Jamie Oliver is preparing for a return to the British restaurant scene – four years after the collapse of his UK business saw the closure of 25 restaurants with 1,000 jobs lost and debts of £83million. His first new venue is scheduled to open this autumn in Covent Garden as part of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s revamped […]
Long-heralded Sri Lankan restaurant Rambutan opens today (17 March) on the edge of London’s Borough Market, from chef and food-writer Cynthia Shanmugalingam (above). Rambutan was first announced last summer, when Cynthia introduced the concept with a soft-serve ice cream pop-up featuring such flavours as mango; jaggery; watermelon and hibiscus; and buffalo curd. Her first book, […]
Spectacular hand-pulled noodles can be watched as well as eaten at a new restaurant in Chinatown, called Kung Fu Noodle because the cooks look like they are practising chopping movements from the martial art made famous in the 1970s through Bruce Lee’s films and Carl Douglas’s hit single. The noodles, from Gansu province in northwestern […]
Experimental barbecue outfit Acme Fire Cult has moved into a permanent new home at Dalston’s 40FT brewery, and opens fully next Friday, April 1st. Chefs Andrew Clarke and Daniel Watkins (centre and right in pic), formerly of St Leonards, launched Acme as a pop-up in London Fields last summer, and have linked up with Steve […]
Famously itchy-footed experimental chef Nuno Mendes returns to his Portuguese roots with his new restaurant in the Fitzrovia foodie enclave of Charlotte Street, which opens on Monday. He says Lisboeta will be “a love letter to Lisbon”, his home city. One of the most eagerly anticipated – not to say hyped – openings in London this year, […]
Sarap, the first Filipino restaurant to make a real impact on the London culinary scene, is to open a West End branch this month in Mayfair’s Heddon Street. Its signature dish will be Lechon suckling pig, slow-roasted whole and stuffed with lemongrass aromatics and truffled adobo pork rice, to be ordered 48 hours in advance […]
Idris Elba – actor, DJ, rapper, producer, activist and self-style Renaissance man – opens his first wine bar and restaurant next week, in Coal Drops Yard at King’s Cross. With 800 wines in stock and space for 70 guests, Porte Noire is being promoted as ‘one the largest fine wine tasting rooms in London’. London-born Elba, […]
A high-end hybrid Oriental restaurant combining Chinese and Japanese cuisines will open next month in the new Four Seasons hotel at Ten Trinity Square in the City of London. Mei Ume, a name bringing together the Chinese and Japanese words for “plum”, launches on June 9, joining star French chef Anne-Sophie Pic’s La Dame de Pic […]
Three-year-old pop-up The Oystermen is to open its first permanent venue in Covent Garden this summer. The Oystermen seafood bar and kitchen will be in foodie hot-spot Henrietta Street, where Ollie Dabbous has just opened his new restaurant in The Henrietta hotel and Gregory Marchand opened Frenchie last year. Unusually, The Oystermen is a business that […]
Ikoyi, an upmarket new restaurant showcasing the cuisine of West Africa, is to open in July in the new St James’s Market just south of Piccadilly Circus. It is a joint venture from school friends Iré Hassan-Odukale (pictured left), who was born in Ikoye, a cosmopolitan area of Lagos in Nigeria, and chef Jeremy Chan (right), whose […]
