📍XLB in Cambridge: Expect not just a wait, but a long wait, staring through the windows here, wondering why it takes so long for dumplings to be served. After an hour, you’ll understand: The reason it takes so long is because chef Dong Huang and his partner, Hui Lan Yi, who works front of house, entrust their xiaolongbao to no one else. If this means molasses-slow service, then it also means this Cambridge restaurant is operating on a level above any London equivalent.

📍Dim sum in Colchester: Some of the best dim sum I’ve had in this country is just outside of Colchester, in a parking lot that contains a Toby Carvery and Banquet. It’s a truly excellent Cantonese restaurant that every Chinese family in a 50-mile radius knows. Not only is the dim sum worth traveling for, but there are some outstanding mains, like the sea-fragrant chicken, with a sauce so savouy and sticky it eats like Worcestershire sauce reduced to the consistency of tar.

📍Baked oysters on Mersea Island: You should eat native oysters only in months with r in the name, but it’s always a good time to get out to Mersea Island, where the prize for a cycle or car ride is seafood at The Company Shed. During summer you’re limited to Gigas rock oysters, which I highly recommend pre-ordering hot, when they’re baked in their shells with cream and Parmesan, and the flesh moves from bracing and salty to creamy and sweet, with a savory flan texture.

📍Banchan in Bristol, UK: Bokman is everything I want Korean restaurants in London to be; it feels like the product of an individual sensibility (in this case, owners Duncan Robertson and Kyu Jeon) rather than the grand sweep of a national cuisine. It could very well be in Los Angeles, but it’s in Bristol. Its most famous dish is the tongdak, chicken stuffed with fragrant rice, but I love the complexity of the banchan, and the daikon that has taken a bath in the galbijjim broth.

📍Suckling pig in Birmingham: Birmingham is not the first city that a Londoner might think of to travel to for food, but it has cultivated its own distinct scene. Nowhere is this more evident than its real working Chinatown (rather than London’s ersatz one), where Peach Garden does some of the best Cantonese roast meats I’ve had. Everything is great, but you won’t find the roast suckling pig on rice in many other places, topped with a shattering pane of crackling.

Under the stewardship of chef Steve Williams and wine importer Raef Hodgson, this restaurant below the Spa Terminus railway arches has been responsible for the most straightforwardly pleasurable London cooking of the last decade. The food is British pretending to be Continental, or the other way around: a constellation of micro seasons anchored to a polestar of pies, fritters, croquettes, tarts, toasts, and ices. Make sure to get three desserts.

Despite the wealth of restaurants in Shoreditch, I’ve always been at a loss as to where to have dinner there, at least until Afghan Grill opened. It has all the best qualities of London’s best suburban Pashtun and Afghan restaurants, but compressed into one small room. The order here is precise: metre rules of chopan kebab, crispy slices of borani budenjan (aubergine with tomato), charsi karahi (meat, your choice) by the half kilo, and the best qabili pilau in the city.

The biggest testament I can give to Aladin’s quality is that in a community where every food is an argument waiting to happen, I have yet to meet anyone who has disagreed on the Aladin nihari: a huge lamb shank that can be dismantled with the back of a spoon. Aladin’s specialises in the “Karachi holy trinity”—haleem, qorma and nihari—though I have a soft spot for the verging-on-inedibly-bitter karela (bitter melon) ghosht. Whatever you order, the nihari always wins out.

Asher’s Africana’s open kitchen, usually full of aunties stirring cooking pots big enough to hide in, is the next best thing to being invited round to your Gujarati friend’s house after school for roti. Here they are feather light but with a whole-wheat backbone that makes you feel virtuous for eating them, despite the amount of ghee. Pair it with a Gujarati thali, with two vegetarian dishes of your choice and some pickles, and you will feel golden for the rest of the day.

Go to Bentley’s if you’re one of those strange people attracted to every animal from the sea and are willing to pay for the best of them. Bentley’s may be famous for oysters, but you should also try whelks, the pauper’s oyster. They’re a fetish only seafood lovers have, served ice cold in their prehistoric shells; dense, with a firm snap. Get lobster, but where else, besides a Japanese izakaya, would you find herring milts, deep fried and devilled, as soft as a sweetbread.