The best pizza in the world can now be found in London. To make matters worse, the awards ceremony was held in Naples.
Napoli on the Road has taken the global number one spot for the first time, after three years as Europe’s best pizzeria. Elsewhere, Smithfield is starting to get interesting, Luke Farrell is taking things up a notch in Marylebone, Canary Wharf has found another roof upon which to put a restaurant and Chelsea is opening somewhere where you can have dinner in a bath.
Here’s what’s new in London restaurants this week.
The world’s best pizza is now in London
There are awards that need explaining and others that do not. Napoli on the Road has been named the best pizzeria in the world.
Michele Pascarella’s London operation took first place in the 50 Top Pizza World 2026 ranking, ahead of Una Pizza Napoletana in New York and Confine in Milan. Better still, this was all announced at a ceremony in Naples, giving London the rare pleasure of beating the Italians at pizza on home soil. It is the first British pizzeria to top the global list.
Pascarella started Napoli on the Road in 2016 with a three-wheeled Piaggio Ape and a wood-fired oven, taking it around London’s markets before opening permanently in Chiswick.
There are now three restaurants, in Chiswick, Richmond and Soho. The accolades have followed at an almost unreasonable rate: Pascarella was named the world’s best pizza maker in 2023, Napoli on the Road has been Europe’s top-ranked pizzeria for three consecutive years and its Ricordi d’Infanzia was named the world’s best pizza in 2025.
A country that puts sweetcorn on pizza should perhaps not become too smug. Still, number one is number one.
9A Devonshire Road, Chiswick, W4 2EU | Website
Smithfield is getting a very ambitious new pub
Smithfield’s meat traders are soon heading east. The restaurants, apparently, are already moving in.
The team behind Sune on Broadway Market – Charlie Sims, Honey Spencer and Spencer Large – are opening The Poet in November, taking over a grand Victorian corner of the General Market beside the new London museum. Former Aulis head chef Charlie Tayler is joining them in the kitchen.
The first phase sounds reassuringly like a pub: a ground floor boozer, dining room upstairs, Guinness at £7.50 and food including pork pie and piccalilli, a Scotch egg coated in Scampi Fries and fallow deer and juniper suet pudding. Spencer, one of the capital’s better-known natural wine sommeliers, is overseeing the wine.
Things get more ambitious next year. A 10-seat chef’s counter called Envoi will serve a 14-course tasting menu structured around a sonnet, while the attic becomes an Arts and Crafts-inspired cocktail bar called Shambles. This is perhaps quite a lot of poetry for a pint, but Sune has earned enough goodwill to get away with it.
The site has some history of its own. Part of it was formerly Bubb’s Le Restaurant Francais, which appeared in Spice World. Finally, some proper heritage.
Opens November 2026 | House 5, London Museum, General Market, Farringdon Street EC4A 4AZ
Camille’s team are going full Victorian at B Penhale
The Poet will have competition almost immediately. A few doors away, the people behind Camille in Borough Market are opening B Penhale in the former Club Gascon.
Chef Elliot Hashtroudi is working with Clare Lattin, Tom Hill and Ratnesh Bagdai on the 60-cover restaurant, which is named after Hashtroudi’s grandmother, Betty Penhale. The inspiration is Britain and Ireland rather than Camille’s provincial France, taking in regional dishes, Victorian dining rituals and the unfashionable cuts that London chefs have lately remembered are rather good. Whole-carcass butchery will be central, with lesser-used cuts appearing across the menu.
There will also be a six-seat walk-in bar with its own chalkboard menu, while Camille’s Max Hancock is putting together a wine list with an emphasis on British winemakers.
Between this and The Poet, Smithfield appears to be becoming fashionable just as the old market prepares for its next life. London tends to enjoy that sort of thing
Opens October 2026 | 57 W Smithfield, London EC1A 9DS | Website
Luke Farrell is taking Thai food somewhere smarter
Luke Farrell has built his London reputation on brilliant Thai food, bright lights and restaurants that rarely encourage an early night. Now he is opening somewhere a little more grown-up.
YAI will arrive on Blandford Street in Marylebone early next year, taking over the former Bellazul site. Farrell, who is behind Plaza Khao Gaeng and Speedboat with JKS Restaurants, is pitching it as his first fine dining restaurant, centred specifically on the cooking of Phuket and southern Thailand.
The ingredients are predictably specific. Songkhla shrimp paste, Betong soy sauce, Pattani sea salt, Phatthalung palm sugar and Sangyod rice will be imported from Thailand, alongside produce grown at Farrell’s own Ryewater Nursery in Dorset and British meat and seafood.
The two-storey restaurant will be built around an open working kitchen, with charcoal cooking visible from the dining room. Farrell says the intention is to cook for Thai tastes rather than rework dishes for London, offering fine-dining quality without quite all the fine-dining theatre.
Given that Speedboat’s natural habitat is somewhere between dinner and a minor incident, seeing what Farrell does with Marylebone should be interesting.
Opens early 2027 | 43 Blandford Street, Marylebone, W1U 7HF
Canary Wharf is putting another restaurant in the sky
Canary Wharf restaurants have traditionally had two choices: be on the ground floor of an office block or go as high as the lift will allow. Alto 19 has wisely chosen the latter.
The new restaurant and bar sits, as its name helpfully suggests, on the 19th floor of Locke London Canary Wharf, the new 279-room hotel at Cartier Circle. It’s being operated by White Rabbit Projects, the hospitality group behind Lina Stores and Kricket with Chris Dargavel, whose CV includes Daphne’s, J Sheekey and Scott’s, leading the kitchen.
Cooking will lean modern Mediterranean and Italian, with the restaurant initially focused on dinner. A substantial wine list is promised, while the principal decorative feature is likely to be the view: Locke looks out across the docks and London skyline from one of the taller points in the Wharf.
There are worse places to discover that your office is still visible from the dinner table.
Opens autumn 2026 | Locke London Canary Wharf, 1 Cartier Circle, London E14 5HF
Chelsea is getting a restaurant where everyone wears a bathrobe
Chelsea has long understood that lunch is improved by expensive wellness treatments. Sonara is merely removing the journey between the two.
Billed as London’s first “Fine Bathing & Dining Club”, it will occupy more than 1,500 square metres over two floors of the One Twenty development on King’s Road, combining an 80-cover restaurant with a banya, hammam, snow room, cold plunge, red salt grotto, floating room and hyperbaric oxygen chamber.
The intriguing bit is how it all works. Guests will arrive, change into swimwear and robes and be assigned a restaurant table for the duration of their visit. That table remains their base as they move between eating, steaming, plunging and recovering. The European-inspired menu will accommodate everything from something light between bathing sessions to a longer meal, presumably once everyone has stopped hitting one another with birch branches in the 30-person oak-lined banya.
Members and day visitors will both be allowed in. There will also be four private suites for anyone who finds communal dining in a dressing gown insufficiently exclusive.
Chelsea knows its way around a £200 lunch. The logical next step was apparently to eat it without trousers.
Opens late 2026 | One Twenty King’s Road, Chelsea, London SW3 | Website
