Two of the world's best kitchens are barely represented in London. Burmese food has three addresses worth the journey, all belonging to one restaurant group, and the dish to order is the tea-leaf salad. Indonesian food has fewer than a dozen places across the whole city, most of them small, none of them central, and the dish to order is rendang. If you want either, you have to go looking, and this page says where.
That scarcity is the point of the page rather than an apology for it. London has more than a hundred Turkish grills and perhaps eight Indonesian kitchens, and the reason is the size of the communities behind them rather than the quality of the food. Our guide to eating cheaply in London covers the cuisines that are everywhere; this is the opposite case.
The two menus, in short
- Mohinga
- Burma's national dish and its breakfast: rice noodles in a thick catfish and lemongrass broth thickened with chickpea flour, with crisp fritters and a wedge of lime. Sour, savoury, nothing like Thai food
- Lahpet thoke
- Tea-leaf salad. Fermented tea leaves tossed with tomato, shredded cabbage, fried garlic, split peas, sesame and peanuts. Bitter, crunchy and faintly caffeinated
- Shan noodles
- From eastern Burma: rice noodles with a tomato and minced chicken or pork sauce, served wet or dry. The everyday dish
- Rendang
- West Sumatran beef cooked down in coconut milk and spice paste for hours until the sauce has gone and the meat is coated in it. Dry, dark, intense
- Nasi goreng and mie goreng
- Fried rice and fried noodles, usually with a fried egg on top, sweet soy and sambal on the side
- Gado-gado
- Blanched vegetables, tofu, tempeh and egg under a warm peanut sauce. The best vegetarian dish either country offers
Burmese food in London: three addresses, one group
The situation is unusual and worth stating plainly. Almost all the Burmese cooking available to a visitor in London comes from one restaurant group, Lahpet, which takes its name from the fermented tea leaf at the heart of the salad. It has three sites, and all three hold the top food hygiene rating.
- 21 Slingsby Place, WC2E, off Long Acre in Covent Garden. Rating 5, last inspected 18 March 2025. The one to use if you are in the centre.
- 58 Bethnal Green Road, E1, in the East End. Rating 5, last inspected 15 May 2024. The original.
- 39-45 Bermondsey Street, SE1, trading as Lahpet Larder. Rating 5, last inspected 23 October 2024. The smallest of the three.
What you get is a curated version of Burmese food rather than a neighbourhood canteen: the salads, the curries, the fritters and the noodles, in a modern room at modern prices. Our estimate for September 2026 is £12 to £20 for a main dish and £8 to £11 for a salad, with a meal for two coming to roughly £60 to £80 with a drink each.
The Edgware Road Burmese restaurant that guidebooks still list has gone. Mandalay, for years the only Burmese restaurant most Londoners could name, no longer appears anywhere on the Food Standards Agency register, which in practice means it has stopped trading. Anything that sends you to Edgware Road for Burmese food is out of date. What is still there is covered in our guide to Middle Eastern food on the Edgware Road.
How to order a Burmese meal
The structure is closer to an Indian thali than to a Chinese or Thai meal, and salads are not side dishes. A Burmese menu is usually arranged as salads, soups, curries, noodles and fritters, and a good order for two people is one salad, one curry, one noodle dish and rice to share.
Start with the tea-leaf salad. It is the dish that explains the cuisine: bitter and astringent from the fermented leaves, sweet from the tomato, crunchy from three kinds of fried pulse, and salty from dried shrimp. It is mixed at the table or in the kitchen, and it should be eaten immediately, because the fried elements go soft in minutes.
Mohinga is the other essential. In Burma it is breakfast, sold from carts before dawn, and in London it is on the menu all day. It is thicker than a Thai noodle soup and much less sweet, with a background of fish sauce, lemongrass, ginger and banana stem. If the menu offers fritters to break into it, take them.
Two notes on heat and on fish. Burmese food is not chilli-driven; the heat arrives as a condiment, in a sour chilli relish you add yourself. And almost everything savoury contains fish sauce, dried shrimp or shrimp paste, including dishes that read as vegetarian. Ask specifically. Our page on halal food in London explains the questions worth asking in any restaurant.
Indonesian food: why there is so little of it
Indonesia has 280 million people and London has, as far as we can establish, fewer than ten restaurants cooking its food. The reason is demographic rather than culinary: there has never been a large Indonesian migration to Britain, and the Dutch colonial link sent the food to Amsterdam instead, where rijsttafel is a national institution. Londoners get the Malaysian version of several of the same dishes instead, which is close but not the same thing.
What exists is scattered, small and usually run by one family. These are the ones we could verify on the register in September 2026:
| Where | Nearest station | Hygiene rating | Last inspected |
|---|---|---|---|
| Bali Bali, 150 Shaftesbury Avenue, WC2H | Tottenham Court Road | 4 | 16 April 2026 |
| Warung Putera Puteri, 56A Queensway, W2 | Queensway | 4 | 13 October 2025 |
| Bali, stall F18, Bang Bang Oriental Food Hall, 399 Edgware Road, NW9 | Colindale | 3 | 17 January 2026 |
| Bali Satay House, Western Parade, Great North Road, EN5 | High Barnet | 4 | 28 May 2026 |
A warung is the Indonesian word for a small family eating house, and the one on Queensway is exactly that: a narrow room on a street better known for Cantonese restaurants, which our guide to Paddington and Bayswater covers. The Colindale stall sits inside a large pan-Asian food hall, which is the cheapest way to try the food and the least atmospheric.
One central Indonesian kitchen currently holds a hygiene rating of 0. We will not name it, because zero out of five means urgent improvement is necessary and we are not sending visitors there under any caveat. It is in Fitzrovia. If you are deciding between Indonesian restaurants in central London, look the address up on ratings.food.gov.uk before you book, not afterwards.
One more casualty: the Soho Indonesian restaurant that appears in older London food writing has left the register altogether, along with the Edgware Road Burmese one. Between them, the two cuisines have lost their two best-known London addresses.
How to order an Indonesian meal
The everyday format is nasi campur: a plate of rice with several small portions of other things around it, chosen from what the kitchen has made that day. If it is offered, order it, because it does what a tasting menu does at a twentieth of the cost.
Otherwise, build the meal round one slow-cooked dish and one fresh one. Rendang is the slow one and the best test of a kitchen: done properly there is no sauce left, only a dark spiced crust on meat that falls apart. Gado-gado is the fresh one. Satay is worth ordering as a starter and is not the same dish as a Thai satay: the Indonesian peanut sauce is thicker, sweeter and rougher-textured, and there should be compressed rice cakes with it.
Sambal is the thing to ask about. Every Indonesian kitchen makes its own, and the range runs from a mild fried shallot relish to something that will end the meal for you. Ask for it on the side rather than on the plate the first time. And kecap manis, the thick sweet soy that sweetens nasi goreng, is the flavour most visitors do not expect and remember afterwards.
Vegetarians, and the tempeh argument
Both cuisines look promising for vegetarians and both need care. Indonesian food has the better claim, because tempeh and tofu are part of the everyday diet rather than substitutes: tempeh is fermented whole soya beans pressed into a firm cake, nuttier and more interesting than tofu, and an Indonesian kitchen will fry it properly. Gado-gado, tempeh goreng and vegetable curries are genuinely vegetarian in most kitchens.
The traps in both are the same two ingredients. Shrimp paste, terasi in Indonesian and ngapi in Burmese, goes into sambals, curry pastes and salads without appearing on an English menu. Fish sauce goes into almost everything savoury. Neither is negotiable once the paste is made, so the question to ask is not "is this vegetarian" but "is there shrimp paste or fish sauce in it".
What to combine either with
Because both cuisines are thin on the ground, the sensible approach is to fit the meal into a day you were having anyway rather than build a day round it. The Covent Garden Burmese site is five minutes from the theatres and from the rest of the Covent Garden options; the Bermondsey Street one is on a street of restaurants covered in our page on Bermondsey Street; the Bethnal Green Road one is a short walk from Brick Lane and from the markets in our guide to London's food markets.
For a broader taste of Southeast Asian cooking, the Malaysian and Singaporean restaurants of Chinatown overlap with the Indonesian repertoire more than either kitchen would admit, and Eid in London is when the Indonesian community in the city is most visible, since Indonesia is the largest Muslim-majority country in the world.
Frequently asked questions
Where can I eat Burmese food in London?
At three sites belonging to the Lahpet group: Slingsby Place in Covent Garden, Bethnal Green Road in the East End and Bermondsey Street in Southwark. All three held a food hygiene rating of 5 when we checked in September 2026. The Edgware Road Burmese restaurant that older guides list has left the Food Standards Agency register and is no longer trading.
What should I order in a Burmese restaurant?
The tea-leaf salad first, because it is the dish that defines the cuisine, then mohinga, the catfish and lemongrass noodle soup that is Burma's national breakfast. For two people, one salad, one curry, one noodle dish and rice is the right shape of order.
Is there Indonesian food in London?
Yes, but very little: we could verify four kitchens on the food hygiene register in September 2026, on Shaftesbury Avenue, on Queensway, inside a food hall at Colindale and in Barnet. There has never been a large Indonesian community in Britain, which is why Amsterdam has dozens of Indonesian restaurants and London has a handful.
Is Burmese food spicy?
Not usually. The heat comes as a condiment you add yourself rather than cooked into the dish, so a Burmese meal is milder than a Thai or Sichuan one. What it is instead is sour and savoury, from fish sauce, tamarind, lime and fermented tea leaves.
What is the difference between Indonesian and Malaysian food in London?
They share dishes, including satay, rendang and nasi goreng, but the Indonesian versions are generally sweeter, because of the thick sweet soy called kecap manis, and the sambals are more central. In London you will find many more Malaysian kitchens than Indonesian ones, so a Malaysian restaurant is often the nearest available substitute.
Sources
- Food Standards Agency - Food hygiene ratings for Lahpet, 21 Slingsby Place WC2E 9AB, 58 Bethnal Green Road E1 6JW and Lahpet Larder, 39-45 Bermondsey Street SE1 3XF; Bali Bali, 150 Shaftesbury Avenue WC2H 8HL; Warung Putera Puteri, 56A Queensway W2 3RY; Bali, F18 Bang Bang Oriental Food Hall, 399 Edgware Road NW9 0FH; Bali Satay House, Western Parade, Great North Road EN5 1AD (checked September 2026)
- Food Standards Agency - What the food hygiene ratings mean, including rating 0 (checked September 2026)
- GOV.UK - Allergen labelling rules for restaurants, relevant to shrimp paste and fish sauce (checked September 2026)