Banana Tree Islington

Walk into Banana Tree and you're greeted with the kind of energy that makes Islington's restaurant strip actually worth the trek. The room buzzes with the sound of people properly enjoying themselves—no hushed whispers here. You're ordering family-style, which means sharing curries, stir-fries and those addictive sticky rice parcels with whoever you've dragged along. The menu reads like a greatest hits of Southeast Asian cooking: larb that's properly funky, panang curries that don't mess about with the coconut, and pad thai that tastes like someone who actually knows what they're doing made it. Prices sit around the £12-18 mark for mains, making it the kind of place you'll actually return to without feeling like you've remortgaged.