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London restaurants are rather fond of rebirth. Close the doors, rip out something expensive that somebody else installed five years ago, add a bar, call it a “new chapter” and hope everyone has forgotten what the old one was like.
Sometimes, though, a comeback is worth paying attention to. This week, one of London’s great grand dining rooms is dusting itself off, a Soho dim sum restaurant has somehow persuaded one of cinema’s greatest directors to oversee its makeover and the restaurant claiming to serve London’s best Sunday lunch is venturing beyond Borough Market for the first time in two decades.
Elsewhere, Kiln appears to be quietly producing half of the next generation of London restaurateurs, the Kudu team have discovered they cannot quite quit south London, Firangi is using a Highbury residency as live research for the restaurant it hopes to open one day and an Arcade favourite is finally getting four walls of its own.
The Queen’s old haunt Quaglino’s is bringing back the Nineties
There are restaurants with history, and there is Quaglino’s, where history apparently had a permanent table.
The St James’s institution, founded by Giovanni Quaglino in 1929, reopens on 7 October following a major refurbishment intended to revive some of the extraordinary excess of its Nineties heyday. More importantly, this was the restaurant where Queen Elizabeth II dined with Prince Philip and the Queen Mother in 1956 – an occasion recorded as the first time in living memory that a reigning monarch had eaten in a public restaurant.
Royal patronage rather suited the place. Princess Margaret reportedly had a table permanently held for her; Princess Diana was said to slip in through the kitchens to escape photographers. Judy Garland held her wedding reception there. Terence Conran relaunched it in 1993 and, for a while, the enormous staircase into its subterranean dining room was practically a catwalk for anyone who mattered.
The latest incarnation is not exactly pursuing restraint. There will be three bars, live entertainment and a Champagne bar with 24 bottles on its list. A dessert counter called the Tabac will sell chocolate cigars and chocolate ashtrays – a concept which manages to be simultaneously ridiculous and completely appropriate for Quaglino’s.
The food, overseen with input from former Humo chef Miller Prada, looks backwards too, drawing on Quaglino’s Italian origins, French technique and British history. Think vitello tonnato skewers, pissaladière, turbot Mountbatten and lamb cutlet Milanese.
Plenty of restaurants would look foolish trying to resurrect the Nineties. Quaglino’s has at least earned the right.
Reopens 7 October 2026 | 16 Bury Street, London SW1Y 6AJ | Website
Firangi is building a restaurant one residency at a time
Some pop-ups are temporary restaurants. Firangi is treating them more like fieldwork.
Ruhi Parmar Amin and Simar Deol have begun their longest residency yet at Top Cuvée in Highbury, where they will spend three months testing a nine-dish menu built around regional Indian cooking before eventually opening a permanent restaurant of their own.
The pair met in Berlin and have since travelled through Bombay, Goa and Delhi, using each Firangi residency to work through dishes, ingredients and techniques they have picked up along the way. Their own backgrounds – Parmar Amin grew up in London in a Punjabi-Gujarati family while Deol was raised in Delhi – provide part of the reference point, but the menu deliberately reaches beyond them, from Himachal Pradesh in the north to Karnataka in the southwest.
That means jowar and lamb tartare with betel leaf, chicken thigh with corn kees and turnip achar, bavette with Chamba chukh peppercorn sauce and Coorg-style pork belly with quince fudge. There is no rice on the menu, either: dishes are intended to stand alone rather than arrive as components of the familiar British curry-house spread.
The residency runs until 20 December, after which Parmar Amin and Deol plan to return to India in early 2027 to continue researching the northeast and south. London gets to eat the homework in the meantime.
Runs until 20 December | Top Cuvée Highbury, 177B Blackstock Road, London N5 2LL | Instagram
One of cinema’s greatest directors is redesigning Yauatcha
Perhaps Yauatcha has decided an ordinary interior designer simply wouldn’t do.
The Soho restaurant closes after lunch on 26 September for a refurbishment lasting until late 2027, and overseeing its new look as creative consultant will be Wong Kar Wai, the Hong Kong filmmaker behind In the Mood for Love, Chungking Express and 2046.
Which, admittedly, is an intriguing way to refurbish a dim sum restaurant.
Yauatcha was a genuinely significant opening when Alan Yau launched it in 2004. It won a Michelin star in its first year and Christian Liaigre’s dark, blue-lit interiors were once startlingly modern. Twenty-two years later, much of Soho has caught up and Yauatcha rather needs the intervention.
Parent company Mohari Hospitality says the overhaul will cover the interiors, food and wider experience, with chef Fai Choi leading development of a more seasonal menu.
Quite what a Wong Kar Wai restaurant looks like remains the more interesting question. Hopefully rain-streaked windows, devastating romantic longing and noodles at 2am.
Closes after lunch on 26 September 2026 for redevelopment; expected to reopen in late 2027 | 15-17 Broadwick Street, London W1F 0DL | Website
‘London’s best Sunday lunch’ is leaving Borough Market
For 20 years, Roast has sat above Borough Market serving the sort of British lunch that requires both Yorkshire puddings and a clear afternoon.
Now it is expanding.
The restaurant will open its second site at Virgin Hotels London-Shoreditch on 21 October, its first move beyond Borough Market since opening there in 2005. The new restaurant has 135 covers, an orangery, bar and chef’s table, while the menu retains the beef Wellington, Full English breakfasts and enormous Sunday lunches on which Roast has built its name.
The headline act is 42-day-aged roast beef with all the trimmings, although the week will apparently have its own reasons to visit: steak, ale and bone marrow pie on Mondays, roast suckling pig on Thursdays and a separate halal menu covering both the à la carte offering and Sunday roast.
Roast has never suffered from excessive modesty about its Sunday lunch. Shoreditch can now decide for itself.
Opens 21 October 2026 | Virgin Hotels London-Shoreditch, 45 Curtain Road, London EC2A 3PT | Website
What is it about Kiln? Another former head chef goes it alone
At some point Kiln may need to install a departures board.
Karla Knowles, formerly head chef at the celebrated Brewer Street Thai restaurant, is opening not one but two restaurants of her own. First comes PAM, opening on Charterhouse Street in Farringdon in October, followed by AREE in Notting Hill next year.
PAM will be Knowles’s first standalone restaurant, marrying Thai cooking with British seasonal produce and the collaborative spirit of the supper clubs she has been running over the summer. AREE, meanwhile, is billed as a fire-led Thai restaurant and will take over the former e&o site on Blenheim Crescent.
Knowles is not the first Kiln graduate currently making noise elsewhere. Meedu Saad, another former head chef and co-owner, opened Impala on Dean Street this year, drawing on the North African food of his family as well as the fire cooking he spent years practising at Kiln.
Restaurants like to talk about “kitchen culture”. Producing chefs who eventually want restaurants of their own is probably a more useful measure of it.
PAM opens October 2026 | 61 Charterhouse Street, London EC1M 6HA | Instagram
AREE opens 2027 | 14 Blenheim Crescent, London W11 1NN | Instagram
Kudu left south London. Apparently it couldn’t stay away
Last September, Patrick Williams and Amy Corbin did something that felt fairly definitive: they closed their various Peckham and Nunhead operations and folded Kudu into one large new restaurant in Marylebone.
A year later, they are heading south again.
Braai Bird will open in November in the former Kudu Grill on Nunhead Lane, centred around an enormous wood-fired rotisserie and, mercifully, a fairly straightforward proposition: chicken and chips. The birds will be slow-roasted over wood and served with South African sauces including monkey gland and Cape Malay, with sharing sides, cocktails, beer and South African wine.
Williams and Corbin say they “always knew” they wanted to return to the area where Kudu began, describing taking back the old Kudu Grill site as a “full-circle moment”.
Perhaps Marylebone was never quite going to cure them of Peckham. Either way, London could do considerably worse than another restaurant built around fire, roast chicken and chips.
Opens November 2026 | 57 Nunhead Lane, London SE15 3TR | Website
Arcade favourite Solis is finally going it alone
Escaping a food hall is becoming something of a rite of passage.
Solis, the chicken-and-steak grill from TA TA Eatery founders Ana Gonçalves and Zijun Meng, will leave the protective embrace of Arcade for its first standalone restaurant, opening at 26 Kingly Street in Soho on 20 October.
The essentials remain: half chicken glossed with smoked aji-aji chilli oil and flat iron steak with Solis sauce. Having an actual restaurant to play with, however, means a much larger menu: chateaubriand with chimichurri and aji picante, rotating butcher’s cuts, mushroom and cheese croquetas, Uruguayan-style prawn cocktail and torta pascualina stuffed with greens, cheese and egg.
Solis follows other Arcade concepts in discovering that, once people like your food enough, it can be useful to have your own front door.
Opens 20 October 2026 | 26 Kingly Street, London W1B 5QD | Website
