Jikoni

Ravinder Bhogal's Jikoni sits on a quiet stretch of Blandford Street, a few minutes north of Oxford Street, and reads less like a restaurant than like the front room of a very well-travelled friend. Bhogal, a food writer and Observer columnist before she was a restaurateur, opened it in 2016 as a "no borders" kitchen, and the room carries the same idea: green and terracotta banquettes piled with block-print cushions, botanical prints in vermilion frames, Jaipur tablecloths, woven East African plates on the walls and pendant lamps under sheer curtains. The cooking crosses the same map, drawing on the Indian, East African, Middle Eastern and British threads of Bhogal's own story.

The restaurant is small and characterful, which is exactly what makes it work for a private gathering: taken over in full it holds around 45 seated or 65 standing across a single light ground-floor room, so a party has the whole place and its atmosphere rather than a partitioned corner. Two sections can also be booked semi-exclusively for a smaller table, and downstairs the Pantry Table seats up to a dozen in the middle of the open kitchen, shelves of spice tins and stacked bowls at your back, where guests can add a cooking lesson or a wine dinner to the meal.

Jikoni has a following well beyond its size. It sits in the Michelin Guide, was named in the National Restaurant Awards' top 100, and Bhogal is a regular fixture in the food and society press. For a birthday, a launch or an intimate celebration it offers something the grander rooms cannot: warmth, colour and a genuine sense of being somewhere personal.