Firangi at Top Cuvée, Highbury

For: a date that wants to talk about the food

Ruhi Parmar Amin and Simar Deo have spent the last few years cooking at pop-ups and residencies in London's wine bars. Firangi, their bistro-style take on hyper-regional Indian cooking, has now settled into Top Cuvée Highbury until December. The duo describe this as its most evolved version yet.

The menu draws on the home cooking of their Punjabi and Gujarati families, and on trips back to Bombay, Goa and Delhi. Expect jowar and lamb tartare served on betel leaf, and Coorg pandi pork belly with green beans, glazed shallot and quince fudge. The bavette comes with a chamba chukh peppercorn sauce and plum. Pudding is a coconut cookie sandwich with chai diplomate and burnt marshmallow. Top Cuvée takes care of the wine list, which is the point of eating here.

Firangi at Top Cuvée, Highbury, N5. Running now until December. @firangidining

Rake at The Compton Arms, Islington

For: a slow Sunday

The Compton Arms has a habit of launching kitchens. Four Legs went on to open The Plimsoll and Tollington's. Tiella moved to Bethnal Green. Rake, run by Jay Claus and Syrus Pickhaver, has been in the kitchen since January 2025 and leaves at the end of this year. That makes this its last autumn of Sunday roasts at The Compton Arms.

The cooking is British, built on whole-animal butchery and Cornish fish. On Sundays that means pork loin, marinated beef rump or a root vegetable stargazy pie. The sides are where it earns the booking: leek gratin, white cabbage choucroute and clapshot, the Scottish mash of turnip and potato, alongside the roasties, greens and Yorkshires. Ask for the back room. It seats twelve, with tartan banquettes and round windows, and is the closest thing a pub has to a private table.

Rake at The Compton Arms, 4 Compton Avenue, London N1 2XD. Sunday roasts until the residency ends in December.

Sunday lunch at Hausu, Peckham

For: a long Sunday lunch

Hausu turns two this autumn, and Sunday lunch is now a weekly fixture. Head chef and co-founder Holly Middleton-Joseph brings whole cuts to the table, cooked over fire, roasted or braised, and served to share. The menu changes each week with what her suppliers have, and leans towards the less obvious cuts.

A recent week included brown sugar and mustard-roasted hare with bacon and tarragon, overnight-braised hogget with turnips and green hot sauce, and ex-dairy beef with black lime and fermented chilli butter. For anyone not eating meat, there's mushroom ragu with lentils, porcini mash and truffle cheese. The roast potatoes are Empress potatoes, finished with Hausu's own potato dust.

The ground-floor dining room has just been refurbished, overseen by the artist Eva Gold, with walnut counters and tabletops and a lighter, more open layout. There are Bloody Marys and records on all afternoon. Hausu's new music programmer, the DJ and producer Jay Duncan, is also starting Sunday film screenings in the upstairs bar, should lunch need a second act.

Hausu, 11a Station Way, Peckham Rye Station, London SE15 4RX. Sunday lunch every week.

Stable Wines, Canonbury

For: a second date, by candlelight

Stable Wines comes from the team behind Goodbye Horses and The Dreamery. It sits at the top of Essex Road, in what most people take for De Beauvoir but is technically Canonbury. Upstairs is a wine shop built around an oak counter. Downstairs, in a former bank vault, is the bar: a long communal table lit with candles, and a passage of small alcoves that can be booked. Ask for an alcove.

The list leans on zero-zero wines, meaning nothing added and nothing taken away. The food is small plates. Carlingford oysters, raw beef with fried potato soldiers, a tomato tartine with fromage blanc and bottarga, and a chocolate mousse finished with salt. There is also a cheese toastie, for anyone working through this list in order.

Stable Wines, 344a Essex Road, London N1 3PD.

Five Feet, Bermondsey

For: a date that might run long

Five Feet opens this month on Tanner Street, in the old Dobson's Bakery. It comes from Jay Patel of Legare and Luna, Roland Horne of WatchHouse, and Jack Ellingham, formerly chef and baker at Dusty Knuckle and Spring. The name refers to Five Foot Lane, which is what Tanner Street used to be called.

The pizza is baked in black iron pans: a centimetre of airy dough with a crisp edge. Ellingham mills his own flour on site, from heritage grains grown by British farmers, using a stone mill brought over from Montpellier. You can watch it through the glass of the dough room. Order the hot sausage pie with vodka sauce, ricotta, pickled chillies and Calabrian chilli honey, or the white potato pie with caramelised onion, scamorza and aged Cheddar. There are vegan pizzas too. The room seats 55, with banquettes for two and counter seats facing the pass. The banquettes are the ones to book.

Five Feet, 4 Tanner Street, London SE1 3LD. Open Tuesday to Saturday evenings. @fivefeet.london

Khao Bird, Soho

For: a cold night in town

Khao Bird started in Brighton as Lucky Khao. It then spent a year above The Globe Tavern at Borough Market before settling permanently on Brewer Street. Restaurateur Mike Palmer and chef Luke Larsson cook northern Thai barbecue, mostly from Chiang Mai, with produce from Sussex farms.

Order the khao soi, the curried noodle soup that does most of the work once the weather turns. Then add the hung-ley, a sweet and sour pork curry with Burmese roots, and the chips topped with Burmese mutton curry and sour cream. The ground floor has 30 seats and an open kitchen. There are another 48 downstairs, which is where to sit if the date is going well.

Khao Bird, 24 Brewer Street, London W1F 0SN.

FINK'S toastie series, North and East London

For: a daytime date with a walk attached

Not every date needs a reservation. Since 5th October, FINK'S has been handing its toastie press to three cooks it admires, one a month, through to Christmas. Each toastie is made on FINK'S sourdough and lasts a month before the next one takes over.

Helen Graham goes first. Her October toastie layers Cheddar and mozzarella with date and hawaij jam, sumac onions and amba, on FINK'S white sourdough. Ben Slater follows from 2nd November with a tartiflette toastie of roasted potato, smoked ham hock, raclette and onion chutney, which FINK'S describes as a posh French chip butty. Jordon Ezra King finishes the run from 1st December with porchetta, rosemary garlic mayo and pickles.

Take one into Clissold Park from Clissold House, or walk off the Gillespie Road site with a lap of Highbury Fields.

Available at FINK'S Clissold House, Stoke Newington Church Street, N16 9HJ (8am–5pm); FINK'S Gillespie, 88 Gillespie Road, N5 1LN (7.30am–3.30pm); and FINK'S Chats, 62 Chatsworth Road, E5 0LS (8am–4pm). @finks.london

And for the night you stay in: Nuvo Nivo by Modal Wines

For: cancelling the booking

Some autumn dates end up on the sofa. Modal Wines, the importer Nicolas Rizzi founded in 2017, has launched Nuvo Nivo, an ongoing range made with growers in France, Italy, South Africa, Spain and the UK. The idea is that well-farmed wine shouldn't have to cost more than it needs to.

The stories behind the bottles make good conversation. The Côtes du Rhône comes from Domaine Élodie Jaume, who farms biodynamically. Modal found vats in her cellar marked VRAC, French for bulk: wine she would normally have sold off because she couldn't bottle her whole production. Modal paid more for it to be bottled for Nuvo Nivo, unoaked. Elsewhere, when 900 bottles of Sicilian orange wine failed a quality check, Modal had the lot distilled into around 240 half bottles of eau de vie rather than pour it away.