London restaurants

The boom in restaurant openings in London has slowed, but those that are now opening are of higher quality, according to the latest edition of guidebook Harden's London Restaurants.

Co-editor Peter Harden said that whereas new restaurants in recent years had been all hype and little substance, the reverse was now true.

Restaurants were having to raise their game to cope with a better-educated and more demanding dining public, he added.

In the late 1990s and early 2000s, the ratio of openings to closures in the capital had been two to one.

This slowed to one to one last year, but has since picked up to 1.6 to one. There were 133 new openings this year, and 82 closures.

Harden's London Restaurants is due out next month.

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