The ultimate tastemaking guide to London's best restaurants

London has one of the best food scenes in the world, which also makes it one of the most overwhelming. Every critic has a verdict and every publication has its own scale. Tripadvisor has thousands of diners but rewards volume over taste. Choosing a table meant opening multiple apps and tabs, and getting hungrier by the second.

Nobody had put the critics and punters side by side in an easy to navigate experience, so there was no gauge on what was actually good.

We built Napkin to do the cross-checking. It doesn't review restaurants; it gathers the verdicts of the city's leading critics and the ratings of real diners on Tripadvisor, converts each to a score out of five, and averages them into one clear Napkin score, shown as stars.

Every restaurant lists every score behind its stars, each linking to the original review, so you can see exactly where the number comes from and read the full expert piece.

The brand experience follows the idea. A classic yellow paper-napkin header, chunky black type, photo-led cards and receipt-style panels in a typewriter face make it feel like a scribble on a napkin from a friend who knows where to eat, not a ratings database. Everything is credited: photos to their source, scores to their publication.

Browse as a grid, a list or a map. Filter by area, budget, vibe and cuisine, from date night to group-friendly. Sort by critics' choice, new or nearest. Save a shortlist that stays on your device, with no account and no tracking unless you accept it. There are light or dark modes to suit each person.

Napkin went from idea to live product in two days. It launched with 260 London restaurants and is automatically updated with new restaurants.

It is also a working example of how we build: find a creative solution to a user problem, make the reasoning visible, and ship something to make people's lives more enjoyable.