A 100-year-old landmark Birmingham hotel abandoned for the past decade will reopen tomorrow as a Nigerian restaurant called Empress. The former Dogpool Hotel in Stirchley has been revived by husband-and-wife team Olusegun Akande and Oyetola Isla, who aim to showcase the richness of their national cuisine. Olusegun says: “We saw potential in this historic site […]
Calabrian-born chef Francesco Mazzei this week opened his latest restaurant – Mezzogiorno in the Corinthia hotel, just off Trafalgar Square. Francesco made his name in London with L’Anima, which opened on the edge of the City in 2008. He followed up by launching Radici, Sartoria and Fiume with D&D London (now Evolv), and ran a six-month […]
A new creative hub that opens next week on the Leith Shore in Edinburgh’s docks has three separate food and drink offers, including an outlet from the team behind the city’s highly regarded restaurants Timberyard and Montrose. Brown’s of Leith has taken over a late-Victorian engineering works which as George Brown & Sons was one […]
Chef Daniel Rogan today reopens his ambitious Southampton restaurant AO by Daniel Rogan, at a new address following a two-year hiatus. Daniel, the son of L’Enclume’s all-conquering founder Simon Rogan, originally launched AO in 2022 but it closed a year later. He designed the interior of the new 26-cover venue in Oxford Street himself, fulfilling […]
A theatrical live-fire restaurant with an open kitchen launched in Spitalfields this week, a few minutes’ walk from Liverpool Street station – a first dining venue from publican and music festival entrepreneur Rob Star of Electric Star pubs. Firestarter shares an entrance on Middlesex Street with its stablemate The Star by Liverpool Street pub/bar next door, […]
Lara Boglione, whose family owns Petersham Nurseries on the edge of Richmond Park, opened a Florentine wine bar/restaurant in Notting Hill this week with her Tuscan winemaker husband, Giovanni Mazzei. Named Trogolo – Italian for ‘trough’, after the communal stone water troughs found across Tuscany – the Westbourne Grove venue promises “a slice of Florence […]
After a three-year delay, members’ club Soho House finally opens in Manchester this month – taking over three floors of the former Granada TV studios in the city centre, complete with a heated all-weather rooftop pool. Originally announced in 2021 with an initial opening set for the next year, Soho House Manchester is the first […]
Three new restaurants that celebrate regional Thai cuisine are opening in London in quick succession this month – all with the word ‘khao’, meaning rice or a casual meal, in their name. First up this week is Khao-So-i, just off Oxford Circus, the first international opening from chef Win Srinavakool and his wife Por Haruethai Noicharoen […]
An ambitious restaurant in a landmark building with a large terrace overlooking the Thames opens this weekend beside Richmond Bridge in leafy southwest London. Tower House, from the team behind Gold in Notting Hill, promises ‘modern Mediterranean food with old-world Italian roots reminiscent of home, in a spirit of relaxed care and warmth’. It is […]
Our round-up of what the nation’s restaurant critics were writing about in the week up to 9th November 2025 The Guardian Lilibet’s, Mayfair Grace Dent anointed her “new favourite restaurant”: Australian chef and Bone Daddies founder Ross Shonhan’s seafood specialist at the birthplace of the late QEII (fka ‘Lilibet’) – whose “turbo-chintz, Las Vegas-style royalist fever dream” […]
