London in the 21st century is the restaurant capital of the world. British chefs vie with the most famous names on the international food scene to secure the primest sites for their new ventures. Here you can find almost any cuisine on the planet, often made with seasonal British ingredients, whether organic meats, sustainably caught fish and regeneratively farmed veg, but food is only half the story: chefs collaborate with designers to ensure that the surroundings look every bit as enticing as what’s coming out of the kitchen. Keep scrolling to discover the best new restaurants in London.
Discover the best new restaurants in London
August restaurant openings
Oriole
Oriole is part of the same avian-themed group of cocktail bars as Swift and Nightjar and is named after a golden-feathered relative of the blackbird. Now it’s flying west from its original home in Smithfield Market to a new and improved site in Covent Garden, complete with a South American-themed restaurant.
The Mood: Live cabaret and cutting-edge cocktails
Three-course meals in the dining room will be soundtracked by live jazz, cabaret and world music, while furnishings in both here and the upstairs bar will be familiar from the original Oriole – woven bamboo ceiling panels, tropical wall murals, cabinets of curiosities and a centrepiece bar hewn from Brazilian quartzite. Look out for the in-house bar lab, where avant-garde cocktail technique will be applied to clarified juices and syrups while an ultrasonic homogeniser creates barrel-aged extracts at the flick of a switch: a taste of things to come.
The Food: Nobu-style nikkei and Latin American fusion
Argentine-born chef director Gustavo Giallionardo is bringing together ideas from across South America, including the Peruvian-Japanese nikkei cuisine beloved of Nobu in the likes of hamachi tiradito kimchi aguachile. The chef has given his own creativity free rein, too, with sea trout accompanied by a beurre blanc made with torrontés, the signature white wine of Argentina. Snacks including octopus karaage are served in the bar alongside draught cocktails such as The Lost Explorer (EspadÃn mezcal, pickled pink ginger, Lillet Rosé vermouth and timur berry soda).
Oriole is available to book now and opens on 28 August, with 25 per cent off the bill during 21-24 August soft launch. It is located at 7-9 Slingsby Place, London, WC2E 9AB
Ambassadors Clubhouse
The first new Indian in six years from JKS Restaurants opens six months after their flagship Gymkhana won its second Michelin star. Ambassadors Clubhouse is a tribute to the grandfather of owners Jyotin, Karam and Sunaina (J/K/S) Sethi, a former Indian ambassador. The Mayfair newcomer will celebrate the food, drink, music and culture of Punjab.
The Mood: Ambassador, you are really spoiling us!
The restaurant draws inspiration from the summer house of the Sethi siblings’ grandfather in the hill-station of Dalhousie, formerly in the Punjab Province of British India. The 140-cover restaurant is spilt over two floors and includes a heated veranda on traffic-free Heddon Street – here’s hoping an Indian summer is coming our way! A gold-domed bar on the ground floor is the first thing to catch the eye, though there are attention-grabbing features wherever one looks, from classic Indian patterns to zingy contemporary prints. The restaurant isn’t just a feast for the eyes, however. From September, Punjabi cultural curator Sukhchain Sohal will oversee resident and guest DJs.
The Food: Club-class Punjabi cooking
The menus seek to reflect the cooking of the undivided Punjab before partition with papads and chaats, tandoor-roasted kebabs and curries cooked in cast-iron karahis and clay matkas, all mopped up with freshly baked breads. Though this being the Sethis, the traditional dishes are brought bang-up-to-date to appeal to the 21st century Londoners who have made Gymkhana one of the hardest-to-book tables in town. Karahi langoustines, fragrant with fennel, and herb-infused haryali rara rabbit keema are likely to among the must-order signatures, washed down with Tequila and mezcal cocktails mixed with north Indian fruits.
Ambassadors Clubhouse is available to book from 9 August and opens on 20 August. It is located at 25 Heddon Street, London, W1B 4BH
Cornus
This rooftop fine-dining restaurant comes with impeccable haute-cuisine credentials. Owners Joe Mercer Nairne and David O’Connor have run Michelin-starred Medlar in Chelsea for the past 13 years. Here they’re joined by executive chef Gary Foulkes, whose last gig was at Michelin-spangled Angler in The City. All those stars might sound stuffy but the light-filled location channels laid-back luxury.
The Mood: An eyeline of skyline
A 19th century warehouse near Victoria Station has been re-imagined along Mid-century modern lines, with muted greens and rich woods in the dining room, and bronze lighting illuminating the marble counter and banquette seating of the bar area. All eyes, however, are likely to be on the rooftop views through the wraparound windows. Expect service to be as slick as the surroundings. O’Connor is a legend among maître ds – with the podcast to prove it – and will be joined out front by his wife Monika, while wine director Melania Battiston won awards for her list at Medlar and is an expert at suggesting the perfect match.
The Food: Reach for the Michelin stars
The seasonally changing menu takes the best bits of French and British cuisine, with foodie savoir faire brought to bear on native ingredients given a gloss of European sophistication. Roast Landes chicken is partnered with Scottish langoustines, sweetcorn and roast chicken sauce, while hand-rolled spaghetti is laced with native lobster, Amalfi lemon, N25 caviar and small-batch olive oil from Two Fields on Crete. Not a wine drinker? The non-alcoholic options are equally well-considered and there are sakés and premium teas, too.
Cornus opens on 6 August and is in soft launch until 3 August, with 30 per cent off the food bill. It is located at 27c Eccleston Place, London, SW1W 9NF
July restaurant openings
Plates
Gourmet vegan cuisine is having a moment in London – French chef Alexis Gauthier has just opened 123V in Mayfair while pop-up-turned permanent Holy Carrot launches in Notting Hill this month. Neither, however, comes with quite the same cachet as Plates, owned by brother and sister Kirk and Keeley Haworth. Kirk was the first plant-based chef to win Great British Menu’s Champion of Champions and Plates is already booked solid until February; reserve a table now for spring and eat on the terrace in the meantime, where bookings are only taken 24 hours ahead.
The Mood: Bringing the outside inside
Keeley has worked with Emma Shone-Sanders of East London-based Design & That Studio on the look of a restaurant that reflects Kirk’s food philosophy of ‘turning the humble into the heroic’. Only pigments found in nature have been used in the low-lit, 25-cover dining room while materials have been repurposed and recycled wherever possible. The centrepiece bar and chef’s counter has been made from felled London trees that would otherwise have been destroyed, a banquette crafted from wood and linen wraps around the entire dining room, textured walls incorporate ingredients from the menu such as buckwheat and quinoa and there is an installation fashioned out of dried seaweed.
The Food: You are what you eat
Kirk adopted a plant-based diet following a diagnosis of Lyme disease in 2016 and his menu reflects the healing ingredients he believes have helped him manage the condition. Not that you’d know the six-course tasting menu was packed with medicinal properties. The chef uses whole, organic produce from trusted suppliers to produce complex dishes of multi-layered flavour and texture. Carrots, for instance, are brined in Korean aromats before being lightly smoked and caramelised over coals, then topped with leek kimchi, whipped aioli, crispy wild rice and spirulina powder and served with pickled kohlrabi and spiced pear.
Plates is available to book now but opens on July 3. It is located at 320 Old St, London
June restaurant openings
The Park
The second of Jeremy King’s trio of new London restaurants – Arlington launched in March 2024; Simpsons in the Strand will follow in early 2025 – The Park is a departure for the veteran restaurateur who made Le Caprice, The Ivy and The Wolseley the seminal restaurants of the 1980s, 1990s and noughties. Not only is The Park King’s first contemporary restaurant in a new building, but it is also his first focused on American cuisine and his first in west London, opposite the northern entrance to Kensington Gardens by Queensway Tube.
The Mood: Mid-century Midtown
The American equivalent of a Wolseley-style, Mitteleuropean grand café is… the diner? But while King has taken the classic diner tropes of wood-panelling and orange booths, he has filtered them through a Mid-century, Midtown sensibility. King has said his inspiration was The Four Seasons Restaurant in Mies van der Rohe’s Seagram Building, which opened in 1959, and architecture is a motif throughout, with walls hung with illustrations by Le Corbusier and photos by Ti Foster, son of Sir Norman. It’s dog-friendly in the daytime, if you’ve been for a walk in the park.
The Food: Stateside breakfasts and Cal-Ital suppers
King has got all the diner details right at breakfast and brunch: mugs on the tables for refillable filter coffee, stacks of fluffy pancakes drenched in maple syrup. Lunch and dinner, meanwhile, reflect the Californian-Italian cuisine pioneered by chefs such as Alice Waters. Mains like zucchini and ricotta rollatini are billed as entrees, salads are very much a thing, and because it wouldn’t be a Jeremy King restaurant without some sort of schnitzel, here there’s a chicken Milanese. An exclusively Italian-American wine list includes bottles from Oregon and Washington State as well as Californian big-hitters.
The Park is located at 2 Queensway, London
The River Cafe Cafe
The River Cafe is one of the most famous restaurants in the country, but it comes with two distinct drawbacks: getting a table in the first place, then having the funds to pay the bill. Neither should be an issue at this more affordable, no-bookings offshoot in the warehouse next door, which trumps the original with a terrace with a view of the Thames. Finally, the River Cafe lives up to its name.
The Mood: Bright and breezy, River Cafe easy
The River Cafe began life as the in-house canteen for the Richard Rogers Partnership and co-founder and chef Ruth Rogers originally trained as a graphic designer, so the look of the restaurant has always been as important as the food on the plate. Here in the former office of Sir Richard Rogers, the visual cues of the River Cafe – paper-clothed tables standing on a cobalt-blue floor, floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking the kitchen garden – are set off by a huge Damien Hirst painting of cherry blossom. Want to take the lifestyle home? The shelves surrounding the tables groan with River Cafe cookbooks and foodie goodies: boxes of cantucci for £15, bottles of Negroni or limoncello for £40.
The Food: Tuscany on Thames
A café it may be, but Rogers and her chef team were adamant that the food had to be Italian. For breakfast that means cornetti deep filled with cream or chocolate, fruit so ripe it might have been picked moments before, and Duralex tumblers thick with bitter hot chocolate. The all-day menu might include courgette and pesto soup for lunch, vitello tonnato for dinner and, in-between in the afternoon, house-made ice cream. Best of all, River Cafe classics like the chocolate Nemesis can now be enjoyed by themselves, while the bar team have been given free rein with the likes of a bergamot margarita: raise a glass to the evening sun setting over the river.
The River Cafe Cafe is located at Thames Wharf, Rainville Rd, London
Akira Back
The signature restaurant of the new Mandarin Oriental in Mayfair marks the UK debut of Akira Back, who is a very big deal in Asia and the States. The Korean-born, Colorado-raised snowboarder-turned-chef has cooked for everyone from the Dalai Lama to Bill Clinton and operates 28 restaurants from Doha to Dallas, Bangkok to Beverly Hills. Dosa, the relocation of the chef’s Michelin-starred Seoul chef’s table, will open later in the year, along with ABar Rooftop. Checking in? Back is also responsible for in-room dining across the 50-room hotel.
The Mood: Glossy glamour at the Mandarin Oriental Mayfair
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Tokyo-based studio Curiosity has brought an elemental approach to the design, with earth, wind and water reflected over the 148-cover dining room and ABar Lounge. A circular marble staircase delivers diners to the triple-height lower ground-floor space, where light catches on the bronze ceiling of ABar Lounge. Back has had a hand in the design too: artwork by his mother is a key component of all the chef’s projects.
The Food: Modern Japanese creativity and cutting-edge cocktails
Back’s globetrotting cooking style grafts influences from his Korean-American childhood onto a thorough understanding of Japanese cuisine, with a strong taste for the contemporary. Signature dishes imported from the international outposts include ‘AB Tuna Pizza’, a crunchy wafer-thin crust topped with ponzu aioli, tuna sashimi and white truffle oil, while London-specific dishes such as turbot with white asparagus and saké beurre blanc will debut in Mayfair. Meanwhile, snacks such as wagyu tartlet will be served in the ABar lounge: not just any old bar lounge, it features cocktails with ingredients like lacto-fermented peaches, a 2.30am weekend licence and a roster of live DJs.
Akira Back is available to book now but opens on June 3. It is located at the Mandarin Oriental Mayfair, 22 Hanover Sq, London
mandarinoriental.com; akiraback.com
Koyn Thai
Never one to miss a gap in the local market, Queen of Mayfair Samyukta Nair has converted the basement of her Japanese restaurant Koyn into a Thai dining room overseen by Paris-based chef Rose Chalalai Singh. Nair says she is aiming for approachability but the West End’s only high-end Thai is likely to be as gilded as her other Mayfair restaurants Jamavar, Socca and Mimi Mei Feir.
The mood: Bangkok by night
Designer Tom Strother of Fabled Studio has given the dark and moody Japanese decor a subtle Thai makeover, incorporating burnt orange leather upholstery, hand-painted tapestries and works by Chiang Mai artist Kitikong Tilokwattanotai to contrast with the black oak ceiling and black marble counter. Food and drink are the focus of the refreshed look: wine is stored in a flower-bedecked sommelier station while food is cooked over live fire in the open kitchen before being served in handmade woven baskets.
The food: Home-style cooking that travels around Thailand
Bangkok-born Chalalai Singh has made a name for herself in Paris at her 11th-arrondissement restaurant Ya Lamaï, named after the grandmother who taught her to cook. But it was at her private Rose Kitchen within the Marché des Enfants Rouges, the city’s oldest covered market, that the chef became a hit with the Parisian fashion community and impressed Nair with recipes drawn from the length and breadth of Thailand. Expect dishes such as a Chiang Mai platter of spicy homemade pork sausage, capsicum nam prik sauce, sticky rice and pork crackling, or a southern Thai crab curry with wild betel leaf.
Koyn Thai opens on June 16 but is available to book now. It is located at 38 Grosvenor St, London
May restaurant openings
Julie’s
First opened in 1969 by interior designer Julie Hodgess, Julie’s was the belle of the beau monde. McCartney and Jagger partied here in the Seventies, Princess Di was an Eighties lady who lunched while Kate Moss threw her 22nd birthday here in the nineties. The 21st century wasn’t so kind – the restaurant closed between 2015 and ’19, and again in 2023 – but the star quality of the Julie’s name remained undimmed. Now Holland Park’s most famous restaurant has been bought by Tara MacBain, a long-time local and venture capitalist turned restaurateur.
The mood: Naughty but nice
MacBain is so committed to her new venture that she has the letter ‘J’ tattooed on her forearm. ‘G’, however, is the most famous letter here on account of the alcove known as the G-spot. Tina Turner dancing on the table (her heel marks are still etched into the wood) is the tamest thing to have happened behind the curtains. But while the brown awnings above the pavement terrace still look like the Julie’s of old, everything else inside is new, courtesy of interior designer Rosanna Bossom. Banquettes are upholstered in custom-made Le Manach fabric, timber tables finished with walnut tops, flower-shaped chandeliers hang from the ceiling and one-off prints on the walls.
The food: Seventies nostalgia given a 21st century update
Julie’s, arguably, has always been more about the mood than the food, though neither, alas, has been a forte in recent years. With a Cordon Bleu qualification under her belt, MacBain wants people to be talking as much about what’s on the plate as what’s on the walls and has enlisted Owen Kenworthy as chef patron. Kenworthy’s last gig was as exec chef of The Pelican (an aesthetically-pleasing pub with a great natural wine selection), so he knows a thing or two about what well-heeled Notting Hillbillies want from their local, namely an all-day menu of Franglais classics with an emphasis on simple sophistication rather than cheffy showboating: devilled eggs with harissa, lobster soufflé with leeks and Gruyère, rhubarb and almond tart with custard.
Julie’s is located at 135 Portland Rd, London
Kioku
The OWO hotel launched last autumn with offerings from some of Europe’s glitziest operators (Mauro Colagreco, Café Lapérouse) but has saved the best till last with Kioku: the fourth London restaurant from Endo Kazutoshi, the chef behind Sumi in Notting Hill, Niju in Mayfair and the Michelin-starred Endo at the Rotunda in White City. The rooftop views here are even better than at the Rotunda, with a 360-degree panorama of central London from the dining room and terrace.
The mood: Magical views and privacy
It’s easy in a rooftop restaurant to focus all the attention on what’s beyond the windows rather than inside but designers Pirajean Lees have emphasised texture as much as natural light in details such as carved oak service stations, accents of aged brass and oxblood leather, and mesh screens to break up an already intimate 55-cover space. Oak chairs covered in Japanese embroidered silk reference Kazutoshi’s favourite hotel in his home city of Yokohama, with the best seats in a spectacular private dining room housed within one of the building’s turrets overlooking Whitehall and St James’s Park.
The food: European-accented Japanese cooking taken to new heights
Don’t mention the f-word (fusion): Kazutoshi gained an in-depth education and appreciation of Mediterranean cooking when his Nagoya sushi master sent him to work at the Japanese embassy in Madrid. The cuisine at Kioku isn’t so much east-meets-west as classic European with a Japanese accent: ravioli made from ramen pasta stuffed with chashu pork, say, or native lobster with fregola, shiso oil and sancho. Purists can rest assured there is also the sushi and sashimi that have made Kazutoshi’s name, with tuna sliced tableside from a bespoke trolley, while Europe’s largest saké collection – 300 bottles of over 110 varieties – is stored in a ‘saké safe’.
Kioku is located on the sixth floor of The OWO, 2 Whitehall Pl, London
See also, April's hottest openings: Oma, Arlington, Lita, Josephine Bouchon and ABC Kitchens.
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