Healthy food in Shoreditch: where to eat well in East London.

Shoreditch has a talent for making rubbish food look fashionable. Strip away the neon and the queues, though, and this is one of the most interesting corners of London for anyone who actually cares what lands on the plate. The good kitchens here are ambitious rather than smug, and several of them are cooking vegetables better than restaurants charging three times as much.

Plates in Hoxton is the headline: the first vegan restaurant in the UK to hold a Michelin star, and Kirk Haworth's tasting menus are precise enough to silence any sceptic at your table. Redemption on Old Street goes the other way, stripping out wheat, sugar and alcohol and building the menu around how you feel afterwards, which is exactly the question most restaurants avoid. The Vurger Co off Brick Lane does plant-based burgers without apology, and Unity Diner on Wentworth Street is a not-for-profit vegan diner whose profits fund animal-rights work.

Walk or take one stop out and East and North London keep going. Temple of Seitan on Morning Lane in Hackney is the seitan fried-chicken shop with queues round the block. Tofu Vegan on Upper Street cooks Sichuan and Hunan dishes entirely with tofu, mushrooms and gluten, and it is genuinely good. The Gate has been serving grown-up vegetarian food since 1989, and Ottolenghi in Islington is the reason a generation of Londoners started treating aubergine and grains with respect.

My test in Shoreditch is the same as everywhere else: purity, wholesomeness, organic where the chef can manage it, and real quantities of fresh fruits, vegetables, pulses, grains and seeds. Plant-forward, not plant-only, so bring the meat-eaters along. Nobody on this page has paid a penny to be here, and nobody ever will.