1. Le Gavroche

Forty years on and Le Gavroche still sets standards of service and cooking that few restaurants in the country come close to. The interior of this basement restaurant may strike some as somewhat old fashioned, but it is reassuringly established in an age of glitzy design. (That does not mean it is snooty or uncomfortably posh.) If only Rolls Royces ran as smoothly as the service under the watchful eye of that master of maître d’hotels, Silvano Giraldin, and if only other kitchens matched the balance of inventiveness and classicism of Michel Roux Jr’s cooking.

· Le Gavroche, 43 Upper Brook Street, London W1. Tel: 020 7408 0881

2. Locanda Locatelli

Giorgio Locatelli is a starry, starry chef and his food is starry, starry, too. It is not slavishly authentic. Locatelli is one of the very few chefs who can take the ingredients and dishes of his mother country and draw on his training in France and England to transform them into something new, without losing the essence of the original. The design of the place is smoothly retro, and the service is smoothly charming. There's a very fine wine list, particularly for those with elastic credit cards or deep pockets.

· Locanda Locatelli, 8 Seymour Street, London W1. Tel: 020 7935 9088

3. Benares

One of the cheeriest things about restaurant eating in the UK is the rise of serious Indian and Asian cooking. Why should we only think of French and, possibly, Italian, in terms of fine dining? There are a number of newer Indian restaurants in London glistening with metro-chic and serving refined, visually sophisticated dishes – Rasoi Nineet Bhatia, Amaya, Deya, the Painted Heron. Benares, where Atul Kochar rules the kitchen, comes at the top of the list. His food is as subtle, smart and explosively flavoured as he is personally modest and self-effacing.

· Benares, 12A Berkley Square House, Berkley Square, London W1. Tel: 020 7629 8886

4. Hakkasan

In many ways still the sexiest restaurant in London, several years after it opened. However, the glory of Hakkasan does not depend simply on slinky, urbane design. The food, the dim sum in particular, has always been several cuts above that of most other Chinese restaurants in the country. There is a certain opulence as well as delicacy about many of the dishes that makes it enormously tempting to plunder the menu to excess.

· Hakkasan, 8 Hanway Place, London W1. Tel: 020 7927 7000

5. Sushi-Hiro

An unlikely restaurant in an unlikely area, opposite Ealing Common tube. The best sushi in London served in a tiny room of Pawsonian minimalism. It is run by Mr Shimagage and his wife with ruthless discipline – they once turned away Heston Blumenthal when he turned up at 1.32 pm for lunch, explaining that they stopped serving at 1.30. But Mr Shimagage sources his shimmeringly fresh fish personally at Billingsate each day before he starts preparing the sushi and sashimi with immense skill, clarity and refinement. Mrs Shimagage looks after you. And it’s very reasonably priced.

· Sushi-Hiro, 1 Station Parade, Uxbridge Road, London W5. Tel: 020 8896 3175

6. The Fat Duck

The most famous restaurant in Britain. Consistently voted among the top five restaurants in the world. Chef/proprietor Heston Blumenthal may have dropped the description of "molecular gastronomy" that helped make him and his food famous/notorious, but his dishes are quite unlike those of any other chef on the planet. For all the flights of invention, Mr Blumenthal’s roots are firmly settled in the sense of pleasure established by French haute cuisine. Not all dishes are masterpieces, but there’s more wit, humour, technical skill, imagination and understanding of just how pleasurable food can be on many levels than most chefs manage in a lifetime. He is a nice chap, too, and used to write the cookery column in The Guardian. Incidentally, if you fancy a change from the echt exoticism of the Fat Duck, try Mr Blumenthal’s pub, the Hind’s Head, next door, for definitive oxtail & kidney pie, Scotch eggs, potted shrimps and quaking pudding.

· The Fat Duck, 1 High Street, Bray, Berkshire. Tel: 01628 580333

7. The Three Fishes

Do not let anyone tell you there is no such thing as regional British food. Send them to The Three Fishes. Not so much a gastro-pub as a rural brasserie: family parties, kids dashing about the place, people reading newspapers over lunch, crisp, smiling service and great food – hot oven bottoms, ox tongue and pickled beetroot, treacle-baked ribs, Manchester tart - cracked out to a consistently high standard and based on local ingredients. The food producers are credited with their products on the menu, on the back of which is a map showing where you can find them. Good beer, too.

· The Three Fishes, Mitton Road, Mitton, Lancashire. Tel: 01254 826888

8. Le Champignon Sauvage

You have to admire a chef who quietly gets on with the business of cooking, evolving, pushing himself on for a decade and a half, gathering a Michelin star, then two of them, without the song and dance that less talented but more media-friendly cooks produce. The Champignon Sauvage has always been essentially a family restaurant, in the French sense. Mrs Everitt-Matthias runs the front of the house. Mr Everitt-Matthias keeps to his kitchen. The restaurant is admirable in every sense, not simply for the way in which the chef sources and respects first class basic ingredients, but also for the way in which his cooking has changed, absorbing newer ideas, but without ever losing the sense of personal vision.

· Le Champignon Sauvage, 24-26 Suffolk Road, Cheltenham, Gloucestershire. Tel: 01242 573449

9. Andrew Fairlie at Gleneagles

There is a certain stateliness about Gleaneagles. It wears its weighty past, G8 summits and golfing bonanzas comfortably. Andrew Fairlie’s restaurant fits in perfectly with this sense of self-confidence. The connection between Scotland and France is hallowed by history, and Mr Fairlie’s own inspirations are very much in the French vein. He uses local ingredients that in the past the Scots have been rather too ready to send overseas rather than put to good use in their own kitchens: lobsters, scallops, salmon, venison and wild mushrooms – the staples of modern luxury cooking.

· Andrew Fairlie at Gleneagles, Auchterarder, Perthshire & Kinross. Tel: 01764 694267

10. Tyddyn Llan

A restaurant with rooms, ie, you can have a terrific feed and totter upstairs for a snooze until it is time to totter downstairs for another terrific feed. On the other hand, you may prefer to wander among the beauty of the surrounding hills and valleys to work up an appetite. Either way, you should prepare yourself for Bryan Webb’s exaltedly earthy cooking. It has power and panache. It fills the mind, as well as the tummy. Like Mr Everett-Matthias, Mr Webb has an instinctive understanding of the nature of his raw materials and the skill to show them off in all their glory. Mrs Webb masterminds the front of house with vigour and charm.

· Tyddyn Llan, Llandrillo, Denbighshire. Tel: 01490 440264