LONDON — The pubs that served shepherd’s pie and fish and chips have been overshadowed by relaxed New York-style cafes featuring dishes like seared tuna with wasabi vinaigrette.

The transformation of London’s restaurant scene from a backwater into an international trendsetter is one more way that this city has become more like New York.

New York and London now have five Nobu restaurants between them. Joining Nobu’s Nobuyuki Matsuhisa on the trans-Atlantic shuttle will be celebrity chef Gordon Ramsey, who has eight restaurants in London and is scheduled to open his first in New York this fall. The restaurant will be in the former Rihga Royal Hotel on West 54th Street in Manhattan and will modeled after Mr. Ramsey’s flagship London eatery. The new hotel will be called The London NYC.

“American visitors have this impression that London has really awful food. They are probably remembering it from when they visited here 20 years ago,” the food and drink editor of Time Out London, Guy Dimond, said. “Things have really changed. In the time that I’ve been a food writer, they’ve changed beyond my wildest dreams.”

The editor of New York-based Gourmet magazine, Ruth Reichl, devoted an entire issue last year to London and gushed in the magazine’s opening letter that “At this moment, London is the world’s best place to eat.”

Mr. Dimond said in addition to the Indian restaurants — which have caused chicken tikka to replace fish and chips as the favorite British dish — high-end Chinese and Latin restaurants have been thriving. Many of the food changes can be attributed to the fact that the British government, unlike those in France, Germany, and Italy, encouraged immigrants from countries who have recently joined the European Union to come to Britain to work. As a result, London has a soaring population of new, young, well-qualified immigrants and a more cosmopolitan mix of cuisines.

Last year, the president of Frances, Jacques Chirac, caused an uproar when a journalist reported that he insulted British cuisine while dining with leaders from Germany and Russia.

“You can’t trust people who cook as badly as that,” Mr. Chirac reportedly said. “After Finland, it’s the country with the worst food.”

That did not fly with Londoners, who have seen an explosion of dining options and a landscape of new restaurants that includes everything from Japanese noodle bars to Spanish tapas.

The founder and CEO of a chain of British seafood restaurants called Fishworks, Mitchell Tonks, said 10 years ago eating out in London was staid. But, he said, good restaurants have bred more good restaurants.

“People used to view eating out as something you did on special occasions and now eating out is something that people do two or three times a week,” said Mr. Tonks, who took his company public on the London Stock Exchange last year and raised more than $8 million.

Mr. Tonks said celebrity chefs with television shows, like Jamie Oliver, inspired more interest in food. As a result, he said, investors are increasingly willing to back new restaurants and food markets.

“London was described recently in one of the papers as almost the gastronomic capital of the world now,” he said. “That is kind of remarkable for a country that has never been recognized for food.”

The explosion of “gastro-pubs” and wine bars in London have given the city a Manhattan-like flair, and Manhattan has followed suit. The Spotted Pig, a British-style gastro-pub, opened on West 11th Street in Greenwich Village in 2004. Another gastro-pub called European Union opened in March in the East Village.

And, the parallels exist in other areas of the food world. As Mayor Bloomberg and the city’s schools chancellor, Joel Klein, have made an effort to provide healthy food in schools (they’ve recently banned whole milk in favor of 1% and skim), Mr. Oliver has waged a high-profile campaign in London to force schools to serve healthier meals.

The owner and chef of Ouest on the Upper West Side, Tom Valenti, said the London dining scene is “much more exciting” than it used to be. “It’s a natural progression,” Mr. Valenti said of the dining improvements. “The rap was so bad for so long that it had to happen. It’s a world-class city. Thank God it happened.”

An Upper West Side publicist and writer, Shira Dicker, said in the 1990s, eating in London was “very expensive, and boring.” No more.

“London has become a New York across the pond in so many ways,” said Ms. Dicker, who spent time in London in 2004 when she was living in Oxford with her husband and children. “It’s just more expensive and it comes with a British accent.”