An Italian restaurant called Cent Anni is launching in St John’s Wood next week on the prominent site occupied by Café Med for the past 25 years. A Grade II-listed late-Victorian building – originally The Blenheim hotel – it has a large outside dining terrace and, unusually for a restaurant so close to central London, off-street […]
Highly regarded Pembrokeshire smallholding restaurant Paternoster Farm will this summer transfer its operations to a remote waterside pub on the western tip of Wales. The outfit was launched by former divorce lawyer Michelle Evans and her husband Leum during the Covid pandemic as a farm shop selling home-reared meat and pastries from their milking parlour […]
Tom Sellers of London’s Restaurant Story is launching an outpost in Cornwall this summer, taking over the venue near St Ives occupied until last year by Adam Handling’s Ugly Butterfly. Named Mor, Cornish for ‘sea’, the new restaurant promises a seasonal menu that exploits the region’s best products, including dayboat fish and grass-fed Cornish beef. […]
Long-running Italian restaurant Sale e Pepe is launching its second venue next week – a seafood specialist at The Langham hotel in Portland Place, just off Oxford Circus. Sale e Pepe Mare has taken over the hotel’s main restaurant space, which operated as Roux at the Landau until 2023; that was followed by a French restaurant […]
The highly anticipated reopening of Simpson’s-in-the-Strand under Jeremy King begins to take shape next week with the soft launch of its signature restaurant, the Grand Divan – famous for roast beef carved tableside from silver trolleys. Founded in 1828, Simpson’s became famous as the most quintessentially English of the capital’s grand dining establishments, but its closure […]
Our round-up of what the nation’s restaurant critics were writing about in the week up to 22nd February 2026 The Guardian Sông Quê Pho Bar, Shoreditch Grace Dent hailed the new canteen offshoot from a 25-year-old Vietnamese institution that serves “the best phở in town” – al-dente noodles in a “very meaningful broth”, topped with a […]
Chef Jackson Boxer has stepped in to help veteran Notting Hill cantina Taqueria “get its mojo back” as it enters its third decade. The Westbourne Grove venue will close on Monday next week (23 February) for a brief make-over before reopening on Tuesday 3 March as TAQ. Originally a street stall, Taqueria moved into its […]
Our round-up of what the nation’s restaurant critics were writing about in the week up to 15th February 2026 The Times & Sunday Times Materia Prima, Notting Hill Following her debut review of London’s oldest restaurant (Rules), new Sunday Times restaurant critic Camilla Long turned her attention to one of its newest, a “high-concept, Japanese-adjacent” […]
Three-and-a-half years after closing his Hackney wine bar the Laughing Heart, Charlie Mellor is back with Osteria Vibrato, an old-school Italian restaurant in Soho that opens on Valentine’s Day. Charlie (left in photo) is joined by fellow bearded sommelier Cameron Dewar (ex-Luca and Burnt Ends; right in photo) in the new Greek Street venture, which […]
An Indonesian celebrity couple are bringing a French-accented take on their national cuisine to London with the launch of Le Nusa restaurant in the Strand. Actor/singers-turned-entertainment entrepreneurs Raffi Ahmad and Nagita Slavina own several restaurants in Jakarta and beach clubs in Bali and Sumatra. They opened their first international restaurant in Paris three years ago, […]
