An ambitious new restaurant billed as the first open-kitchen chef’s table in Suffolk has opened in Bury St Edmunds, backed by Clove Club and Noble Rot investor Linda Keenan. Named Bellota – Spanish for acorn, key to the diet of Pata Negra pigs – the 20-cover venture is a collaboration with Spanish-born chef Ruben Aguilar […]
Alex Grant and Simon Shand, former members of the team at Shoreditch bistro Leroy, which closed down last year, have joined forces to open a new restaurant on the same corner site. Duchy takes its name – and its gastronomic cues – from the Duchy of Savoy, the historical borderland between the south of France and northwest […]
Northcote, the Lancashire boutique hotel and gastronomic powerhouse that hosts the annual Obsession food festival, has been bought by new owners – who have persuaded executive chef Lisa Goodwin-Allen to return just a month after quitting, to a new role as chef patron-director. The acquisition by Yorkshire-based kitchen entrepreneurs Alf and Clare Ellis ends a period […]
Bar Kroketa, the tapas bar from the team behind Spanish import specialists Brindisa, has taken over José Pizarro’s former site in Broadgate Circus near Liverpool Street station, which it will open as its third and biggest branch next month. Chef/restaurateur José Pizarro announced the closure of his only venue in the City last December, after […]
Our round-up of what the nation’s restaurant critics were writing about in the week up to 23rd March 2025 London Standard Senza Fondo!, Shoreditch David Ellis was primed to castigate this cod-Italian for its childish promise of “bottomless lasagna” (misspelt, he snootily corrected: it should be the plural form, lasagne), for the exclamation mark in […]
Soho restaurateur Nima Safaei opens his third venue in the district next week – a quick-service pasta bar that will not take bookings. Like its sibling Italian restaurants – 40 Dean Street, Nima’s original venue, opened in 2010, and 64 Old Compton Street, which followed last year – the new venue takes the name of its address: 27 […]
A flood of new food halls is rising across the country this year, from Newcastle via Manchester and Birmingham – where two halls open in May – to London, where no fewer than three are launching in quick succession this spring. Newcastle’s Freight Island, scheduled to open in the autumn, is billed as the ‘largest single […]
Giorgio Locatelli is to open a new restaurant at the National Gallery in Trafalgar Square this summer, five months after closing his famous Locanda Locatelli in Marylebone. The new all-day restaurant, to be called simply Locatelli, is on the mezzanine of the gallery’s Sainsbury Wing, which reopens on May 10 after a two-and-a-half-year refurbish. He […]
Acclaimed Welsh chef Nathan Davies is to open a new restaurant on Guernsey this summer, 18 months after leaving highly rated SY23 in Aberystwyth. Vraic – a local seaweed in Guernsey French – will have an open kitchen centred on a Basque-inspired grill cooking whole fish and joints of meat on the bone, while much of […]
Gordon Ramsay (right in photo) has acquired the former site of Le Gavroche in Mayfair, with chef Matt Abé (left) shifting from his flagship, Restaurant Gordon Ramsay in Royal Hospital Road, Chelsea, to take charge of the as-yet-unnamed new venture. Michel Roux closed Le Gravroche, in Upper Brook Street, just over a year ago, ending […]
