This busy eat in/takeaway café on Fleet Street belongs to a small chain of four regional restaurants serving up a tasty range of the best Mexican street food. There aren’t many places in the UK where real Mexican food joints like this can be found. Everything is freshly prepared in front of the customers and the chefs are consistently grilling and chopping away in the open view kitchen.

Pearl has a lot going for it, wonderful surroundings and great service carried out with a quiet and efficient elegance, setting the scene for the amazingly good creations from the kitchen led by Jun Tanaka. These three elements come together to deliver the special experience you anticipate when you initially walk through the doors .

The dishes are bursting with flavour and prompt that delightful experience where you not only marvel at the resulting combination but want to analyse each and every one of the ingredients on the plate that bring the whole thing together so deliciously.

Café Luc is open all day and serves very good food from breakfast to dinner. The menu is strongly French with Mediterranean hints. This is the sort of place you might take your mother after a morning of shopping in Marylebone if you wanted something a bit more special in a brasserie style environment.

The brainchild of chef Omar Allibhoy, it’s the first in a planned series of Madrid-style all day tapas bars. Allibhoy, head chef of El Pirata Detapas, was recently described by Gordon Ramsay as the Antonio Banderas of cooking and was trained by Ferran Adrià of the über-fêted El Bulli, so our expectations were high.

You can see ORA’s shocking pink neon sign from a good distance away, so vibrant is it that it seems to throb. This new Thai restaurant tucked away in Little Portland Street is otherwise quite unassuming from the outside, but as you enter it’s a different story. It’s smart and comfortable, a great space to take your time and enjoy a meal, but don’t just take my word for it, check it out for yourself.

Anita Pati finds that ordering her meal off a touch screen is a touch odd, but warms to the food at Inamo St James the second branch of a concept that’s had a mixed reception for it’s Pan-Asian cuisine and futuristic concept.

Zenna Bar is London’s first Indian cocktail bar, found underneath The Red Fort, a pretty good Indian restaurant. Prior to this launch the venue hadn’t reached anywhere near full potential, averaging small weekly numbers of guests and takings. Now the bar has an atmosphere and is starting to create an identity as new life pulses through its veins.

Rivington Grill isn’t fine dining of course but it’s not downmarket either. Some dishes verge on the self-mocking and ironic, even by Shoreditch’s high standards, but the cooking is capable in a way that that is all about the ‘operation’ rather than just the chef and that’s no bad thing in our current celeb chef obsessed culture.

The latest restaurant from Aldo Zilli, the Italian chef behind Zilli Fish and Zilli Café. Zilli Green is vegetarian and gets its main inspiration from traditional Italian dishes fused with other styles of food from around the world. Not your typical sit-down restaurant, Zilli Green differentiates itself from the competition by offering a buffet as well as the standard menu.