Heston Blumenthal is to shut down his London restaurant Dinner by Heston at the end of next January, on the 16th anniversary of its launch. Describing the closure as “sad and bittersweet“, he said the project had “run its natural course“. Set in the Mandarin Oriental hotel overlooking Hyde Park, Dinner was Heston’s follow-up to the […]
Our round-up of what the nation’s restaurant critics were writing about in the week up to 8th March 2026 The Guardian Trillium, Birmingham Grace Dent warmed to a “weird, bold, silly restaurant”, where high-profile Brummie chef Glyn Purnell has “miraculously” managed to translate Michelin-style cooking for what she called a “semi-rowdier yet still upmarket stage”: “there’s […]
Chef Conor Gadd, co-owner of Italian neighbourhood trattoria Trullo in Islington, has opened his first solo venture, taking over the venue previously occupied by Petersham Nurseries in Covent Garden’s Floral Court. Burro (meaning ‘butter’) is billed as a “part Irish country house kitchen, part Italian fifties bistro“, serving “warm, evocative and creative food” that expresses […]
The City of London’s notorious appetite for red meat shows no sign of abating, with the opening of two new steakhouses within 10 minutes’ walk of each other this week. The Four Seasons hotel at Tower Bridge has replaced La Dame de Pic, its highly rated French restaurant from visiting star chef Anne-Sophie Pic, with […]
From an impoverished childhood in Sri Lanka, chef Larry Jayasekara has completed an extraordinary journey to running The Cocochine in Mayfair, where guests feast on immaculately prepared European cuisine accented with South Asian flavourings. HARDEN’S caught up with him at the restaurant as its second anniversary approaches this month. Larry grew up in a small […]
The prolific Public House Group opened its latest venue this week – CeCe’s in Notting Hill, billed as a classic Italian restaurant with “a hint of Hollywood”. Taking over the former site of celeb hangout Casa Cruz in Clarendon Road, the launch has been kept quiet until this week. It follows hot on the heels of […]
Our round-up of what the nation’s restaurant critics were writing about in the week up to 1st March 2026 The Guardian Pavyllon, Mayfair Grace Dent, a proud member of the early-rising “5am Club”, followed a heavily hyped trend to sample an upmarket power breakfast at the Four Seasons hotel on Park Lane, suggesting: “Perhaps now […]
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 […]
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 […]
