Mildmay Road Apartments

The brainchild of wine importers and a charcutier, Cadet is a compact bar and shop selling, unsurprisingly, wine and charcuterie. During the week, you can just enjoy some simple bar snacks alongside the wonderful selection of largely French wines. Yet from Thursday to Sunday, a blackboard appears, listing a treasure trove of well-priced and generously flavoured dishes. Expect the likes of pâté en croûte, excellently seasoned rillettes and slip sole with Café de Paris butter. The chatty team will help guide you through the array of enticing wines.

The appealing, Eastern Mediterranean-influenced menu at Chef-Owner Oded Oren’s bustling little bistro is made up of enticing sharing plates, with many ingredients cooked over charcoal, such as lamb loin, succulent chicken skewer and hispi cabbage with muhammara. Start with the delicious stone-baked flatbread and then around five dishes between two should suffice. The prices are kept fair and that includes the well-made cocktails, while the service team are delightful. There’s lots of fun to be had here.

In the middle of an ersatz-industrial space sits a horseshoe-shaped counter with 18 seats, allowing diners to see ‘behind’ the scenes. Every seat has a view of the chefs in action and it is they who serve the dishes and explain their construction and make-up with palpable pride. The surprise seasonal menu consists of around 10 contrasting and creative courses. The focus is on seafood and dishes could include brill with black pudding, Orkney scallops with smoked kipper cream, and delicious Sicilian red prawns. As everyone is served together, it’s important to arrive on time.

There's something so appealing about the simplicity of a restaurant like Primeur. A proper neighbourhood operation, it comes with stripped-back décor, a handwritten blackboard menu and a relaxed, bustling atmosphere. Diners can sit around large communal tables or up at the counters around the edges of the room. The cooking, for its part, avoids overcomplication and puts the ingredients first, as evidenced by grilled pork chop with roquefort butter. Ensure you save room for dessert, too, especially if the textbook custard tart is on the menu.

Go for the house martini as you enjoy an array of snacks like crispy buttermilk chicken and crab dumpling that precede the start of The Clove Club's multi-course set menu. The roll-call of prime British ingredients includes Orkney scallops, Wiltshire trout, Torbay prawns, Herdwick lamb and Middle White pork – all starring in seasonally pertinent dishes where their natural flavours are allowed to shine through. The historic surroundings of Shoreditch Town Hall provide the perfect backdrop, with the open-plan kitchen adding a little more theatre to proceedings.

In contrast to the grandeur of its location inside the Town Hall Hotel, there's a modern, understatedly stylish look to Da Terra. You start with drinks and snacks in the elegant lounge, soundtracked by the comforting rhythms of bossa nova, before heading to the dining room – where the tables by the open kitchen offer a view of the impressive Molteni stove. Chef Rafael Cagali draws on his Brazilian and Italian heritage in skilfully crafted, highly original dishes bursting with colour. His signature reinvented version of the Brazilian 'moqueca' fish stew is bound to be a highlight.

There’s so much going for this former pub which has been transformed into a wine bar and restaurant with a young, on-trend vibe. The place is packed with East London’s coolest diners, many of them at shared tables and all delighting in a concise menu based around high-quality, seasonal British produce. The treacle tart makes for a wonderful end to the meal – and if your sweet tooth is still not satisfied, the same people run The Dreamery ice cream shop across the road. The eclectic wine list specialises in natural options, which the affable and knowledgeable team will happily guide you through