London’s restaurant scene has another busy week ahead. Tom Kerridge is opening a new bar inside the Corinthia hotel, a Michelin-starred chef is launching a Korean fried chicken restaurant and a new City pub is promising £6 Guinness alongside live lobster.
Bancone has also opened its biggest London restaurant yet, while restaurateur Roberto Costa is preparing to pick a fight with London’s current pizza obsession with a new opening in Exmouth Market.
There is, in other words, enough going on to justify a weekly catch-up. So we are doing the sorting. Each week, we’ll pick out the London restaurant openings, chef moves, closures and other dining news actually worth knowing about – from the genuinely significant to the slightly ridiculous.
Consider this your shortcut through the week’s restaurant noise.
Tom Kerridge is shrinking his restaurant and making more room for martinis
Eight years after Tom Kerridge opened his first London restaurant at the Corinthia hotel, Kerridge’s Bar & Grill is being split in two.
When it returns on 5 September, the restaurant will simply be called Kerridge’s and will become a considerably more intimate 57-cover dining room hidden behind a velvet partition. The space beside it becomes Georgie’s Bar, a larger standalone bar named after Kerridge’s Boxer. Georgie’s paw print was famously left in the concrete during construction of The Hand & Flowers kitchen in Marlow.
The important detail is that this is more than somewhere to sit while waiting for a restaurant table. There is a dedicated Martini Club serving Dry, Wet, Dirty and “Steak” versions straight from the freezer, alongside familiar cocktails, British beers and a food menu running from pork scratchings and beef jerky to buttermilk fried chicken, shellfish brioche rolls and a cheeseburger topped with barbecue brisket.
It is an interesting reversal of the usual hotel-restaurant logic: less space for formal dining, more for dropping in, drinking and eating something substantial at the bar.
Opens 5 September | No 10 Northumberland Avenue, London, WC2N 5AE | Website
The Goodman founders are opening a pub – with £6 Guinness and live lobster
London is not short of pubs attempting to persuade you they are restaurants. The Albatross, opening near Bank on 7 September, appears to be taking the opposite approach: a restaurant group with some serious steak-and-seafood credentials attempting to build a proper pub.
It comes from George Bukhov-Weinstein and Ilya Demichev’s Wild Group, whose restaurants include Goodman, Beast and Wild Izakaya. The 200-seat, two-floor site at 8-10 Old Jewry will be their first pub and occupies the former Commonwealth Bank of Australia, close to Goodman City.
These being the people behind Beast, the food goes considerably further than a packet of crisps. British seafood is central to the menu, including native lobster and Norwegian king crab kept in live tanks, oysters and seafood bisque, alongside turbot, sea bass and the slightly more pub-like prospect of chicken and veal schnitzel. Former Goodman chef Chris Piorkowski runs the kitchen.
There are more than 15 beers on tap and, perhaps most encouragingly in the City, Guinness will cost £6 a pint. Chris Dunlop, formerly of New York’s Spotted Pig, has been installed as landlord, with former Tom Kerridge staffer Alice Tayler alongside him as landlady.
There is an awful lot going on there. Whether live king crab and a six-quid Guinness make natural drinking companions remains to be discovered.
Opens 7 September | 8-10 Old Jewry, London, EC2R 8DN | Website
A Michelin-starred chef has gone into the fried chicken business
Woongchul Park’s Sollip is where Korean flavours meet French technique across an elaborate Michelin-starred tasting menu. His latest project requires rather less cutlery.
Park has opened Papa Dak at Flat Iron Square in Southwark, concentrating on Korean fried chicken and food designed to be eaten communally. “Dak” means chicken in Korean and the two headline versions are Korean Red – sticky, sweet, spicy and indebted to yangyeom chicken – and Guinness Black, which folds London’s current enthusiasm for the stout into the proceedings.
There is also so-tok so-tok, the Korean street food snack alternating sausage and chewy tteok rice cakes on skewers.
Park opened Sollip with his wife Bomee Ki in 2020 and won a Michelin star two years later. Chefs moving from tasting menus into fried chicken are hardly a hardship for the rest of us, and Papa Dak joins the growing category of places where Michelin-level CVs are being applied to food you can eat without committing half an evening and three figures to it.
Open now | Flat Iron Square, 45 Southwark Street, London SE1 9HP | Website
Bancone has opened its biggest restaurant yet
London’s fresh pasta boom used to involve squeezing onto stools in tiny rooms and accepting that somebody at the next table would hear your entire conversation. Bancone Bloomsbury suggests the genre has grown up.
The group has opened its sixth London restaurant inside the newly refurbished Imperial hotel on Russell Square. At 140 covers inside, and another 60 on the terrace, it is Bancone’s largest restaurant by some distance and its first hotel site.
The silk handkerchiefs with walnut butter and confit egg yolk remain – Bancone says it has sold more than a million bowls of them since 2018 – joined by spicy pork and ’nduja ragu with tagliatelle, bucatini cacio e pepe and Herdwick hogget pappardelle with soy, Thai basil and chilli. An open kitchen keeps the pasta-making visible.
Its expansion is another indication of just how thoroughly London’s new-wave pasta restaurants have moved into the mainstream. What began with relatively small, specialist dining rooms from the likes of Bancone, Padella and Lina Stores has developed into a sizeable restaurant category of its own.
Open now | 61-66 Russell Square, London W1B 5BB | Website
Finally, someone wants to start a fight about London pizza
Apparently London now has its own style of pizza and Roberto Costa would like a word about it.
The restaurateur behind Macellaio RC is opening God Save The Pizza in Exmouth Market on 1 September, taking over the former Macellaio site and explicitly positioning the new restaurant as a challenge to what it calls the dominance of “London-style” pizza.
Costa is going thinner and crispier, using Roman-style sourdough bases rather than the softer, puffier pizzas that have proliferated across the capital. The menu is divided into Original, Revolution and Rebel categories, with pizzas available as an eight-inch pizzetta or 14-inch sharer.
Restraint does not appear to be the central organising principle. One pizza combines beef ragu, spicy salami and chilli; another uses a fiery habanero tomato sauce. The knowingly provocative “Extremist” comes with ham, cheddar, pineapple sauce and four-cheese cream. Spicy lasagne, curry-sauced chicken wings, chilli jacket potatoes and Ferrero Rocher sundaes continue the theme.
Calling your restaurant God Save The Pizza while declaring war on the prevailing local style is one way of making sure people notice the opening. Whether London needed another pizza restaurant is rather beside the point. At least this one has arrived looking for an argument.
Opens 1 September | 38-40 Exmouth Market, Islington, London EC1R 4QE | Website
