El Pastor sits in a railway arch on Stoney Street at the edge of Borough Market, run by Sam and Eddie Hart of Barrafina fame alongside younger brother James in his first venture with them, plus ex-A&R man Crispin Somerville. It’s a straightforward taqueria rather than a fine-dining reinterpretation of Mexican food.

Tortillas are made fresh in-house using specialist corn flour, and the kitchen sticks close to traditional methods rather than reworking recipes for a London crowd. There’s no booking system beyond a text-back waitlist, in keeping with the walk-in, no-frills approach the Hart family also built Barrafina’s reputation on.

El Pastor — 7a Stoney Street, Borough Market, London SE1 9AA | tacoselpastor.co.uk

Breddos Tacos started life in 2013 as a makeshift taco shack in a Hackney car park, before founders Nud and Chris built enough of a following through residencies and pop-ups to open a permanent Clerkenwell site on Goswell Road in 2016. A Soho branch followed a year later but has since closed, leaving Clerkenwell as the flagship.

The menu sticks close to its street-food roots, with tacos built around slow-cooked meats and punchy salsas rather than an elevated tasting-menu format. It’s one of the more unpretentious ways into London’s Mexican food scene, priced and paced for a casual weeknight rather than a special occasion.

Breddos Tacos — 82 Goswell Road, Clerkenwell, London EC1V 7DB | breddostacos.com

Café Pacifico opened in a former banana warehouse on Langley Street in 1982, and is widely credited as London’s first Mexican restaurant and tequila bar — the starting point for everything that’s followed on this list. It’s been trading continuously from the same Covent Garden site for over four decades.

The menu sticks to the classic Tex-Mex-leaning dishes that introduced London to Mexican food in the first place, backed by one of the longest-running tequila collections in the city. It’s less about culinary reinvention than preserving a genuine piece of London dining history.

Café Pacifico — 5 Langley Street, Covent Garden, London WC2H 9JA | cafe-pacifico.com

Wahaca opened its first branch in a converted basement bar on Chandos Place in 2007, founded by Thomasina Miers and Mark Selby after Miers won the first series of MasterChef with a Mexican-inspired menu. It went on to become the restaurant most responsible for turning Mexican street food into a mainstream London night out.

The menu is built around market-style small plates — tacos, quesadillas, tostadas and grilled meats — designed for sharing across a table rather than one dish per person. The Covent Garden original remains the site most closely tied to the brand’s beginnings, even as Wahaca has grown into a chain across the city.

Wahaca — 66 Chandos Place, Covent Garden, London WC2N 4HG | wahaca.co.uk