Given all the economic gloom and doom, and especially in the financial sector, you might have thought that top-end London openings would have been ‘pulled’ right, left and centre in the recent months. Especially around the City, and perhaps most particularly in Canary Wharf. In fact, if anything, the reverse is happening.
If ever there was an opening that should have been stymied by the misery in the money-factories, it was the Canary Wharf offshoot of Roka
in Fitzrovia. Well, it’s just been confirmed to us that that’s going ahead in the autumn. And it’s far from being the only top-end début still planned for the next few months. Backers with deep pockets, in particular, seem to have decided that London has a future.
Round the City, Bjorn van der Horst’s Smithfield opening, the Eastside Inn (charging around £90/head in the fine dining area), is set to open next week. Also in Smithfield, as recently re-confirmed to us, the Galvin brothers are pressing ahead with their plans for a chapel-conversion to open later this year. In Fleet Street, Sir Terence Conran launches Lutyens in the summer.
Moving to Belgravia – where international money reigns – this month sees the opening of an offshoot of upmarket NYC Palm steakhouse, on the Drones site. And it is believed that Gordon Ramsay’s new Pétrus will open not so far away from its original site at the Berkeley Hotel – where Marcus Wareing now trades under his own name – some time this year.
In Westminster, a new Roux operation, with a view of Parliament, is set to open in September. Should be convenient for expense-account dining!
We’re also holding our breath for the announcement of a really big-money West End mega-venture from an operator not currently known in London. Watch this space.
Contrary to some recent reports, it seems that the rich – and the restaurants to service them – really are always with us.
PS Are things worse in the Big Apple? A recent article on nymag.com certainly suggests so.
PS (12 May) The London Evening Standard notes that “InterContinental Hotels said today that London, where it has 49 hotels, is a rare ‘bright spot’ in an otherwise tough market.” It does indeed seem that London has a resilience which, perhaps to a surprising extent, is protecting it from the worst effects of the international economic downturn.
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