Restaurants

With plenty of exciting launches constantly taking place across the Capital, we pick London’s best new restaurant openings taking place over the coming month. Yeni - Soho Aiming to introduce London to the flavours and culinary traditions that reflect Istanbul’s rich heritage as the meeting point of Asia and Europe, the team behind Yeni Lokanta will open a Soho restaurant next week. With the Istanbul restaurant having become a cult success, since opening in 2013, Cem Bilge and chef Civan...

With restaurants in Manhattan’s Upper West Side and Greenwich Village, Ed Shoenfield and Executive Chef Joe Ng’s RedFarm has become a New York institution. Joining Balthazar, another New York export, on Russell Street, RedFarm’s first international venture opened last summer, taking over a three-floor site near Covent Garden. With over 40 years of restaurant experience (and 55 restaurants to his name), Brooklyn-born Shoenfield has paired his experience of America’s Chinese food scene with dumpling expert Ng’s contemporary culinary flair, ultimately...

Hidden away in a cobbled mews in Smithfield is one of the area’s oldest restaurants. Launched in 1986 and named for its proximity to Smithfield Market, Le Café du Marché is a family owned French restaurant. Founded by Charlie Graham-Wood, whose family came from Lyon, and now owned and run by his daughter, Sophie, the ambition for Le Café du Marché was to serve honest authentic French food to London. The recently renovated venue’s atmosphere certainly conveys memories of restaurants...

“A fusion of Mediterranean products and traditional Japanese cuisine techniques,” ‘Meppon’ is a brand new cuisine spearheaded by the team behind ZELA - a restaurant backed by Cristiano Ronaldo, Rafael Nadal, Enrique Iglesias and NBA star Pau Gasol. Following the success of MABEL Hospitality’s Ibiza restaurant of the same name, another ZELA was launched in London at the end of last year, taking over a space within the ME London Hotel, alongside Radio Rooftop and STK London. Past the doorman...

Damien Hirst’s Pegasus centrepiece has been the subject of much publicity since Caprice Holdings announced plans to open Brasserie of Light in Selfridges at the end of last year. But with the crystal-studded instillation and its 30-foot wingspan dominating the restaurant, it’s perhaps unsurprising that some of the food served seems like a slight afterthought. The final part of the department store’s £300 million investment into its London flagship, Brasserie of Light is the latest from Richard Caring’s Caprice Holdings,...

Celebrating an alpine winter classic, Le Pont de la Tour has launched a unique cheese room experience for January, specifically championing fondue. While arguments often take place over whether fondue’s origins lie with France or Switzerland, Le Pont de la Tour is decidedly French, opened by Sir Terence Conran at the beginning of the 1990s. D&D London has since taken over the Shad Thames restaurant. Occupying a former Victorian warehouse complex, the operation is split into two components: a lavish...

Nascent during the 1990s, bacchanalian lunches have fallen out of favour in London. While decadent business lunches would have once stretched long into the afternoon, the era of lavish feasts and lenient expense accounts is long gone. Nowadays, financial pressures and time restraints have, for the most part, fuelled a growth in popularity surrounding desk lunches: uninspired salads or wet sandwiches and burnt coffee from Pret. At the beginning of 2017, Lloyds of London even went so far as to...

I’ve said it before, but one of my favourite things about London is our access to so many world cuisines . Most of the time, we don’t even have to travel far to be able to sample something new. Perhaps it’s just because I’m partial to it, but it seems that the last couple of years have really opened Londoners’ eyes to the variety of Asian cuisine, taking our taste buds further than the previous backstop of a Friday night...

International restaurateur Alexandros Andrianopoulos makes his long-overdue debut on the London food scene with a “complete luxury lifestyle experience” based in the former headquarters of Cartier watchmakers on Avery Street. Boasting “five layers of pleasure” and littered with a barrage of sensory adjectives throughout its marketing material Onima looks and feels like a (somewhat seedy) gentleman’s club, with lights dimmed, neon abound and staff that look like they have just walked off the catwalk. If Marco Pierre White and Peter...