The 20 best restaurants: part four

NB: This list, compiled because it's the 10th Observer Food Monthly Awards this year, is not ranked. These 20 are all equal. They're here because they serve up great, interesting food.

5: Amaya, London

The notion of the big-ticket Indian restaurant has never quite worked in Britain. Partly it's our own expectations. There are literally thousands of cheap curry houses in the UK. As a result we find it hard to get our heads around paying serious wedge for curries, whose names we recognise from those budget joints. And then there's the restaurants themselves. In reaching for ideas of luxe, the kick and fire of the food, the very thing we come for, gets blanded out; it feels like a desperate echo of itself. Sure, you get a better quality of tablecloth. You get more waiters and better lighting, but the rest of it, drawn from the international hotel sector in India where most of the chefs at the top end train, feels corporate, one long exercise in blah.

Amaya, in Belgravia, is an exception. From the moment it opened in 2005, it was clearly something different. Sure, it was night-time shiny. The lights twinkled. The seats were comfortable. But the food still retained its power. Of course, it's Belgravia expensive. But there's no reason why we should be less willing to pay big numbers for Indian food, than say French or Japanese, other than cultural snobbery.

At the heart of the restaurant and the food is an open kitchen with super-heated tandoor ovens and flaming grills. Come here, then, for smokey kebabs, chargrilled seafood, for glorious breads, great chutneys and pickles and some especially good sealed pot biryanis.

Amaya, Halkin Arcade, Motcomb Street, London SW1. 020 7823 1166; amaya.biz. Meal for two £140

4: Quo Vadis, London

Although Quo Vadis on Soho's Dean Street has been operating for the last decade – and for many years before that; it opened in 1926 – it only appears on this list for the way it has operated over the last 12 months or so. Before that, under Eddie and Sam Hart, there was nothing especially wrong with it. Quo Vadis was simply a flashy, thick tableclothed London brasserie, with prices that always felt slightly higher than they should be, for food that was fine but hardly thrilling. Business was, shall we say, less than brisk.

Then, early last year, the Harts hired a new chef, Jeremy Lee, who had been cooking at the Blueprint Café over in Docklands for more than a decade (as well as the great maitre d', Jon Spiteri). Lee, a lovely, gregarious, sweet man, is the kind of cook you want in charge of your dinner, not because of his mastery of technique – though he has that – but because of his sheer bloody good taste. He has an understanding of the good things in life. It says much that when he relaunched the menu it was a simple sandwich that many began dribbling about: warm lightly oiled sourdough toast with smoked eel fillets and a sparky fresh horseradish sauce. Oh my. I know people who have just ordered two of those as a main course.

There is a direct line from Jeremy Lee to Simon Hopkinson (with whom he cooked at Bibendum) and via him back to the solid "Continental" virtues of Elizabeth David, all refracted through a modern prism. Lee can write a menu: think crab soup with rouille, puntarella with anchovy and boiled egg, lamb's sweetbreads with peas and almonds, pork with bitter leaves and onions, a hare pie, and a hazelnut cake to finish. All of this, at prices which are a good 25% down on what they once were at Quo Vadis.

Unsurprisingly, the dining room now hums. Some people moan about the regular sight of Lee swanning about the dining room during service in whites, table hopping and snogging his mates. And yes, there is a bit of that. Unusually for a chef, Lee actually likes people. Plus it's his show. He is what we come for.

Quo Vadis, 26-29 Dean Street, London W1. 020 7437 9585; quovadissoho.co.uk. Meal for two £90

3: Restaurant Sat Bains, Nottingham

There's no point pretending. The location of Sat Bains's eponymous restaurant is less than lovely. To get there, you turn off a motorway junction roundabout on the smudged edge of Nottingham, and drive down lanes that cut through and around sooty flyovers.

The low-slung restaurant with rooms which you find at the end, however, curiously shielded from the thrum of the traffic, is something very lovely indeed: a very particular expression of one man's huge good taste and obsessive attention to detail.

Long before Bains won his second Michelin star, long before he came to wider attention when one of his starters – a slow-cooked, jellified duck egg, with crisp Jabugo ham and a pea sorbet – was chosen for the final of the second series of BBC2's Great British Menu, he was regarded by his peers as something special: an extraordinarily focused chef, who shaped intense meals of tiny tasting plates. All of which is rather unexpected for such a big-chested, bald-headed Punjabi boy, with a full-on gym addiction.

Bains cooks firmly in the grand modern idiom. One of my meals there began with a rich foamy soup of Jerusalem artichokes with, at the side, what he called "tinned tuna"; in reality diced tuna sashimi in a bright, light, spicy sauce of yuzu and soy. There was a glorious scallop dish, their surfaces coated with crunchy praline, and paired with crisp, fresh apple. There was rabbit belly, pressed and salted, with brown shrimps and langoustine and, underneath, a smear of bitter grapefruit reduction. Huge flavoured hare came with a stew of pine nuts and sultanas in a fabulous jus. The dishes are an exercise in miniaturism, but the flavours punch and kick and punch again. You end up waving away cleaned plates with desperate sadness.

The tasting menus – from seven to 10 courses for between £79 and £99 – are built around a colour-coded system of the five tastes. In truth, it's all but impenetrable. It may say "fish pie" or "allium" or "jelly and ice cream" but that won't give you the first clue what you'll actually end up with. Warn him of any likes or dislikes or allergies and then give yourself to his good taste. And it is always his. Refreshingly, if Bains can't be at the pass for dinner he closes the restaurant. Better still, get a crowd together and book the lunchtime chef's table for a ringside seat. It costs, but it's worth it.

Restaurant Sat Bains, Lenton Lane, Nottingham. 0115 9866 566; restaurantsatbains.com. Meal for two £200

2: The Seahorse, Dartmouth

For an island nation we were, for a very long time indeed, uneasy around seafood. All those eyes. All those fins. All those scales and claws and shells. It probably explains why, even now, a lot of our very best stuff – the langoustine that teem on the sea bed about Scotland, the glorious cockles of the Thames estuary and elsewhere that can give palourdes clams a run for their money – get sent away to France and Spain, which actually want them.

Some of us, however, do recognise what it is exactly that we have, and are embracing it. For those of us who are enlightened there is The Seahorse. The restaurant, on the front in the pretty Devon town of Dartmouth, is the product of two men and their lifetime's obsession with fish. Restaurateur Mitch Tonks and his close friend and head chef Mat Prowse, have spent years on various fishy projects.

The most high profile, FishWorks, their ill-fated attempt at a mass market vehicle for the very best fish, may have, well, floundered. But The Seahorse goes from strength to strength, winning award after award, including last year's OFM gong for the readers' best restaurant.

It's easy to see why. The proposition is pretty straightforward: the best ingredients fished from the waters outside their door, in as sustainable a manner as possible, served in a manner drawing on the best of the European tradition.

It could be scallops roasted in the shell with garlic and white port, or red mullet cured with fennel and blood orange; it could be the deepest, richest and punchiest of fish stews, full of shells to be sucked at, or a prime tranche of turbot grilled over the fire and served with a frothy hollandaise. All that, and a very comfortable room, with a view into the kitchen on the inside, and outside, a glorious view of the waters.

It isn't cheap, but then quality fish like this never should be. If you want to enjoy the good stuff you really do have to pay.

The Seahorse, Dartmouth, Devon. 01803 835 147; seahorserestaurant.co.uk. Meal for two £130

1: Polpo, London

For all its knowing cool – the inked and bed-haired staff, the beaten copper ceiling and bare brick walls – it would have been easy to mark the arrival of Polpo with a shrug: another small, knowingly boho restaurant in London's Soho, with a strong line in Italian food.

It took me a while to clock what its founders, Russell Norman, late of the suited-and-booted Caprice Group, and his business partner Richard Beatty, had done. The food might have spoken with an Italian accent, but the restaurant talked pure New York, with a strong Brooklyn twang.

For years London restaurateurs had barked about importing from New York the sort of laidback place that marries a no frills, elbows-on-the table vibe with sturdy cooking. A few had tried; none had got it right. Now, here was Polpo – it means octopus in Italian – with a great menu of gutsy food at a price which, by London standards, didn't make your eyes water, delivered by staff who seemed more interested in you than the angle of the cutlery on the table.

It became the place for a greaseless fritto misto, for duck ragus, for robust, bitter salads, impeccable flatbreads, and earthy wines poured into tumblers like they were shots of Jim Beam. It's the kind of effortless cool that takes serious work. Better still, it heralded the arrival of a whole group: of Polpetto with the great Florence Knight at the stove (soon to be relaunched), a mini-chain of Polpos, of Spuntino for sliders and mac 'n' cheese, of Mishkin's for a loving (if flawed) take on the New York Jewish deli.

Sure, there are irritations – not least a refusal to take bookings in the evenings in some places. Still, there's always lunch.