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Good morning, happy Friday. How was everyone’s September?

I’ve just returned from a very quick four-day trip to the US to meet my new nephew and spend some time with my mom and sister. It was a bit of a whirlwind, but I’m very grateful they’re on the East Coast, as I have a feeling I’ll be making that trip a lot more often now that said nephew is here.

September was a really exciting month for Table for Two. I had the opportunity to interview a former Michelin inspector, spent a lot of time behind the scenes thinking about where I want to take the publication next, and have some very exciting interviews coming up that I can’t wait to share.

And to everyone who subscribed in September, hello and welcome. Thank you for being here!

In case you missed it:

Aston Martin is bringing leading chefs into the F1 paddock to create bespoke menus for select Grands Prix, with collaborations across Miami, Monaco, Silverstone and Monza, and more planned for Singapore, Austin and Abu Dhabi. Max Coen, co-founder and former head chef of Dorian, took over the kitchen at Silverstone this year.

Speaking of Max Coen, there’s been plenty of speculation about his next move following his departure from Dorian earlier this year. His Instagram bio now simply reads “Next Chapter, 2027”, with no further context.

Major’s Grill is coming to Cambridge House. Major Food Group is bringing a new restaurant to the highly anticipated Cambridge House, Auberge Collection. Inspired by the group’s New York restaurant The Grill, Major’s Grill will be a new concept created specifically for London. I wrote about the groups dilution of the Carbone brand back in August, but credit where it’s due: this is how you expand internationally while preserving the integrity of the original.

Vanity Fair goes inside The Corner Store. Clara Molot spends four days with Eugene Remm to figure out how he manufactures New York’s hardest-to-book reservation at The Corner Store. The formula: familiar food, absurdly attentive service, celebrities at the next table and just enough difficulty getting in to make the reservation feel like social currency. P.S. if anyone knows how I can get a reservation for 17 or 18 December, I’m all ears.

Professional Lunch ranks every three-Michelin-star restaurant in the UK. has now eaten at all ten of the UK’s current three-star restaurants and ranked them in his latest newsletter. Marshall has become my go-to on Substack for anything fine dining, and I really value his reviews.

What to bookmark this October:

I love autumn in London.

And this October, there are more things worth doing than there are nights in the month.

The Horses, the newest pub from Public House Group, has opened in Clerkenwell. Salman Toor’s first major European exhibition is showing at the Courtald, and Frieze is back in Regent’s Park. Over at Southbank, the BFI London Film Festival premieres the films that will be everywhere by awards season, and Dua Lipa is curating the London Literature Festival.

There is so much on this month and here’s the highly edited Table for Two list of what’s actually worth your time:

Dining:

Clementine (Islington) - I really need an excuse to make it over to Islington. Anna Higham has built a cult following around neighbourhood bakery Quince, and this month she’s opening Clementine, a 20-seat café directly across the road. The menu sounds exactly like what I want to eat on an autumn morning: tattie scones and Scotch pancakes.

The Horses (Clerkenwell) - if you can’t tell I’m really excited about this one. Public House Group’s latest pub is now open, and a first with an east London post code. I have a reservation for the end of this month and will report back.

ENDO + Moga (Chelsea) - Endo Kazutoshi is opening ENDO, a 10-seat omakase in Chelsea, but I’m even more excited about Moga, the listening bar upstairs in the two-storey townhouse. Through October and November Moga is only open to ENDO diners, but will open to the public in December.

Soraya (Marylebone) - From the team behind Nina, Bottarga, Lagana and Zephyr comes Soraya. They’ve brought their audience along for the build and already had 10k+ Instagram followers before opening. My reservation isn’t until November, so let me know what you think if you make it this month.

Cinema:

BFI London Film Festival (Southbank) - For the past few years, James and I have managed to make it to the London Film Festival, which returns this year from 7–18 October. Tickets sell out very quickly, and I think it’s really only worth booking screenings at Southbank (ideally Royal Festival Hall). Booking at the Vue or Curzon can feel just like any other trip to the cinema. At the time of writing, there are still select tickets available at Southbank for The Match, Beloved, La Dérive, amongst a few others.

La Femme Infidele (Southbank) - If you don’t manage to get tickets to the London Film Festival, there’s plenty of other programming at the BFI. A few weeks ago, James and I saw the re-release of Claude Chabrol’s La Femme Infidèle, and I have to say, a sold-out theatre on a Friday night for a 1960s French film is one of the many reasons I love London. The film has been playing over the past month, with its final screening tomorrow, 3 October, introduced by Chabrol’s daughter.

Bad Apples - Playing at venues across London, this black comedy stars Saoirse Ronan as a primary school teacher pushed to breaking point by one of her pupils. We keep meaning to see this one but haven’t made it yet, so let me know what you think if you have.

Art:

Salman Toor: Someone Like You (Courtauld) - There’s been so much buzz for the Bayeux Tapestry and Renoir and Love, but the exhibition I’m most looking forward to this month is New York-based artist Salman Toor’s European show at the Courtauld. He paints intimate, slightly dreamlike scenes in a recurring acid-green palette. I’ve followed him on Instagram for a while and can’t wait to finally see his work in person.

Painting the French Riviera (Royal Academy) - If you’re already missing summer holidays, this one brings together a century of artists drawn to the Côte d’Azur, from Cézanne and Matisse to Picasso and Yves Klein. Unsurprisingly, there’s a lot of Mediterranean light, colour and very beautiful scenery.

Myrlande Constant (Frieze London) - If you’re going to make a beeline for one thing at Frieze, make it Myrlande Constant’s first European solo presentation. The Haitian artist creates extraordinary large-scale works from beads and sequins, I’m really looking forward to seeing her work in person.

Literature:

Dua Lipa & Mustafa: Nour (Southbank)- London Literature Festival returns from 20 October to 1 November, with Dua Lipa hosting three events at Royal Festival Hall. A few tickets remain for her conversation with poet and songwriter Mustafa on 24 October, or check out programming for the rest of the week.

One for your reading list - The standout book I read this month was Good People by Patmeena Sabit. It reads almost like true crime, to the point that I had to double check I was actually reading fiction. It’s heartbreaking, but I also learned so much about the Afghan immigrant experience in the US.

Let me know in the comments what you’ve booked in London this month, and if there’s anything I’ve missed.

Have a great weekend,

Danielle

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Damien Hirst once walked into Quo Vadis and found his former business partner’s imitation of one of his paintings hanging on the wall. Ian Fleming tried to extract military secrets from German prisoners by getting them drunk over lunch at Scott’s. And at the Savoy, one of the most famous names in luxury was fired for stealing from the hotel, a secret that wouldn’t come to light for another 86 years.

London’s dining rooms have seen things.

And I, for one, would like to know everything.

Give me the feud, the affair, the painting with a backstory, the waiter who knew too much.

The best restaurant stories also have a unique way of surviving. Chefs will eventually leave, owners change hands, menus get rewritten and dining rooms refurbished…but stories attach themselves to a place and once you know a story, it becomes impossible to sit in the room without looking for signs of what happened there.

So I went looking for five of the best: feuds, espionage, scandal, tragedy and spectacularly bad decisions, all hiding inside London dining rooms that are, remarkably, still open today…consider this an invitation to book a table and go looking for the evidence yourself.

Here’s what happened.

01.Quo Vadis (Soho)

The restaurant that turned a business breakup into an art exhibition.

In 1999, British artist Damien Hirst walked into Quo Vadis for lunch and discovered something strange hanging on the walls. At first he thought he was looking at one of his own paintings. Then he realised it was a replica, one of his spot paintings, crossed with three violent slashes and titled Divorce. Its creator was Marco Pierre White, who until recently, was his business partner.

Marco Pierre White took over Quo Vadis in 1996, already the youngest chef, and the first British chef, to hold three Michelin stars. Among his partners was Damien Hirst, who was handed a five-year, £200,000 contract not just to invest, but to decorate the place.

He didn’t hold back…two skinned cows’ heads floated in formaldehyde behind the bar. A pair of skeletons hung from butcher’s hooks in a glass cabinet. It brought thirty animal-rights protesters to the door in January 1997 and ended with the police being called and five people taken to court.

It was very 1990s London with one of the country’s most notorious chefs, one of its most notorious artists, and dead animals suspended above the tables.

Behind the spectacle, the relationship was souring and by April 1999, White had bought out Hirst and the other partners. Hirst’s collection came down, though even that became contested, White said he wanted it removed, and Hirst said he removed it himself.

Either way, Quo Vadis now had a lot of empty wall space.

Instead of hiring someone to fill it, White decided he’d fill it himself with a collection that parodied Hirst’s, piece by piece. The vitrines became Which Came First?, a shelf of eggs and a chicken. The butterfly paintings got his own imitation. The DNA sculpture became BSE. And in the foyer, the most pointed of all: Divorce, his own spot painting, slashed three times.

I haven’t been able to track down a single photograph of White’s versions, and my emails to Quo Vadis asking about their archives have, so far, gone unanswered. If anyone has seen one floating around, please send it my way, I’m determined to find them!

02.Scott’s (Mayfair)

The restaurant where Ian Fleming accidentally got mistaken for a German spy.

In 1940, Ian Fleming, the man who’d go on to create James Bond, walked into Scott’s for lunch with two German prisoners of war. The plan was to get them drunk enough to give away military secrets.

I’ve eaten at Scott’s several times, including dinner in the Renoir Room, and somehow never knew that Fleming once accidentally triggered a Scotland Yard surveillance operation over lunch.

Fleming was working for British Naval Intelligence at the time. The two men were captured U-boat officers, believed to know how German submarines were navigating British minefields. His approach was not exactly sophisticated: lunch, alcohol, see what secrets slipped out.

There was just one problem…nobody had told the staff at Scott’s.

The waiter, a man named Baker, overheard four men speaking quietly in German and called Scotland Yard. Fleming soon noticed the tables around him filling up with unusually serious couples, his intelligence operation had triggered a second intelligence operation… into him.

His actual plan wasn’t going much better. He and his colleague were getting drunker, and the Germans weren’t giving anything away. Fleming returned to the Admiralty “befuddled and no wiser” about the minefields, and was informed by his furious boss that the afternoon’s chief achievement had been mobilising a sizeable contingent of Scotland Yard.

And yet Fleming kept going back. Baker went on to become Scott’s head waiter, Fleming became a regular with a favourite table, a two-top on the first floor, and when he started writing Bond, Scott’s made it into the books.

03.Langan's Brasserie (Mayfair)

The restaurant where a man traded meals for masterpieces and then burned his own house down.

In December 1988, Peter Langan died in a fire at his Essex home, one he’s alleged to have started himself, weeks after a spectacular meltdown. He was 47.

It’s a strange way to end a story about a man who spent his career paying artists in lunches instead of cash, and who once put out a kitchen fire with a bottle of vintage champagne rather than water. To understand how Langan’s Brasserie ended up hung with Bacon, Freud and Hockney, and how the man behind it went out the way he did, we have to go back to 1976.

Langan opened the restaurant on Stratton Street that October, and ran it on one non-negotiable rule: artists ate for free, so long as they left something on the wall instead of a bill. By the time the doors opened, Bacon and Freud were already hanging there, and Hockney went further than anyone, designing the menu, sketching Langan three separate times, and drawing him, his chef and his co-owner eating lunch together beneath the palm trees.

Running the place, Langan drank a dozen bottles of champagne a day, he was known to fall asleep under the tables mid-service and, on one occasion, to crawl across the floor biting diners’ ankles.

Miraculously, none of it seemed to hurt the restaurant and by the mid-1980s, Langan’s was the most desirable room in London with guests like Elizabeth Taylor, Marlon Brando, Mick Jagger and Princess Margaret.

Then in 1988 came the argument with his wife, a threat to leave, and the fire… weeks later, Langan was dead.

The restaurant outlived him easily. It survived administration in 2020, and new ownership after that, and it still hangs fresh art on its walls today, in tribute to a man who never once wrote a cheque for a painting.

04.Savoy Grill (Strand)

The scandal the Savoy hid for 86 years, starring the man who’d go on to found The Ritz hotel.

Everyone knows the name Ritz means the height of hotel luxury, but almost nobody knows that The Ritz exists because its founder got caught stealing from the hotel restaurant down the road.

In March 1898, César Ritz was the general manager of the Savoy, and August Escoffier, who at the time was the most celebrated chef alive, ran its kitchen. Together Ritz & Escoffier turned the Savoy Grill into one of London’s most fashionable addresses, with the Prince of Wales among their regulars.

But not everything was as it appeared on the surface. When the Savoy’s directors opened the books they uncovered a 5% kickback scheme running through the kitchen. Basically Escoffier would order 600 eggs, the supplier would deliver 450, and the two of them would split the difference. Wine and spirits worth over £500k in today’s equivalent had simply vanished, some of it comped to guests who were being coutted for Ritz & Escoffier’s next project, a rival hotel they were building down the road.

On 7 March the directors sacked Ritz & Escoffier, ordering them to leave the building immediately. Sixteen kitchen staff loyal to the pair took up their knives and refused to leave. It took a squad of Met Police to clear the building, and the next morning’s papers ran it as “A Kitchen Revolt at the Savoy.”

Facing a lawsuit, both Ritz and Escoffier signed a confession on the condition the Savoy never made it public. The Savoy kept their word for more than eighty years, until copies of the confessions mysteriously appeared on the desk of Observer food writer Paul Levy in late 1983. Nobody knew who had sent them but Levy nicknamed his anonymous source “Deep Palate.”

By then it didn’t matter though, Ritz had already turned the disgrace into momentum, opening his own hotel in Paris that same year, and one in London soon after. Within a decade, the Ritz changed the luxury world and “ritzy” became synonymous with glamour. As for Escoffier, his legacy also outlived the scandal with the dishes he made famous in the Savoy kitchen, Peach Melba, Crêpes Suzette, still on the menu at the Savoy Grill.

05.Café Royal (Regent Street)

The restaurant where a lunch conversation decided Oscar Wilde’s fate.

Through the early 1890s, Oscar Wilde spent much of his time at Café Royal. The gilded Domino Room was where he drank, argued and performed for the young men in his circle at a time when the “wrong” kind of desire was a criminal offence.

By 1895 the performance had caught up with him. The Marquess of Queensberry, father of Wilde’s lover Lord Alfred “Bosie” Douglas, had left a card at Wilde’s club accusing him, in a memorably misspelled note, of “posing as a somdomite.” Wilde, against the advice of nearly everyone around him, decided to sue for criminal libel.

On 24 March 1895, days before the trial opened, the writer Frank Harris took Wilde to lunch at the Café Royal and told him, as plainly as he could, to drop the case. Harris had already made enquiries. He knew what Queensberry’s lawyers were preparing to produce in court, and he knew Wilde couldn’t survive it.

Wilde refused and said the lunch with Harris was a betrayal, not a warning.

Three weeks later, Queensberry was acquitted and the evidence gathered for his defence became the basis for Wilde’s own prosecution. He was convicted of gross indecency and sentenced to two years’ hard labour. He left prison broken, and left England for good, never writing another major work.

The Café Royal outlived all of it. It’s survived being sold, restored, and eventually converted into a five-star hotel, its dining rooms and bars retained. The room where Harris made his case and Wilde made his fatal decision is still there.

London is really good at celebrating what’s new, but as much as I love a new opening I’ve been trying to also revisit the institutions that built the way this city eats.

A few months ago I wrote How London Learned To Eat which covered the lineage of how London became one of the greatest dining cities in the world. But lately I’ve been thinking less about who came from where, and more about the ideas they left behind, and where we can taste and experience the inspiration that so many of the new openings pull from.

So whilst I have my list of new London openings for this autumn, I’ve also made a list of the institutions I’ll be revisiting, and today I’m sharing it with you.

These are six restaurants that changed the vocabulary of eating out in London. The things they pioneered now feel so familiar that we barely notice them: ingredient-led menus, restaurant-quality food in pubs, nose-to-tail cooking, open-fire kitchens, glamorous Asian dining and eating at the counter.

Let me know if there are any others you would add to this list x

THE RESTAURANTS

01. The River Café - Opened in 1987

Legacy: Introduced London to ingredient led, seasonal Italian cooking and the idea that simplicity could be luxurious.

The River Cafe’s origin story is as iconic as the restaurant itself. Opened by Ruth Rogers and Rose Gray in Hammersmith, it started not as a restaurant but as a staff canteen for the Richard Rogers Partnership, Ruth’s husband’s architect company. Word began to spread about the kitchen’s ingredient led, simplistic approach to dining and by popular demand, the canteen opened its doors to the public and became the restaurant we love today.

These days, an ingredient led menu is table stakes for any decent restaurant, but The River Café helped put exceptional seasonal ingredients at the centre of London's idea of sophisticated cooking.

02. The Eagle - Opened in 1991

Legacy: Restaurant quality cooking in a pub, creating the template for the modern gastropub.

Ordering a proper meal at a pub feels quite ordinary today, but before The Eagle opened in 1991, going to a pub and going to a restaurant were two distinct experiences. The Eagle started offering food with a blackboard menu, a bar you ordered from, and food that was genuinely good.

Today, some of the best London menus are pub restaurants, influenced by The Eagle’s origin.

03. St. John - Opened in 1994

Legacy: Nose-to-tail, whole animal cooking with radical simplicity

Fergus Henderson jokes that when St. John opened in 1994, Smithfield and Clerkenwell felt like a post-apocalyptic, decaying neighbourhood. The restaurant opened with whitewashed walls, hard floors, no art, no music, no flowers. Henderson, a trained architect, deliberately stripped the space of all of this, his philosophy that people, food and conversation should provide the room with everything it needed.

But it was the food at St. John that was actually most defiant. This was Britain in the 1990s, when ambitious, elaborate restaurants, like La Gavroche and Harvey’s, were the most celebrated. Meanwhile, St. John’s ethos was to cook the whole animal, serving bone marrow, pig’s ear, tripe, blood cake, kidneys, tongue….cuts that any other restaurant would consider undesirable.

This approach would eventually become known as “nose to tail” eating, but St. John’s influence went far beyond convincing Londoners to eat offal. It changed the idea of what sophisticated cooking could look like.

Thirty-two years later, the philosophy is so embedded in London restaurants that it barely registers as radical. Today, whole animal butchery, lesser used cuts, short ingredient-led menus and deliberately simple plates are everywhere.

04. Moro - Opened in 1997

Legacy: Moorish flavours, fire cooking and the modern open kitchen restaurant

Moro opened in Exmouth Market in 1997, founded by husband and wife duo Sam & Sam Clark and born from their travels through Spain, Morocco and the Sahara, where the couple learned about the cooking of the southern Mediterranean.

The Clarks had both worked at The Eagle and The River Café and Samuel Clark explained later they opened Moro with the same ingredient led approach, but applying it to much less familiar foods of the Spanish and Muslim Mediterranean, which just wasn’t available in London at the time.

Moro’s original menu included ingredients that were cutting edge for their time: harissa, tahini, preserved lemon, cumin yoghurt, chickpeas, pistachios, pomegranate, and meat and fish cooked over charcoal.

But Moro’s influence isn’t just felt through its menu, Moro changed the way what dining looked and felt like. Stripped back interiors, zinc bar, wood oven and grill, and an open kitchen, they set the aesthetic DNA for what London’s beloved restaurants look like today.

05. Hakkasan - Opened in 2001

Legacy: Asian fine dining and the restaurant as a total experience

Alan Yau opened Hakkasan in 2001, with chef Tong Chee Hwee leading the kitchen and French designer Christian Liaigre behind the interiors. When it opened, Chinese food was already deeply embedded in London’s dining culture but it wasn’t served with the same luxury, glamour or cultural cachet as the city’s European fine-dining restaurants.

Hakkasan presented Cantonese cooking through an entirely different lens, combining traditional techniques, exceptional ingredients and contemporary presentation. In 2003, it became the first Chinese restaurant in the UK to receive a Michelin star.

But Hakkasan’s biggest influence might just be everything surrounding the food. Diners descend from an unassuming entrance into a dark, cinematic dining room with a carved wooden screen, low lighting, music and a dramatic cocktail bar.

Hakkasan’s legacy is felt in the restaurants that transport you into another world for the night.

06. Barrafina - Opened in 2007

Legacy: Counter dining, open kitchens and making Spanish food exciting

Its hard to imagine London without counter seating, Barrafina helped turn sitting at the kitchen counter into one of London’s most desirable restaurant experiences. Brothers Sam and Eddie Hart opened the original Barrafina on Frith Street in Soho in 2007, inspired by Barcelona’s Cal Pep, with its tiny L-shaped counter, simple cooking and the theatre of watching chefs work directly in front of you.

Barrifina opened as a tiny restaurant built around a marble counter, an open kitchen and a no reservation policy. Rather than being separated from the kitchen, diners sat almost inside of it watching dishes being cooked and handed across the counter, almost as theatre. The restaurant turned waiting for a stool, sitting shoulder to shoulder with strangers and watching the chefs work, into the dining experience.

Under chef Nieves Barragán Mohacho, Barrafina made Spanish cooking some of the most exciting in London.

What did I miss? Tell me the London restaurant you think changed the way we eat today.

Danielle

I was having this conversation with my husband recently, and it turned into a bigger question. When does a chef stop being a cook and become an artist? When does a meal stop being functional and become an artistic expression? When does a diner stop eating a meal and start experiencing one through their tastebuds, the same way they’d experience art in a museum or gallery? And is all of that only possible through a tasting menu format?

To answer these questions we begin, improbably, with Andy Warhol's 1964 Brillo Boxes. If you're not familiar with this work, it's a series of plywood boxes, painted and silkscreened to replicate the packaging of Brillo soap pads down to the logo, colours and text. When the piece was first shown in New York in 1964, the reaction wasn't just puzzled, it was genuinely hostile, and it sparked conversations in the art world and beyond that are still being had today. The philosopher Arthur Danto responded to the controversy with an exploration of what actually constitutes art in his essay “The Artworld.”

I remember reading this essay in an art history class I took at university, and as I started to explore this question of the difference between a chef being a cook versus an artist, and a meal being functional versus a piece of art, I decided to re-read it and was struck by several points from Danto’s argument.

Warhol’s Brillo Box is perceptually identical to an actual Brillo carton in a supermarket stockroom. If two objects look the same, the difference between “art” and “not art” can’t be discerned in the object’s colour, form, composition and craft, it must be discerned by something else. The same can be said for a piece of cooking, if a similar dish is executed by a chef with a story and a home cook on a Tuesday night dinner, does that automatically make both dishes a piece of art?

Danto argues that art’s status comes from outside the object, “an atmosphere of artistic theory, a knowledge of the history of art,” essentially a framework the viewer can bring to the object.

Which brings me to a tasting menu I had a few weeks ago at Restaurant JAN, a South African-French restaurant in Nice. The main course was a duck, plum foi gras and bobotie executed using classic French technique. Bobotie is a traditional South African dish of spiced minced meat with an egg-custard topping. Our French interpretation of babotie at Restaurant JAN was served alongside a skillet of the traditional version, providing us the diners (who’ve never had babotie before) a reference point to experience the chef’s translation of an interpretation.

Restaurant JAN handed us a framework to interpret the course on a literal plate, but I actually think Danto’s claim is more nuanced. The framework doesn’t have to be served alongside the dish in a literal sense (though it could be). It just has to be available to the diner. Instead of being handed a framework to interpret the meal, an educated diner can also walk into a meal with the same accumulated context that an art historian brings to a gallery, context of where the chef has cooked before, an understanding of what’s inspired the kitchen, and where the chef sits relative to their peers or own past work. In other words, a meal becomes art when it has context that can be experienced around it.

Danto’s essay “The Artworld” not only proposes the argument for Warhol’s Brillo Box, which has context, a framework, and an artist claim behind it, therefore clearing the bar to be considered art, his essay is attempting to answer the question “what is art” in all its formats, displacing older definitions that were based simply on beauty, technique or expressive skill. Art requires context and a framework for you to experience it in.

So this brings us back to our initial question, when does a meal stop being simply functional and become an artistic expression?

Tasting menus aren’t the only format for a meal to become art, but tasting menus do a better job of narrating the context behind the meal where an à la carte format might provide signals of their story (in technique, pacing, ingredients, menu balance etc) but it usually requires the diner to explore further. Neither format is the requirement, they’re just two different delivery mechanisms for the same thing a meal needs to earn its place as art in the first place.

The real signifier of whether a meal can be classified as art is the intent and aboutness of the meal. In an à la carte format, the chef still has a story, and when that story is strong enough, the legibility shows up differently than a server explaining it to you.

At a lunch with my team some time ago, we went to Rambutan in Borough Market and the experience blew me away. Explosive flavours, the table overflowing with dishes, there was almost an intensity to the speed at which the dishes arrived and the table to plate ratio was comical. I knew little about the restaurant going into it, but I didn’t need the context to know something was being communicated.

After that meal I scrambled to gain as much context as possible. Chef Cynthia Shanmugalingam’s, British born to immigrant parents, opened Rambutan as a way to reconnect with her heritage, traveling back to Sri Lanka after the Civil War ended. She said these trips were a culinary revelation, inspiring her to recreate the same rustic meals with bold flavours. I went back to Rambutan with this point of context, and felt I was able to experience the meal in an entirely new way with a deeper appreciation.

Tasting menus aren’t the only format for a meal to become art, but tasting menus do a better job of narrating the context behind the meal where a more casual format provides signals but usually requires the diner to explore further.

So the real signifier of a meal classified as art is the intent and “aboutness" of a meal. A home-cooked weeknight dinner or a soulless meal at a restaurant chain can fail in the same way a three-star kitchen theoretically could if the food isn’t about anything outside nutrition, habit or transactional need to fill hunger, with no authorial claim behind it.

This brings us back to the Brillo carton. Whilst Danto would argue Warhol’s creation is art, the version in the supermarket stockroom, which looks identical, isn’t art at all, because nobody intended for it to mean something. This same logic applies to food cooked purely to fill a function. What disqualifies anything, a meal included, from becoming art is the absence of intent to mean something, cooking as pure service, with no claim being made at all.

After dinner conversation

Five stories from dining and culture worth bringing up at the dinner table this weekend.

01. Marco Pierre White's ultimate travel food list

If I had to pick a celebrity crush, it'd be Marco Pierre White in the 1990s. These days I appreciate him more for his self-deprecating humour, the influence he's had on London's dining scene, and his standing as a tastemaker. The Times ran a piece this week where MPW lists his favourite places in the world to travel and eat. I was delighted to see La Colombe d’Or as one of his favourite spots, and I’ve added all of the others to my own travel list.

02. The painter who finds the absurdity behind the dining room door

My own art collection leans abstract, but I have a soft spot for satire. Thomas Bossard is a contemporary French painter who provides some levity in my feed. His work finds the humour in traditionally stuffy institutions, and the chef, kitchen and dining room are a recurring motif. Chefs and diners show up as small, comical figures against imposing backdrops, a nod to the real absurdity that plays out in these rooms.

You can see more of Thomas Bossard’s work on Instagram, or in person at the L’Oeil du Prince Galerie in Biarritz.

03. “Fine dining is dead,” says chef Bruno Verjus

In a video posted to Instagram, chef Bruno Verjus announced he's closing his two-Michelin-star Parisian restaurant Table, opening the video with the line "fine dining is dead." His reasoning: he no longer feels comfortable excluding people from his table. It's a fair point, and a respectable one. But I don't think fine dining is dead, I think it's evolving into something new (and potentially more inclusive…)

04. Where does the art world eat in New York?

If you need something for your morning walk, I enjoyed The Art Angle's podcast episode, Where the Art World Eats. As a born-and-raised New Yorker living abroad, it's hard to keep up with the city's ever-changing dining scene, but museum-and-restaurant partnerships sound like one of its biggest trends in New York in 2026.

05. A deranged thriller for food lovers, and an important commentary on excess

I read Callie Kazumi’s novel Greedy a few weeks ago on holiday and thought the food writing was really excellent. Fair warning though, the ending goes somewhere unhinged, but it’s a powerful commentary on excess, one that I’m still thinking about weeks later.

Table for Two lives at the intersection of food and culture, not simply recommendations, but a considered point of view on why dining matters, and where to find the best of London’s table culture. If this piece resonated, please support my work by subscribing.

So when something new lands, there are a few things I’m looking for:

• Will this spot add something new to London’s dining scene? A way of cooking or a format others will spend the next few years borrowing.

• Is an established group taking a chance on a new chef, giving them a platform to make a name for themselves?

• Or, is the restaurant taking something already familiar and simply doing it better than anyone else currently is?

KID is the new Turkish restaurant that opened last week in Soho, the fifth from David Carter’s dcco, the group behind SMOKESTAK, Manteca, OMA and Agora.

Turkish food is hardly new to London. But two things about KID had me excited going into it. First, Agora and OMA were two of my favourite openings of 2024. Second, Carter has teamed up with chef Sertaç Dirik, who spent years running his family’s restaurant Mangal II in Dalston. Mangal I and Mangal II were London’s first two ocakbaşı restaurants, Turkish grill houses, and when they opened in ‘89 and ‘94 there was very little like them in the city. KID is Dirik’s first time leading a kitchen of his own in a central location, backed by a group with Michelin pedigree. That alone was enough to get me in the door.

The food itself isn’t reinventing the wheel, it’s Turkish cooking over a mangal grill, which London has seen before. But the menu leans on seasonal British produce and proteins alongside non-British flavours like pomegranate molasses and Turkish sivri peppers.

All of which is to say: I went in wanting KID to be good.

I love a restaurant on its opening weekend. The team is still working out the kinks, but there’s something magnetic about the energy of both staff and diners on that first Saturday seating. You feel it before you even step inside KID, the large glass windows give you a peek into the buzzing, candlelit dining room.

Not a single empty table, and a clear sense that everyone around you is there for the same reason you are. James and I were seated a few tables from chef Angela Hartnett and chef Neil Borthwick, fittingly, James had just watched her Where the Chefs Eat episode on Condé Nast Traveler, and we’d been talking about her when we passed Qua Vadis on the way over.

The atmosphere is a 10/10 for a Saturday date night, but I think it would also be well suited to a girls' night out. Whilst it was opening weekend, and the staff were clearly still familiarising themselves with the details of the menu, I found the service to be warm, diligent, and our servers seemed quite passionate.

The menu is my ideal format with seven sections where you order a few dishes in each section that come out slowly, leaving you space to savour each plate.

We start with Sukuk and Grilled Peach and the Courgette Flower with Tulum Goats Cheese. The starters were good, however I’d say they were the most average part of our meal. It was my first time eating sukuk, a Turkish spicy sausage, and I must admit I’m not a sausage fan. It was the grilled peach that got me, however instead of peaches off the grill it was more of a peach purée. This was my least favourite dish of the evening. The courgette flower was lovely, but I’d say on par with other courgette flowers I’ve eaten and nothing remarkable.

Luckily these two dishes were the only ones I felt apathetic about.

For our Meze we ordered the Smoked Aubergine & Garlic Yogurt and the Muhammara with the Wildfarmed Grilled Pide. The smoked aubergine was delightful, the smokiness of the aubergine balanced by the freshness of the yogurt, and a crispy grain sprinkled on top for texture. The muhammara comes deconstructed, with the roasted red pepper dip, walnuts and feta all served separately but in a single bowl. And the pide, a potato bread pita made over the grill, had just the right amount of smoke and served as the perfect vessel for the two dips.

Next were the small plates. We ordered the Içli Köfte, Aged Beef Yogurt and the Börek, Beyaz Peynir, Courgette. If you take only one menu suggestion away from this whole post let it be this: the köfte with aged beef is an absolute must. A pastry served with the most tender spiced beef and again perfectly balanced by the yogurt sauce. The börek was also delightful, and the courgette sauce it was served with complemented it well.

Next up we ordered the XL Cornish Scallop, Coco Bean Fasülye, a perfect example of British ingredients paired with Turkish tradition. The scallop, cooked perfectly tender, came served sliced on a bed of coco beans with the most warming flavours.

For our main we ordered the Lamb Lokma, Sivri Ezme, which is lamb heavily marinated with olive oil, garlic, lemon, and aromatic spices, cooked over the grill until it becomes perfectly tender and served with a finely chopped tomato and pepper condiment. We also ordered a side salad to complement the richness of the dish.

Finally, for dessert we ordered the baklava, which was served with cherry, and for a nearly faultless meal my biggest piece of feedback would be to serve it with a dollop of ice cream (or the Turkish equivalent dondurma) to complement the warmth of the dessert.

KID isn't inventing anything revolutionary with Turkish food, grilling over a mangal has been in London for nearly 40 years. But watching chef Dirik do it in a central London location, with dcco putting their pedigree behind it to make it happen, makes me quite excited and curious to see how KID is received over these next few months.

Let me know in the comments if you’ve been yet, and how your experience was.

You can reserve a table for KID here.

Table for Two lives at the intersection of food and culture, not simply recommendations, but a considered point of view on why dining matters, and where to find the best of London’s table culture. If this piece resonated, please support my work by subscribing.

From the moment we got on the call, his passion for food was obvious. As part of his introduction, he told me about a new ice cream shop he’d checked out in Bangkok earlier that day. He wasn’t sure it deserved the online buzz it was getting, but the first thing he said was that spots like this matter because they let people experience something special without a Michelin price tag attached. I knew I was in good company.

Our conversation centred on his nearly five years as an inspector, and it was riveting, demystifying a lot of what I’d always wondered about how the guide actually works from the inside. We covered everything from the night three inspectors unknowingly turned up to the same 25-seat restaurant, to how the decision to award a star is actually made.

This is one of my favourite conversations I’ve had for TFT so far.

Over to Chris.

You are a former Michelin inspector, covering the UK and Europe, how does someone actually get that job?

I’m very fortunate to have worked for Michelin in a role so few people get to do, and I still feel very loyal and supportive of the guide.

I have a degree in hotel management and worked in hospitality, in the kitchen at the Savoy and at The American Bar, before applying for the Michelin inspector role. I didn’t get it the first time. Six months later, Michelin reached back out. The process was extremely rigorous.

People assume Michelin hires for a refined palate, but that’s not it. They’re actually looking for a neutral palate, one they can mould to match inspectors around the globe. The expectation is that after training, you rate a restaurant consistently with everyone else. A 1-star in Tokyo should be consistent with a 1-star in London.

The food scene today is sophisticated, open Instagram and you’ll find no shortage of amateur critics with strong opinions. But Michelin doesn’t hire people who are opinionated, or who’ve already eaten at a lot of two- or three-star restaurants. The average age of a new inspector is late 20s to early 30s, people who aren’t particularly affluent or able to dine at that level yet. Michelin isn’t really looking for a trained palate, they’re looking for a blank one it can shape, someone who is passionate about food.

Your first 9-months, you were shadowing other inspectors before you were let loose on your own. What’s the one thing about judging a plate that you had to actually learn, that isn’t something you could ever pick up just from being a good eater?

The delta between a 1-star restaurant and a 2-star restaurant is quite distinguishable. What’s much harder to differentiate is the difference between a 2-star and a 3-star, and that’s something that only comes with practice. My first nine months as an inspector were all about collecting data. It’s the consistent volume of restaurants, seeing enough of them back to back, that trains you to make that distinction.

A good eater experiences a meal in isolation. What you’re taught to do as an inspector is hold it against a body of comparisons: this visit against your last visit to the same restaurant, and against every other 2 and 3 star meal you’ve had that year. You’re tracking how a menu has evolved, whether a dish that impressed you eighteen months ago is still being executed at that level, whether the kitchen has gotten complacent or sharper. That comparative memory isn’t something you’re born with. It’s built meal by meal, and the only way to train it is by visiting a high volume of 2-star and 3-star restaurants.

The role was famously anonymous, was that ever actually tested? Did you ever suspect a restaurant had worked out who you were?

Oh yeah, especially if you were solo dining. In London, inspectors would team up as much as possible, but outside London it was harder, and I’d often find myself alone in Scotland or the north of England. At the top end of the market, they certainly suspected, but they were professional enough not to ask.

One year, the guide was considering a star for a particular restaurant, and several of us were independently allocated to evaluate it. I walked into the dining room, which sat 25, and spotted an inspector at one table, and another inspector at a different table. That night, unbeknownst to the restaurant, they were serving three inspectors at three separate tables.

What people don’t always realise is that at the end of a meal, an inspector would reveal themselves to the staff. If there were two of us dining together, one would leave and one would stay behind to speak with the chef and learn more about the kitchen. We collected this information directly for the guide. It wasn’t always easy to get real time with them if the restaurant was busy and you didn’t want to draw attention to yourself, so I’d often go back the next morning at 10am for a proper conversation instead.

It was always funny revisiting a restaurant the following year, especially one where I’d had a long conversation with the chef after revealing myself at the end of the meal. At the top end, they were sophisticated enough to recognise me on sight the second time round, but they’d never say anything.

What was it like revealing yourself to the chef?

I was younger and less confident back then, and chefs are not known for being understated. Occasionally they could be very direct. “How is your meal?” “Why haven’t I gotten a star?” But I was incredibly fortunate to meet people like Pierre Koffmann, who was an absolute gentleman. You become more confident over time about what you can and can’t say, but you always give them the respect they undoubtedly deserve, and you’re bound by a code of conduct throughout.

Everyone assumes being a Michelin inspector is a dream job. Were there downsides you didn’t expect?

Plenty, it still is very much a job. You’re eating out for lunch and dinner, every day of the week, sometimes two dinners a night. You’re away Monday to Friday travelling around the country, and you spend some weekends alone in the country too, it’s a solitary existence. And you can’t really talk to anyone about what you actually do.

Only about 30 percent of what you do is star related, the other 70 percent is paperwork.

And after a long week of eating out at that level, when you get home on a Friday night, the last thing you want is something complicated. You want fish and chips, a burger, a quick Indian takeaway, something completely undemanding.

Eventually you start repeating yourself. You’ve travelled the length of the UK and Ireland, done a bit overseas too, and the same faces and rooms start coming around again. It’s not unpleasant exactly, people recognise you, especially at the top end of the market, but that repetition, and the isolation underneath it, was definitely the most difficult part of the role.

How is the decision to award a star actually made?

The decision to award a star is never one person’s call. It’s based on multiple visits from different inspectors, and it requires consensus, which is genuinely difficult to reach. Your score or conclusion has to match the words you actually use, if you describe a meal as wonderful, that has to be reflected in the score, and it has to hold up as an average across those multiple visits. The editor of the guide makes the final call, and Michelin is usually very conservative. If two inspectors come back with split opinions, the star doesn’t get awarded.

What’s the real difference between a 1-star, 2-star and a 3-star experience, not the guidebook language, but what you’re actually tasting and feeling as the diner?

There’s very little difference in what’s actually on the plate between a 2-star and a 3-star restaurant. If you follow football, 1-star is the Premier League, 2-star is the Champions League, and 3-star is the World Cup team. The real distinction at the 3-star level is consistency over years. A restaurant rarely earns 3 stars unless it’s been operating at a high standard for a long time.

1-star and 2-star restaurants don’t need to be luxurious. Interiors can be modest, the focus stays on the food. At 3-star, everything else comes into the equation too: the room, the service, the drinks program. It has to be excellent every single day, for years, not just on the plate but in the whole experience around it.

Michelin’s official line is that stars are about food alone, is that actually true in practice, or does service and atmosphere factor in more than they let on?

Officially, yes, food comes first. But you can’t properly rate a restaurant at 2 or 3 stars without accounting for everything around the food too, the wine list, the pacing of service, whether the team can cater to each table specifically. None of that is written into the guidebook language, but it inevitably does shape the score.

Where the official line does hold up is that a restaurant doesn’t need to be dressed up to earn a star. What actually matters is whether everything on offer, the food, the list, the service, feels coherent and justifies what’s being charged. So Michelin isn’t lying when it says food comes first, it’s just that once you’re eating at that level, food doesn’t really exist in isolation.

Tourism boards now openly fund Michelin’s expansion into new cities. Does that funding relationship compromise the guide’s credibility today?

It doesn’t make the guide less credible. Michelin has built a genuinely successful brand, and it’s entitled to make money from that. Like any business expansion, there have been a few hiccups along the way. When Michelin first expanded into Japan, for instance, there were no Japanese inspectors on staff, and you have to ask how you can properly judge Japanese food without them. But those growing pains got sorted out over time.

Tourism board funding enables Michelin to expand into new regions it might not otherwise reach. But that funding doesn’t change the standard restaurants are held to. Michelin still applies the same rigorous evaluation it always has, regardless of who’s paying for the expansion.

In an age where every meal gets photographed and reviewed instantly, how has Michelin managed to keep its anonymity intact?

Michelin has managed to hold onto something most institutions have lost in the social media age, a genuine sense of mystique…that’s remarkable when you think about it. Every diner now has a platform, everyone photographs their plate, and yet nobody really knows who the inspectors are or when they’re coming. That opacity is actually one of Michelin’s greatest assets, and I don’t think it’s an accident that they’ve protected it so carefully whilst everything else about food criticism has become transparent, instant, and personal.

With so many other rankings out there now, like the World’s 50 Best or Gault & Millau, does Michelin still carry more weight?

Gault & Millau and the World’s 50 Best are both respected, and they matter in their own right. But when a chef gets a call about their rating, it’s not the 50 Best list they’re thinking about first. It’s the stars. That’s true whether you’re in Tokyo, Paris, or New York. Nothing else has built the same weight, the same instantly legible signal, in the way Michelin has over more than a century.

Is there anything you’d change about how Michelin operates today, if you could?

Honestly, I wouldn’t change much. I’d want them to hold onto that mystery, the anonymity, and keep being slow to award stars. There have only been a handful of exceptions in the last 20 years, cases where a star was given faster than usual, and Michelin took criticism for it. That restraint is exactly what protects the credibility of the whole thing.

What dining trends are you finding genuinely interesting right now?

I’m a traditional guy, so I’ll give you the more skeptical answer first. Restaurants have to be creative, they have to teach me something new, but the trend toward ever-longer tasting menus isn’t the way to do that. I’ve been to some of the most talked-about restaurants in the world recently, and a few of them, for all the acclaim, feel a little formulaic to me.

I’ve also started to wonder about the commercial sustainability of the whole ultra-high-concept model. I went back to the Fat Duck a couple of years ago and it was truly awesome, but it left me asking how sustainable that kind of restaurant actually is. I think the three-star places, Mirazur in Menton, Le Louis XV Alain Ducasse in Monte Carlo, Plénitude in Paris, will always exist in some form, because of what they represent institutionally. I’m less confident about the tier below that.

Now that you’re no longer working for the Michelin guide, do you still find yourself checking restaurants when you eat out?

Completely, and I don’t think that ever goes away. You find yourself subconsciously checking a restaurant the moment you walk in. When someone goes above and beyond, you notice, and you think about it long after the meal. Equally, when you have a genuinely bad experience, it stays with you in the same way.

One last question, rather than your all-time favourite restaurant, if someone asked you where to eat once, this year, where would you send them?

Le Bernardin in New York. The lunch menu is great value for a 3-star kitchen, it’s the same room and precision for a fraction of dinner pricing whilst running 200+ covers a service without a dropped ball. It’s an extraordinary 3-star experience.

Earlier this week I had the opportunity to interview a former Michelin inspector for an upcoming Table for Two article. It was truly an eye opening conversation, I learned so much and I can’t wait to share it with you… more on that soon.

This might also be one of my most indulgent food weeks of the year. On Wednesday we got to try out chef Jan Hendrick van der Westhuzien’s restaurant JAN on the port of Nice (sensational!!!). Thursday we had lunch at La Colombe d’Or in Saint Paul de Vence, the spot where Picasso traded art for meals, and tonight we’re dining at World’s Best restaurant, Marizur, chef Mauro Colgreco’s top spot in Menton. We’ve been getting in lots of steps and swimming in the sea to balance it all out.

This week’s newsletter is inspired by the flurry of restaurants transporting between the major cities… but what happens to a restaurant’s charm when expansion becomes over saturation? I’m deep diving into the Major Food Group’s replication of Carbone (9 times over) and how this once elusive restaurant completely lost its magic for me.

Also inside: JAN and La Colombe d'Or from a week on the Côte d'Azur, the UK heatwave's effect on local sourcing, the VAT cut fight hits a wall, and London's first pizza tasting menu.

Carbone: When a restaurant’s expansion becomes brand dilution

When I lived in New York, Carbone was the hardest table to get a reservation.

It was 2014. I was in my early twenties, scraping by in one of the most expensive cities in the world with neither the connections nor the understanding really of how to secure an impossible-to-book reservation.

I left New York without ever trying Carbone’s cult-like Spicy Rigatoni Vodka, and for years it was a dish that lived in my mind as a piece of New York never accessible to me.

Fast forward 11-years later, Carbone opened in London at the end of 2025. From Fulham to Knightsbridge its now a 20 minute cab ride away, and at the time of writing this, there are more than a dozen reservations available for this evening, including the coveted 8pm slot.

Carbone London has been open now for 9 months, and I still have never been and honestly, I don’t think I ever will. Not in London, not in New York, not at Carbone’s “Riviera” location (which, confusingly, is located in Vegas), and not in any of their other nearly dozen locations. The restaurant has completely lost its magic to me.

You might say its the surplus of inventory, more bookings up for grabs means less scarcity, and therefore less demand for the restaurant. But I don’t think it’s that alone.

Carbone in 2014 felt elusive, it felt aspirational, it felt like a piece of New York’s culture that belonged strictly to New York. The best table for eating New York Italian food, authentic to an Italian chef who grew up in the city.

Today you can dine at any of its locations, across six countries, and diners know the type of experience they’ll get regardless of booking a table in Hong Kong or Miami. It’s the same night out.

In 2022 Carbone’s Greenwich Village flagship lost the Michelin star it held onto for eight years. This was during the same stretch of time the brand opened Miami, Dallas, and Doha, three new cities in under two years, with Riyadh, Dubai and London still to come.

Michelin isn’t the only precise measurement of quality, but losing a star the same year you open three new cities is a hard coincidence to ignore. The restaurant became so focused on replicating the same room, the same menu, the same experience from one city to the next, it's hard not to read that as dilution.

For many restaurants losing a Michelin star would be a kiss of death. But losing the star had no baring on the New York restaurant’s popularity, and today it’s still difficult to book their Greenwich Village location.

That’s because Carbone’s customers are no longer booking for what’s on the menu. They’re booking for a guaranteed scene, that’s copied and pasted from one location to the next, where you know exactly what you’re getting no matter where in the world you’re visiting from.

But I don’t want to eat Italian food in New York, Hong Kong and Dallas where the menu is the same. The same Spicy Rigatoni Vodka that lived in my mind as aspirational New York, can now be ordered in Doha, Miami, Hong Kong, etc. I want a menu that feels unique and fresh, with ingredients that reflect where in the world I am.

I also value a restaurant’s capacity to surprise. The same menu, the same atmosphere, the same theatre across six countries and nine locations, cannot surprise anyone. And that’s not a failure of Carbone, that’s by their own design.

I listened to an episode of The Go To Food Podcast recently where Mario Carbone was asked about public perception of restaurant expansion, his response:

It is absolutely a taboo because I believe people see it as this product that if the owners are to make a profit and grow and build multiple units then for some reason we must also be cheating the customer and that’s just not true.

That’s not it at all. As a businessman I have a lot of respect for what he’s built with The Major Restaurant Group, and I’d gladly dine at Torrisi or The Grill.

But when a restaurant, in this case Carbone, takes the successful DNA of what’s worked in one neighbourhood and transplants it across the world, it dilutes the soul that makes dining out so special.

It also changes the type of customer and demographic it initially attracted with the restaurant that earned it its success in the first place.

Carbone certainly has a customer with international demand. There’s a customer delighted to pay for a guaranteed scene with a guaranteed menu.

But the restaurant that was once so elusive to me, has multiplied many times over, and therefore no longer exists.

Restaurants of the week

My holidays are always centred around food, and in the South of France we’ve been completely spoiled for choice. Every meal this past week has been fantastic but there have been two stand outs.

JAN, Nice

Jan Hendrik van der Westhuizen was the first South African chef to receive a Michelin star back in 2016 for his restaurant JAN in Nice. When we were researching our trip I kept stumbling on his spot in Nice, and it didn’t disappoint. The restaurant is French, but the kitchen draws on influence from their founders South African heritage. Every dish is injected with so much creativity and heart, from the butter course, sculpted as Jan van Riebeeck, with three types of butter: salted, cognac, and bannana and cinnamon. Through to the cheese course: a completely separate restaurant across the street where you build your plate from a table of 20+ cheeses. Each of the courses was executed to an immaculate standard, my husband and I agreed it’s the first tasting menu we’ve had this year where we simply cannot pick a stand out dish, they were all exceptional.

La Colombe d’Or, Saint Paul de Vence

I remember hearing about La Colombe d’Or on a podcast back in 2020. Six years later I finally got to try it for myself. For those unfamiliar La Colombe d’Or started as a modest cafe/inn in the 1920s. When the Riviera became a wartime refuge for artists, the owners Paul and Baptistine Roux let painters settle their tabs in canvases rather than cash. This trade turned this small village restaurant into one of the greatest private art collections in France, with pieces by Picasso, Matisse, Braque, all hanging along the walls.

Lunch on the terrace was absolutely buzzing, though if I'm honest, I was more excited for the art than the food. We started with a fig and parma ham plate, then the sole for mains. After lunch I snuck inside to go looking for the art collection. First, a Picasso lithograph hangs almost carelessly over the fire alarm on the way to the bathroom, in a humble frame, if I wasn’t looking for it I would’ve missed it. But it's the main dining room that’s really stayed with me. Everyone was out on the terrace, so I had it entirely to myself… just me and the art, hanging in the exact room it was made for. Completely unforgettable experience!

What’s happening in food, dining & culture this week:

How will the UK’s sustained heatwave change how local ingredients show up on a menu?

The majority of top UK menus sell themselves on provenance of local ingredients. But what happens when climate changes the way crops grow locally? This article from the Guardian highlights how six homegrown products have been affected by the prolonged heat. This isn’t a one off summer, it’s what food security looks like under sustained heat and it’s going to keep reshaping how “local” shows up on a menu. What I’m curious about is how kitchens will adapt sourcing and menu design.

UK treasury warns VAT cuts for hospitality might not be feasible

Back in June Tom Kerridge launched the VAT’s the problem campaign, advocating for the reduction of VAT for hospitality to be cut from 20% to 10%, in line with the rest of Europe. This week James Murray responds for the first time with a warning:

“We want to support hospitality, but let’s be upfront about this. If you’re having a big cut in VAT, it cost a lot of money, and anything we announce we want to make sure is fully funded”

This comes at the same time top chefs question the commercial sustainability of running fine dining restaurants in the UK.

The difference between hospitality & servitude

’s Substack is one I always really enjoy, written from his perspective as an owner of two restaurants in Bristol. Last week he published this article sharing his restaurants’ approach to hospitality, and how they manage the absurd requests from patrons. Dan touches on the financial side as well, and how an off menu request has economic consequences.

London’s first pizza tasting menu

Napoli on the Road introduces London to its first ever pizza tasting menu at their spot in Soho. When I first heard about this a few weeks ago I thought it sounded like a gimmick (still kind of does?), however the caliber of chef/founder cannot be denied. Michele Pascarella was awarded Best Pizza Maker in the world in 2023, and NOTR has been awarded Best Pizzeria in Europe (outside of Italy) in 2024, 2025, and 2026, as well as Pizza of the Year in 2023, 2025, 2026. At £65 per person, it’s great value for money in Soho, 7-courses with an entree, antipasti, four types of pizza and a dessert.

That’s all for this week’s newsletter. Enjoy the week, and I’ll see you next Friday.

Danielle x

Table for Two lives at the intersection of food and culture, not simply recommendations, but a considered point of view on why dining matters, and where to find the best of London’s table culture. If this piece resonated, please support my work by subscribing.

I was very much still in London this week, and I must admit it’s quite tough to eat in this heat. I’ve mostly eaten at home this week, simply because I can’t bare to be in a restaurant with a roaring fire and no air conditioning. I’ve been eating some variation of a peach, nectarine and tomato salad all week.

Table for Two turned three months old this week, and I want to give a big thank you to everyone who’s subscribed. In the past month alone, TFT has picked up nearly 200 new subscribers, been invited to its first event, connected with a load of brilliant creators, and has been a really good creative outlet.

Much more to come over the next few months, and thank you again for being here.

Noma re-opens their Copenhagen doors at $700 per head with zero Michelin stars. What does this new era signify?

A closed kitchen. A chef scandal. A $1,500 per head LA residency. A decision to reopen the Copenhagen doors after all.

Noma has had an extraordinarily turbulent year. Last week it reopened as Noma 3.0 under new leadership, chef Pablo Soto, who’s been with Noma since 2013, now runs the kitchen, whilst René Redzepi has stepped back into a creative director role.

Let’s back up though. The closure of Noma 2.0 was years in the making, and happened later than planned. The “end of 2024” deadline announced in January 2023 kept getting pushed back until the restaurant finally closed nearly a full year past its own stated date.

Back in 2023, Redzepi told the New York Times that financially and emotionally, as an employer and as a human being, it just didn’t work. Noma’s own statement, posted the same day, struck a different note: the plan was to close the restaurant and reopen as Noma Projects, a pioneering test kitchen dedicated to food innovation, sharing the learnings of that work more widely than ever before.

Noma’s influence has shaped the food industry well beyond its own dining room, and the idea was to redirect that toward licensing, an e-commerce line and occasional pop-ups. As the company put it, being a restaurant would no longer define them

Shortly after closing, the Noma team hosted its first residency in LA, at $1,500 a head. But not before the New York Times broke a story detailing abuse allegations against Redzepi from 35 former employees between 2009 and 2017. This included verbal abuse, physical assault, intimidation.

I won’t go into the details here but his behaviour was abhorrent. Days after the story broke, on the opening day of the LA residency, Redzepi posted that he was stepping down, saying he’d take responsibility for his own actions and let Noma’s other leaders guide the restaurant’s next chapter.

The controversy didn’t stop the LA pop-up from opening, but it drew protesters, including Noma’s own former head of fermentation R&D, who’d spent months compiling other former employees’ allegations online.

So why, after finally closing its doors to focus on R&D and innovation, did Noma announce in June that they’d be reopening their doors in Copenhagen, as Noma 3.0 at roughly $700 a head?

I’ve been thinking about this a lot. Noma didn’t just lose its stars by closing, it asked Michelin to remove their stars, arguing they hadn’t been open long enough under new leadership to have earned them. It didn’t appear among Copenhagen’s three-star restaurants in the 2026 Nordic guide, and says it doesn’t expect to reclaim them in 2027 either. However, they’re still charging $700 a head for a menu with zero Michelin stars attached.

That’s not exactly the humility the ‘please remove our stars’ first comes across as… it seems like a pricing experiment. For twenty years, the stars were the pricing power, they’re the industry’s shorthand for “this justifies the number on the bill.”

If $700 with no stars sells out the way $700 with three stars used to, that tells you what the R&D pivot in isolation cannot… that Noma’s brand has decoupled from Michelin’s rating system entirely, and the restaurant itself has become proof of concept for that decoupling, evidence to license, not just food to sell. In other words, Noma is now testing whether its own name does that job without the stars.

And early evidence suggests that it does. Reservations are currently open through November, with all spots booked (and paid up front) within minutes of becoming available.

Which is why leadership under Pablo Soto matters. He’s the mechanism Noma is using to make the decoupling from a darker time credible. He’s been on staff since 2013, so he’s not an outsider brought in to clean the brand’s reputation.

He was in the kitchen through the years the abuse allegations describe, which can be read two ways… it’s continuity, but it also means Noma is asking the public to trust that someone who witnessed the old culture is now qualified to dismantle it. When Soto says “we’re still here standing,” it’s Noma’s whole business thesis in one sentence. Noma is betting the name survives the man who built it and Soto is the test of whether that’s true.

What I find most interesting is the restaurant is no longer the product. It’s the marketing budget to showcase and build credibility around Noma’s R&D efforts. And at $700 a head with no stars to justify the price, the live test of whether the Noma name can carry its own valuation without either Redzepi or Michelin behind it.

Noma’s influence never worked by being the best restaurant in the world in isolation… it worked because the entire industry copied it. Foraging, fermentation, the tasting menu as narrative format… all of that spread because ambitious kitchens used Noma as a reference point for what serious food could be.

Perhaps this is an idealistic view, but if Noma 3.0 succeeds commercially, it could set up the same mechanism for kitchen culture. A restaurant with this much gravitational pull, if it can make paid interns, real time off, and supportive leadership look like the standard a top kitchen is supposed to meet, without compromising on ambition or quality, could Noma do for the culture in top kitchens, what it already did for fermentation and foraged garnishes?

Let me know what your thoughts are on Noma 3.0’s re-opening?

Stubby's, an Aussie-inspired café, lands in Parsons Green

There’s a lot to love about Fulham, but the food scene isn’t it. I’ve spent an embarrassing amount of time with friends and neighbours trying to unpack why we don’t have good restaurants here, and why the ones we do get don’t seem to last (RIP Fenn). Pubs, we’ve got on lock. Anything more ambitious, less so.

But the past eighteen months has brought a run of good casual openings, Vincino’s reopening, Common Pizza, Sablé (best cookies in London by a mile), all doing well, and now Parsons Green welcomes Stubby’s, an Aussie-inspired café and wine bar serving artisanal sandwiches for lunch. I’ve been several times since it opened at the end of July, and it’s a fantastic addition to the neighbourhood.

The sandwiches are elevated well beyond typical takeaway lunch. There’s the Tamsin, with koji chicken thigh, chilli crisp, salsa verde and parmesan, and the Barry, with porchetta, katsu and cucumber, amongst several others. I also really like that you can order a whole or a half sandwich.

The coffees and matchas are just as good, I’ve been drinking them iced, with cold foam, and have become fully addicted to the Mont Blanc cold brew.

Every time I’ve been, there’s been a queue out the door and I waited 20 minutes for a sandwich last weekend. I’ve also been told the sandwiches sell out by 1pm on weekends, so get there early. Seating is limited, so plan to take away (it’s right on Parsons Green, so eating on the grass is a great option… although it’s quite beige and crunchy at the moment…).

That’s all for this week. We’re going to see Tony tonight at the Everyman, followed by pizza at Alleycats. Tomorrow we plan on cooking from Santiago Lastra’s new cookbook, Mexican Soul.

Have a wonderful weekend, and I’ll see you next Friday.

Best,
Danielle

Table for Two lives at the intersection of food and culture, not simply recommendations, but a considered point of view on why dining matters, and where to find the best of London’s table culture. If this piece resonated, please support my work by subscribing.

Two minutes out, you open the page.

Thirty seconds out, you start refreshing.

On the third refresh the times appear….a whole column of them… and you take the coveted 8pm Saturday spot.

The adrenaline carries you the rest of the day. In fact, it probably carries you until the dinner itself.

There is no shortage of new openings this autumn, but there’s a much shorter list of those that’ll require the above.

Sometimes it comes down to the chef, but there are also the groups that’ve spent years building a following, a whole universe a diner can step into for a few hours, and the booking difficulty is inherited before the doors even open.

I went through every new restaurant announcement for the rest of the year and pulled the six I’m certain will be the hardest tables to book in London this autumn.

At the end I’ve included some practical tips on how to actually secure one of these elusive tables.

Set your alarms.

Autumn 2026’s Top Openings

01. Soraya, Marleybone

Cuisine:

Persian

Background:

The latest from Pachamama Group, who have done perhaps the best world building of anyone in London. Same team as Nina, Bottarga, Zephyr and Lagana.

You can measure the demand. Monday morning, I checked availability across the group for that same night. Nina, one table at 10pm. Bottarga, nothing. Lagana, 5pm or 9:45. Zephyr, 9:45pm. That’s a Monday. Try Thursday or Friday and there is nothing at all, at any hour.

Soraya doesn’t have the most pedigreed kitchen in this list, but it won’t matter. What this group does better than anyone is build a room you want to be in, and the food holds up underneath it. What they’re doing differently this time is opening in public, their creative director Yaroslava Malkova has been documenting the build in a register that matches the restaurant itself, so by the time the doors open the audience is already inside. I have felt genuinely invested in a construction delay, which is not a sentence I expected to write. Soraya was supposed to open in June, then July, now August.

Opening:

August 2026

Follow:

Follow Soraya on Instagram

02. KID, Soho

Cuisine:

Turkish

Background:

This is Sertaç Dirik’s first restaurant of his own, after years at his family’s cult restaurant, Mangal II, in Dalston, which he left in 2023. He’s opening KID with David Carter, founder of OMA, Agora, Smokestak, and co-founder of Manteca.

Carter has a track record of opening rooms that gain popularity and recognition quickly, most recently OMA earned its Michelin star in under a year, whilst Agora picked up a Bib Gourmand in that same window. Pair that with a chef whose kitchen is still named among London’s best, even three years after he left the pass. The restaurant will be built around sourdough pide, charcoal, and house made çökelek.

Like Soraya, KID has been building in public. Unlike Soraya, the tone is subtler and more aesthetic, this week they posted the craftsmanship behind the restaurant’s tables, built by Jan Hendzel Studio.

Between the chef and the restaurateur, KID is shaping up to be one of the hardest bookings this autumn.

Opening:

1 September 2026

Booking Opens:

Monday, 10 August 2026

Follow:

Follow KID on Instagram

03. Nakimushi, Notting Hill

Cuisine:

Japanese

Background:

Chris D’Sylva’s restaurant group, which includes Dorian, Eel Sushi, Supermarket of Dreams, the Notting Hill Fish + Meat Shop, is adding Nakimushi to its portfolio.

Nakimushi will put two chefs across three floors of a townhouse in Notting Hill. Chef Robin Kosuge’s will be leading Robin’s Ramen on the ground floor, while chef Yuji Shimokawa Kelly will be opening his sushi restaurant, Urchin, upstairs.

This is the most pre tested opening in London this autumn. Both concepts ran as residencies first, and both built the demand that made a permanent room inevitable. Robin’s Ramen went from a one-day pop-up at Eel Sushi to an eight-month residency that ended in May.

Between both chefs audiences, as well as the audience that comes with any restaurant Chris D’Sylva opens, Nakimushi is launching with a lot of pent up demand.

Opening:

September 2026

Follow:

Follow Nakimushi on Instagram

04. Rump Steak, Notting Hill

Cuisine:

Steakhouse

Background:

Speaking of Chris D’Sylva’s growing portfolio, this week Rump Steak was announced as his next venture. The restaurant will focus on underused, rarer cuts of meat.

Nose to tail isn't new, but building an entire restaurant on the parts nobody orders is. That's a narrow enough premise to fail badly and a good enough one to start a category, and D'Sylva's record says it lands.

The reason it goes on this list is simpler than the rest. It's another Chris D'Sylva restaurant, and he doesn't miss. Dorian took a year to get a star and still is tough to book. Supermarket of Dreams turned a grocer into a destination. Nothing needs to be known about Rump Steak beyond who is opening it.

Opening:

This one was just announced this week and they say it’s set to open later this year but haven’t put a date on it yet.

Follow:

No Instagram account yet

05. Kong, Spitalfields

Cuisine:

Chinese

Background:

Chef Andrew Wong and Dishoom’s co-founder Amar Radia are opening a first of its kind Chinese pub in Shoreditch.

Wong already holds two stars at A. Wong and Radia helped build the most reliable queue in British hospitality with Dishoom. A Chinese pub is the kind of idea that gets written about before it serves anybody, and this pairing means it has already attracted a lot of attention.

The only thing that’s unclear to me is that given the pub format, will they take reservations or run on walk-ins only. If Kong holds most of its room back, the difficulty won’t be making the booking, it’ll be the queue on arrival. Stay tuned.

Opening:

Autumn 2026

Follow:

Follow Kong on Instagram

06. Coreus by Clare Smyth, Admiralty Arch

Cuisine:

Seafood

Background:

Smyth’s third London restaurant, after three starred Core and Corenucopia, which took a star within months of opening. It sits inside the Waldorf Astoria at Admiralty Arch, in the former home of the First Sea Lord, and it’s built around coastal and lesser-known British seafood.

Between Smyth’s Midas touch and a Grade I landmark on The Mall with a view down to Buckingham Palace, this will be the hardest table to book on the list.

Opening:

Autumn 2026

Follow:

Coreus doesn’t have an Instagram yet, but you can follow the Waldorf Admiralty Arch’s account here, or Clare Smyth’s Instagram here

(bonus) 07. The Horses, Clerkenwell

Cuisine:

Pub

Background:

Of course, two hours after I hit publish on this article, The Public House Group announced they’ll be opening their next pub, The Horses, so (as promised) I’m adding this as a bonus 7th. The group has gone from strength to strength opening pubs that are chic, elevated and truly celebrate British cuisine, and its reflected in their popularity. Try booking the Fat Badger or The Hart on a Friday or Saturday at 8pm, it is not easy. This will also be their first opening with an east postcode, in the ever growing food mecca that is Clerkenwell. I expect this will be one of the hardest reservations to secure this autumn.

Opening:

September 2026

Follow:

Follow The Horses on Instagram

Practical Tips for How
To Actually Book a Table

As we’ve discussed, I’m no stranger to setting an alarm and the pre-booking scramble to snag a Saturday night reservation. But I do like to take a more calculated approach to the booking mania. Below are a few tips I’ve learned over the years to actually secure a table at an impossible-to-book new opening.

Before bookings open

Join the restaurant’s mailing list, not just their Instagram - Restaurants email their own list ahead of public release, sometimes a full day before. If the restaurant doesn’t have its own mailing list yet then join the group’s list. Both Pachamama and D’Sylva have proper mailing lists which I’d bet will get booking priority. Instagram will tell you when bookings are open, but the the email will usually provide you with first access.

Set up your account on the platform now - Resy, OpenTable, SevenRooms, most of us already have accounts across all of these platforms but it’s crucial to make sure you’re set up with card details saved, phone verified and logged in before the booking opens. The ninety seconds you lose creating an account is the ninety seconds the table exists. Worth checking which platform each restaurant uses before release day, because they differ and you don’t want to be signing up while the calendar empties.

Turn on Instagram Story alerts, not just post alerts - Soft launches, friends and family nights and early-access links will go out on Instagram Stories, rather than posts, and disappear in 24 hours.

Follow the chef and the group, not only the restaurant - Announcements often land on the personal account first.

The day it drops

Find out the release pattern - Most London restaurants use a rolling window, a fixed number of days out, at a fixed hour, or the first of the month for the month ahead. Once you know the pattern you never have to guess again, and you can set a recurring calendar reminder rather than relying on an Instagram post you might miss.

Book on desktop, logged in, one tab - I hate to say I’ve lost reservations because the booking site was open on multiple tabs. Stick to one tab and avoid any tech frustrations.

Adjust your party size - Tables for two usually go first. If your search comes out blank search for four, these usually are easier to book, and then you get to invite friends.

Take the bad slot - This one’s a bit cheeky but take the five thirty or nine forty-five, then amend upward. Many systems (not all) let you move an existing booking, and moving is much easier than getting one.

If you don’t get the booking…

Work the cancellation window - No-show fees usually bite at 24 or 48 hours, which means cancellations arrive in clusters at exactly those marks. Check the site at the 48-hour and 24-hour points before the date you want.

Sign up for notify on every platform the restaurant uses - Then actually respond fast, those alerts go to everyone simultaneously.

Walk in for the counter seat - Counter and bar seats are frequently held back from the system entirely, making it possible to snag a seat as a walk in.

Go early, not late - Counterintuitive but true: the hardest week is usually around week six, once the reviews land, so go right after opening.

This week: reflections on “Where Are the Women Restaurateurs?”, five stories in food & dining culture to dig into over dinner this weekend, the restaurant of the week as well as the openings that should be on your radar for autumn.

Drop me an email reply or a comment telling me what you think of the new format.

Where are the women restaurateurs?

Three restaurateurs on what it actually takes to open a restaurant, and my reflections on what their stories tell us about female ownership.

One of the best parts about starting this Substack has been engaging with so many inspiring creators on the platform, and this week I had the opportunity to meet one of those creators in person. Pani is the writer behind The Goal Is To Eat, and her newsletter is one I’m always excited to see land in my inbox. This week she hosted a Monday evening panel at Toklas Restaurant, with an inspiring group of restaurateurs, the topic: Where Are The Women Restaurateurs?

The panel included three women who’ve opened brick and mortars in food & beverage: Cynthia Shanmugalingam who owns the buzzy Borough Market Sri Lankan spot Rambutan; Anna Higham owner and pastry chef behind the Islington neighbourhood bakery Quince; and Boutheina Ben Salem owner of Tunisian coffee house OULA.

The conversation was candid, touching on topics I haven’t heard discussed publicly like how much does it cost to open a restaurant, how to finance an opening, and how to pick the right location for your spot?

Whilst the panel was not asked directly where are the women restaurateurs, having honest conversations that de-stigmatise some of the barriers to entry for minority groups, is the first step in answering its own question.

The theme that defined the night across each panelist is that none of these three women received capital through institutional channels like banks or VCs. They got in through personal networks, friends who'd invest, ten years of industry goodwill, and a chance conversation at a dinner.

What emerged across all three: hospitality capital still runs informally, and informal capital runs on who you already know. This is the barrier that filters out people without pre-existing access, disproportionately women and minorities.

It's worth asking whether this is a gender story specifically, or whether 'call in every favour you've ever earned' is just how independent restaurants get built full stop, regardless of who's asking. Plenty of male owned openings run on the same informal capital. But if the network everyone draws on skews toward people who already look like the industry's existing owners, the mechanism doesn't have to be discriminatory to produce a discriminatory result.

If the door in is a personal network, the fix could be making informal capital less informal through published investor lists, funds earmarked for women and minority led openings, formal routes that don't depend on ten years of goodwill or a lucky seat at the right dinner.

In the meantime, if you’d like to support more female owned restaurants, there are a few resources available. Pani published this resource: Women Owned Hospitality Index, which maps female-owned restaurants, bakeries, cafés, and pubs across London. Sally Abé, restaurateur behind Teal and Kayla Lawrie, Top Jaw producer, have also built a map, with female owned UK restaurants in London and beyond.

After dinner conversations

From the serious, to the light-hearted, a round-up of dining and culture news to dig into around the table this weekend.

01. London Museum is re-opening with food & beverage as core programming

London Museum has announced its reopening in a new home at Smithfield this November. The museum closed in December 2022 and will reopen in the historic General Market building in November 2026. The building has been empty for more than thirty years and renovations for the new museum began a decade ago. The launch includes four hospitality concepts: an all-day bistro, a bar with a London-inspired drinks programme, a café open 24 hours Thursday to Sunday, and a rotating residency space for up and coming food talent. Earlier this year the V&A East opened with Jikoni on site. At £437 million in restoration costs, F&B isn't an afterthought here, it's doing some of the work of justifying the spend as museums start to monetise the visit beyond the exhibition ticket.

London Museum opens on November 28th.

Learn more about their F&B program here

02. Smoke taint concerns in Bordeaux

It's been frightening to watch the wildfires raging across the South of France, and my heart goes out to everyone affected. Separately, and on a much smaller scale, the fires are also threatening this year's Bordeaux harvest through smoke taint, where smoke particles cling to grape skins and alter the wine's flavour, degrading quality, especially in red varieties. This will likely result in an uneven 2026 Bordeux vintage where the estate (and its proximity to the fires) will matter a lot.

The news this week reminded me of an article I read last year in Saveur on how the climate crisis will reshape, and in some cases eliminate, our favourite foods, linked here. A fascinating and terrifying read.

Read full article on smoke taint concerns in Bordeaux here

03. Marco Pierre White Makes a Lasagna for BBC Maestro

On a much lighter note, I'd love to know who's running Marco Pierre White's Instagram, because it's full of self-deprecating posts like this one. There are two versions of MPW living in my head: the Harvey's 1990s era screamer who kicked out customers for asking for salt... and then there's the fully self aware chef we get today. We’ve seen Gordon Ramsay use TikTok similarly, the same men who built reputations on kitchen tyranny are now being repackaged as nostalgia and self-parody.

Anyway, this MPW collab post actually made me laugh out loud.

04. The Wolseley’s Founder Thinks You’re Doing Dates Wrong

A restaurateur has the best vantage point on some of the most interesting moments of a life: first dates, proposals, break-ups. I really enjoyed this piece by Alfred Tong who interviewed Jeremy King, founder of J Sheekey, Le Caprice, The Ivy, and The Wolseley. King shares his dating advice from the perspective of someone with four decades of observing from his restaurants.

“Some of the worst problems I’ve ever had in restaurants were with people wearing suits and ties….”

Read the full article by Alfred Tong here

05. Dominic Sessa only read Kitchen Confidential after he was cast as Anthony Bourdain

Bourdain die-hards are up in arms over the Tony trailer. Dominic Sessa was on Vogue’s The Run-Through this week talking about playing a young Bourdain, and admitted he knew almost nothing about him going in, only picking up Kitchen Confidential after landing the role.

The Bourdain purists are calling it sacrilege. I’d argue it’s the opposite. A super fan brings baggage…. reverence, imitation, and would perform a romanticised version of Bourdain (read: cringe). A trained actor with no prior attachment can build the role from research instead.

Link to the interview can be found here. Interview starts 16 minutes in.

Restaurant of the week

A weekly review of one restaurant I’ve eaten at recently and would recommend.

Luca, Clerkenwell

There are few better places to spend a sunny Saturday afternoon in London than tucked away on a terrace, and Luca might just have one of my favourite terraces in the city. The space is in the back of the restaurant so it’s far away from any main roads which means it’s tranquil and feels like you’re escaping London for the afternoon.

Earning a Michelin-star in 2023, Luca is famous for serving what it describes as “Britalian” cuisine, a modern style of Italian food that views traditional Italian recipes through a seasonal British lens. For example, instead of using cheese from Bologna, you’ll find an artisanal variety from Bedfordshire instead.

Menu highlights: Roast orkney scallops with jerusalem artichoke and ‘nduja; Parmesan fries; Tortelloni of Italian courgettes, ricotta, datterini tomatoes, basil and hot honey

Address: 88 St John Street, Clerkenwell, London, EC1M 4EH

Book here

To have on your radar…

What's next in restaurant and dining culture and worth keeping an eye on.

Over the past week and a half we've had a few exciting announcements in restaurant openings and culture. These are the ones to have on your radar:

Restaurants:

• Waterhouse - The Water House Project is reopening simply as Waterhouse, in a new Victorian warehouse space on Ezra Street, near Columbia Road. Opening 6 August 2026.

• Endo - Endo Kazutoshi is opening a 10-seat omakase restaurant in the former Five Fields site in Chelsea, with a listening bar upstairs. Opening October 2026.

Culture:

• The Rise of the Rockstar Chef - A 3 part BBC documentary featuring Gordon Ramsay, Marco Pierre White and Heston Blumenthal. Premiering late 2026

• Tony - The A24 biopic of Anthony Bourdain. Coming to UK cinema 14th August, 2026.

  ---

Table for Two lives at the intersection of food and culture, not simply recommendations, but a considered point of view on why dining matters, and where to find the best of London’s table culture. If this piece resonated, please support us by subscribing.

I’m still extremely particular about my dessert selection, though. A good dessert can’t be overpoweringly sweet, it needs different textures in every bite, and ideally different temperatures too… a level of precision that, in my experience, only shows up in more experienced kitchens.

But sometimes a sweet tooth calls, and what you actually want is that same precision without the eight courses that come before it.

London has no shortage of options: bakeries opened by pastry chefs who built their reputations in some of the world’s best Michelin kitchens, and are now running things on their own, in a far more casual format.

Below you’ll find 7 bakeries opened by chefs who’ve led pastry in Michelin-starred kitchens. Each costing a fraction of a full Michelin meal but delivering the same satisfaction of dessert done at the highest standard.

I’ve been to all of them personally, so consider it properly vetted with ordering recommendations, plus what to know about each chef’s pedigree.

01. Onsu (Soho)

Chef:
Michael Kwan

Type of Desserts:
Pastries & Cakes

Pedigree:
Michael Kwan trained in the pastry sections of The Fat Duck (3-stars) and Hakkasan, before becoming Head Pastry Chef at Ladurée and Executive Pastry Chef at The Dorchester (3-stars) in 2022. In addition to his glowing CV, Kwan is a multi title competitive pastry chef, he was the UK Sugar Champion (2019), European Pastry Cup Champion (2022), and Craft Guild of Chefs Pastry Chef of the Year (2024). Onsu is his first standalone concept.

What to know:
Onsu opened in Soho this past January, blending Asian flavours with classical European patisserie technique. The bakery arrived to huge fanfare (queues spanning down the street) but arrive at opening and you'll beat the crowds.

What to order:
For pastries: The Wagyu curry bun (if you don’t see it on the counter ask if they have any left), the kumquat cheesecake, the Salted egg yolk mille-feuille and the blackcurrent & blueberry yoghurt mousse (pictured above)

For drinks: Any of the -86°C coffees or teas are Onsu’s signature. The glass is so cold it ends up freezing your beverage like its a slushy. Go with somebody you can share with, this was sweet and I couldn’t have more than a few sips.

Format:
Takeaway or eat in

02. Le Café by Nicolas Rouzaud (Mayfair)

Chef:
Nicolas Rouzaud

Type of Desserts:
Cakes & Pastries

Pedigree:
Nicolas Rouzaud trained for seven years at Le Bristol Paris (3-star) under pastry chef Laurent Jeannin, before becoming Executive Pastry Chef at The Connaught, leading pastry at Hélène Darroze at The Connaught’s (3-stars) Afternoon Tea. Le Café is his first standalone café concept.

What to know:
Le Café opened in January 2026 in Burlington Arcade, the first independent shop from Chef Nicolas Rouzaud, who also remains Executive Head Chef at The Connaught. Its bright red storefront stands out against the formal independents around it, and the branding feels like pure joy. The pastry is delicate, the flavours well balanced. Order at the counter, then grab a seat by the window upstairs.

What to order:
The vanilla flan, the saint-honoré, the hazelnut Paris-brest or, for something savoury, the tomato & mozzarella feuilleté.

Format:
Table service & takeaway

03. Cedric Grolet at The Berkeley (Knightsbridge)

Chef:
Cedric Grolet

Type of Desserts:
Cakes

Pedigree:
Cédric Grolet trained at Fauchon for five years before joining Le Meurice (2-sstars) as sous-chef in 2011, becoming Executive Pastry Chef there in 2012. In 2018 he was named World's Best Pastry Chef by The World's 50 Best Restaurants. Cédric Grolet at The Berkeley is his first standalone pastry boutique outside Paris.

What to know:
Cedric Grolet is part of The Berkeley hotel in Knightsbridge, however to access you must walk through the bakeries entrance on Wilton Place. Here you have the option to dine in, with either a 5-course menu (£90), or seven-course menu (£135). Alternatively, you can order a treat at the counter for takeaway and eat it at one of the tables outside.

What to order:
Trompe-l’oeil fruit sculptures…the pear or flat peach is the most popular.

Format:
Table service & takeaway

04. Cakes & Bubbles, Hotel Café Royal (Mayfair)

Chef:
Albert Adrià

Type of Desserts:
Cakes

Pedigree:
Albert Adrià built his early career as a pastry chef at elBulli (3-stars when it was open) and today owns and runs the restaurant Enigma (2-stars) in Barcelona. In 2015 he won the World's Best Pastry Chef award. This is Albert Adrià's first spot outside Spain.

What to know:
Cakes & Bubbles is the most formal spot on this list, it has more of a restaurant feel than a bakery feel, so it's better suited to occasions where you want to sit down with a glass of bubbles and a sweet treat. That said, there's a small bar area if you'd rather sit casually, or you can get chocolates or cakes to go. To access you can either go through the hotel lobby or the bakery has its own entrance on Regents Street

What to order:
Basque burnt cheesecake and a glass of champagne

Format:
Table service & takeaway

05. Claridge’s Bakery (Mayfair)

Chef:
Richard Hart

Type of Desserts:
Breads with a small selection of pastries

Pedigree:
Trained as a fine-dining chef at Maze (1- star) and Bistrotheque, before relocating to California, where he became head baker at the world-renowned Tartine Bakery in San Francisco for seven years. In 2018 he co-founded Hart Bageri in Copenhagen with Noma's René Redzepi.

What to know:
This spot is best for breads, there are very few pastries here. It's a tiny little space that feels quite sweet, and if you were dropped in with no context, you might mistake it for a neighborhood spot. There's no entrance through the hotel; you can only access it via Brooks Mews.

What to order:
The sourdough country loaf or the marmite cheese straws (pictured above)

Format:
Takeaway only

06. Quince (Islington)

Chef:
Anna Higham

Type of Desserts:
Pastries

Pedigree:
Anna Higham trained under Gordon Ramsay before becoming Head of Pastry at Lyle's (1-star) and running the bakery at its Borough Market spin-off, Flor, where she won Baker of the Year at the Young British Foodie awards in 2019. She went on to become Executive Pastry Chef at The River Café (1-star) before founding Quince.

What to know:
While most of the bakeries on this list lean French technique, Quince intentionally goes the other way. No croissants at all, the focus is entirely on British baking traditions: soda breads, butteries, scones, country loaves and rustic baguettes made exclusively with UK grown stoneground flour. I read that Nigel Slater is a regular, rumoured to pop in most Saturdays for an oat cookie.

What to order:
The brown butter bun, which is the best seller

Format:
Takeaway only

07. William Curley Patisserie Chocolatier
(Soho)

Chef:
William Curley

Type of Desserts:
Chocolates

Pedigree:
William Curley trained through the pastry sections of Pierre Koffmann's La Tante Claire (3-stars) and Raymond Blanc's Le Manoir aux Quat'Saisons (2-stars), before becoming the youngest ever Chef Pâtissier at The Savoy. He's since been named Britain's Best Chocolatier four times by the Academy of Chocolate.

What to know:
This spot is much more a fancy chocolate shop than a bakery, but it's the perfect place to pick up a box for a hostess gift, or a few pieces for yourself to keep in the fridge and make your evening square of chocolate feel far more elevated (I can say from experience this is an excellent idea).

What to order:
Top sellers include the Thyme & Scottish Heather Honey and Rosemary & Olive Oil

Format:
Takeaway only

Every one of these bakeries is a fraction of the price of the meals these chefs made their names on. Same hands, same standard, but no eight courses in front of it.

Let me know in the comments which one you’d try first, and if there are any others that belong on this list.

Table for Two lives at the intersection of food and culture, not simply recommendations, but a considered point of view on why dining matters, and where to find the best of London’s table culture. If this piece resonated, please support us by subscribing.

First: it earned a Michelin star three months after opening… a feat in its own right, but unlike a Bonheur by Matt Abé or Core by Clare Smyth, chef John Chantarasak wasn’t fresh out of a three-star kitchen, and didn’t have a major restaurant group like JKS behind it, as we saw with Ambassadors Clubhouse and Legado.

Instead chef John Chantarasak spent nine years testing the idea… pop-ups, a residency at The Outcrop at 180 Strand, a regular dinner series called Baan run out of his own Battersea flat. By the time AngloThai reached Marylebone, its identity was mature enough to earn the star within months.

But the menu’s strength isn’t just a decade of trial and error. It’s a direct reflection of who Chantarasak is. Born in the UK to a Thai father and a British mother, raised in Wales, he cooks a menu that reads like an early chapter of his own autobiography.

And whilst it’s undoubtedly a Thai restaurant, the menu isn’t pretending to be one in the way you’d expect. Just the opposite actually, it celebrates its British ingredients, delivered through the structure of Thai cuisine.

I went for lunch on a warm July afternoon. The lunch menu is 5-course abbreviated version of the dinner menu, with two supplements available, one at the starter and one at the dessert, both of which I took.

Nearly every ingredient is British. The flavours, a panang, a chu chee curry, are not. The absence of peanuts means the kitchen turns to sunflower seed; buckwheat stands in for rice. The substitution logic is what makes the meal so unique, and I read it as an argument that Thai cuisine isn’t a set of imported ingredients, it’s a structure that holds its own with ingredients not otherwise native to the cuisine.

The highlights of the meal for me start with the first supplement: the Brixham Crab, Exmoor Caviar & Coconut Ash Crab. The saltiness of the crab and caviar balancing each other perfectly and the cracker is the perfect vessel.

One of the best dishes of the meal might be the simplest: sunflower seed panang with potato bread. No peanuts, sunflower seed carries the curry’s richness instead, and the potato bread exists purely as a vessel, torn by hand and dipped in its sauce. It’s the clearest statement on the menu, substitute the ingredient, but keep the logic and structure, and the dish still works exactly as it should, but specific to AngloThai’s unique style.

For the desserts, it’s the palette cleanser that stays with me: a strawberry, coconut & pandan bowl. A strawberry granita, shaved fine, sits over coconut milk pooled over a scatter of fruit at the base of the bowl. It reads like a Thai shaved ice dessert built entirely from an English fruit bowl: strawberry standing in for the usual tropical fruit. It’s the lightest dish on the menu and incredibly refreshing on a hot July day, I’ve thought about it every day since.

AngloThai is a restaurant where you can taste that a cuisine is more than a list of ingredients. Nine years of pop-ups got it to Marylebone. Three months got it a star. The crab, the panang, the granita all make the same point: swap out every ingredient Thai food usually relies on, and if the logic underneath is intact, the dish still works. That's the case for AngloThai as a whole… British ingredients, Thai structure…. much like the chef behind it.

Table for Two lives at the intersection of food and culture, not simply recommendations, but a considered point of view on why dining matters, and where to find the best of London’s table culture. If this piece resonated, please support us by subscribing.

We’re back with another instalment of After Dinner Conversation. The plan was to do these round ups monthly, but the first instalment two weeks ago clearly struck a chord, so we’re back mid month with round two.

We also seem to have made it to the other side of the London heatwave, at least for now, and I’m not taking that comfort for granted.

It’s been an intentionally low key week otherwise, save for dinner Thursday night at Caractère in Notting Hill for an early birthday celebration with my friends.

This week also marks two months since I started this Substack. I’m having so much fun writing it, I’d love to hear what you want more of.

As always thanks for being here, and I hope you enjoy this week’s After Dinner Conversation round up.

01. The price of building a Mayfair restaurant

Have you ever wondered what it actually costs to build a restaurant in Mayfair?

The answer, apparently, is somewhere between £2.5m and £3.5m. That number has been sitting with me since I read this interview on Glassette with Atelier Wren, the interiors duo behind the new Berenjak Mayfair, which opened back in March.

The interview get into all the questions I’d want answered too… what they overspent on, the single most expensive thing in the room, etc. But the part that really stayed with me was the brief itself: make the space feel like a family villa on the Caspian Coast, and do it by converting two separate commercial units into one. There’s something quite moving about that, actually, how much care goes into making a room feel inevitable, when the bones of it start out anything but.

I happened to be at Ambassador’s House, another JKS restaurant, last Sunday, and found myself thinking about exactly this, how the rooms we sit in feel so complete, when really a team spent months solving a puzzle just to set the atmosphere for our meal.

Read the full interview here.

Book Berenjak Mayfair here.

02. My favourite flavour ice cream is Loewe

Okay, I’ve found London’s chicest ice cream of the summer. Loewe has partnered with The Dreamery ice cream shop in Islington to promote their new pistachio scented candle, with two flavours on offer: Pistachio, of course, and Sour Cherry.

What’s really struck me is how luxury fashion houses are using food to bring their brands to life. A few weeks ago I posted about the ice cream at Anya Hindmarch’s pop up. But it’s not just ice cream.

Chef Mauro Colagreco, of Mirazur fame, has opened Monsieur Dior for the summer, a restaurant set inside the gardens of Dior’s newly renovated Saint Tropez boutique. And Louis Vuitton has partnered with chefs Arnaud Donckele and Maxime Frédéric on the Michelin starred restaurant at the White 1921 Hotel.

A dinner, an ice cream pop up, a chef collaboration… each one generates an enormous amount of organic, aesthetically coherent content.

But I think it goes deeper than UGC content. There's so much emotion tied up in taste… taste is nostalgia, it's memory, it can be aspiration, connection. Those are the same emotions that turn you into a loyal customer of a luxury fashion house. And it's exciting to watch fashion collaborate with chefs and restaurants to build experiences around them.

Experience it for yourself:
Loewe x The Dreamery collaboration is running at The Dreamery’s ice cream shop in Islington until 30th July.

03. What actually goes on in the kitchen before a star’s awarded

I’m not sure where I was last October when Knife Edge: Chasing Michelin Stars came out, but it wasn’t on my radar.

Each episode takes place in a different country and follows 3 restaurants in the twelve weeks leading up to that country’s Michelin star ceremony as chefs chase their first, second, or third star. You watch them push their kitchens right up to the ceremony itself, where you find out (alongside them) whether they’ve earned it.

A few things stayed with me from this series.

First, the heart, grit, and soul these chefs pour into their restaurants is a good reminder of everything that happens before a dish ever makes it to the table in front of us. It’s one of the reasons I think dining with context is so important.

Second, I found it fascinating to hear how kitchens speculate about whether a solo diner might be a Michelin inspector, a phenomenon I’ve wondered about myself. James and I have even played a game trying to guess who in a dining room might be an inspector.

And third, the anonymous interviews with the inspectors themselves was the first I’ve ever heard from a Michelin inspector, on the record.

I appreciate this show came out in October last year so it’s technically old news, but if you’re like me and haven’t already watched it, it’s worth adding to the top of your queue.

Where to watch: Knife Edge: Chasing Michelin Stars is available streaming on Apple TV.

04. The UK’s tipping culture now rivals the US

When I moved to London eight and a half years ago, the rules around tipping were simple. You only had to tip at sit down restaurants, and even then, 12.5% was automatically added to your bill. Easy.

Nearly a decade later, it’s gotten more complicated. Earlier this year I bought drinks at a bar and remember being miffed to realise, after I’d already tapped my card, that a service charge had been added to the bill without asking me.

London Centric

How American tipping culture came to London

If you’ve stood at the bar while ordering a pint of beer, or ordered a coffee at the counter of a cafe in London, you might have been hit by the trend sweeping the capital: “optional” service charges automatically applied to purchases…

Read more

3 months ago · 117 likes · 34 comments · Jim Waterson, Polly Smythe, and Cormac Kehoe

That’s the exact experience I had in mind reading London Centric’s piece on How American tipping culture came to London. Their argument: post Covid, tipping has reached this frenzied state largely because of April 2025’s hike in employer National Insurance, which made direct pay rises harder to absorb, combined with a 2024 law requiring all tips and service charges go to staff , money that’s structured as a genuinely optional service charge, is taxed at just 20%, versus the much higher tax on wages.

It’s made me far more sympathetic to hospitality asking for a tip on every takeaway coffee or pastry, it’s not a shakedown, it’s the system (albeit, a twisted system) working how it’s supposed to.

05. Michelin’s new ‘Grapes’ distinction sparks backlash in Burgundy

Last week, Michelin released its inaugural Michelin Grapes guide, extending its rating system into one of the world’s most famous wine regions.

Rather than scoring individual bottles, Michelin is now rating entire estates, one, two, or three grapes. In this first round: 9 estates took three grapes, 20 took two, and 33 took one.

The backlash was immediate. Domaine Arnoux-Lachaux, awarded one grape, publicly asked Michelin to remove it from the guide entirely:

“We do not know how the Domaine’s rating … could have been established. Since 2020, we have deliberately chosen not to submit our wines for press reviews or ratings.”

It's a legitimate question…. how do you rate an estate that won't participate? Though it's worth noting that DRC, Leroy, Roumier, Coche-Dury, and d'Auvenay all landed in the top tier without apparent objection. Which raises the real question here: is Michelin's process the problem, or is this one estate unhappy with its grade and framing it as a principle?

That's this week's After Dinner Conversations. Let me know in the comments what you make of any of these, and I’ll see you on Wednesday!

Table for Two lives at the intersection of food and culture, not simply recommendations, but a considered point of view on why dining matters, and where to find the best of London’s table culture. If this piece resonated, please support us by subscribing.

So you arrive with a question you cannot put down throughout the meal, is Igni worthy of a star?

Igni was one of eight new 2026 openings I named using my framework for predicting first year stars, Clench is the pedigree signal, Igni is tasting menu only, which is the format favoured by inspectors, and its part of the Creative Restaurant Groups which has another Michelin star restaurant in its portfolio. On paper it’s one of the most eligible candidates in London.

The room was unchanged from Humo, but what had changed was how the fire was used. Miller Prada’s Humo was theatrical… the grill was used as a a spectacle, an à la carte running alongside the tasting menu, a kitchen that was the main focal point of dinner. Clench has kept the grill and stripped everything else back. Tasting menu only, seafood led, and much more delicate.

I went with my friend Ally, who gets as excited as I do about restaurants and the culture around them. Igni offers three, six and nine courses. We took the nine. Excessive for a Wednesday evening, yes, but the dishes it adds are the ones Clench has been trialing since before he opened: the scallop, the turbot, and a tuna course served three ways.

Snacks arrived first. A smoked eel meringue with black tea and yuzu ponzu, which we had to eat fast; London was in the high twenties and it was going soft at the edges. A yellowtail skewer with burnt pear and a roasted soybean dip. And a charcoal pastry of Devon crab with dashi and Granny Smith apple.

What you noticed, three bites in, was the smoke. It was in everything, and it was a good precursor for what followed.

The highlight of the first few courses was the bluefin tuna. One fish, three cuts: belly aged for two weeks, an akami tartlet, and the bloodline served as a parfait beneath a thin red pepper wafer. I always love tasting the same fish cut three ways, and back to back they painted a picture of how differently one animal can read.

I must also mention the Yukon Gold potato bread, inspired by a Taiwanese bao, finished over the fire with dried miso and served with a vadouvan butter. It was a bread course with a point of view, and one that was representative of the rest of the menu.

The first main, the turbot, was where the meal stalled. It arrived as a thick white cut with one edge caught brown over the fire, in a pool of dark sauce, to be eaten with a whipped lettuce. Turbot is a fish that carries a sweet, faintly mineral flavour, and I found neither the fish nor the sauce delivered it. Clench said Igni would be delicate. This dish was too delicate, and frankly a bit bland.

The duck came without ceremony. We enjoyed it more than the turbot, but by then the mains had flattened the evening, and it passed without leaving much behind.

Things picked up with the desserts, the final course was a tofu ice cream, koji toasted and served with chocolate, and it carried a smokiness that had nothing to do with the grill.

Which brings us back to our initial question. Will Igni win a star?

On the first five dishes, absolutely. But the mains make me hesitate. It’s possible we caught an off night. Consistency, though, is one of Michelin’s stated criteria, and on this night, the mains did not deliver.

Table for Two lives at the intersection of food and culture, not simply recommendations, but a considered point of view on why dining matters, and where to find the best of London's table culture. If this piece resonated, please support us by subscribing.

It was the second time in eighteen months those fourteen seats had done this. The same room had opened in September 2024 as Dosa, trading on the name of celebrity chef Akira Back. Dosa won a star in February 2025, and by July 2025, Back ended his involvement with the hotel, and Dosa closed with him.

I started looking into this because some of the most serious restaurants in London are inside hotels with elite chef’s names attached to them. But this wasn't always the case. For most of the twentieth century the hotel restaurant was a functional thing… a dining room for guests who didn't know the city well enough to eat anywhere else, judged on convenience rather than cooking. Now it’s the other way around. People book the hotel for the restaurant, and Londoners who'd never need a room fill the same tables. How did that inversion happen?

The answer begins, improbably, in Monte-Carlo. In 1987, Alain Ducasse took over the restaurant at the Hotel de Paris, an institution owned by the principality's own casino and hotel company, and Prince Rainier III challenged him to win Monaco its first three Michelin stars. Ducasse did it in thirty-three months, in 1990 the first hotel restaurant anywhere to reach the top rating. The restaurant is Le Louis XV, and still holds those three stars today.

For the first time, a renowned chef proved a hotel's restaurant could be a destination in its own right. At the same time London did serious hotel dining the old way. The Connaught's finest room was called (wait for it) … The Restaurant. The chef was Michel Bourdin, a Frenchman trained at Maxim's in Paris who ran The Connaught’s kitchens for twenty-six years and won the hotel its first star in 1975. But Bourdin was an employee of The Connaught, and the stars belonged to the hotel, rather than the chef.

That's the difference between the old way of running hotel restaurants and the new, Bourdin worked for the hotel. Today, more often, the hotel works for the chef's name. Ducasse's win in Monte-Carlo showed hotels what their restaurants could be worth with a renowned chef like Ducasse in kitchen. And so began the birth of the modern hotel restaurant.

In 2001, Gordon Ramsay won his third star at Restaurant Gordon Ramsay, and it was that win that set off what came next. Blackstone had just bought Claridge's, and they came to Ramsay with a deal: his name over the hotel's dining room. Ramsay didn't cook there himself, the kitchen was run by his chef de cuisine, Mark Sargeant, but Ramsay oversaw the menu and the direction, and, crucially, Claridge's got to hang his name over the door as a halo for the rooms.

For a hotel, the restaurant is not where the money is. A hotel earns about 73% gross profit on a room, but only about 28% on its restaurant (source). So why would a hotel bother with the culinary world at all, rather than just building more rooms at a better margin?

Because a serious restaurant pays off somewhere else. Hotels with a prestigious restaurant charge 9% more per room and earn 19% more revenue per available room (source). The restaurant stops being a functional need to just feed their guests, and becomes a marketing tactic to drive occupancy.

Look what the Connaught Hotel has done with the same building. The dining room Michel Bourdin ran for twenty-six years that was called The Restaurant is now Hélène Darroze at the Connaught. The hotel that once employed its chef and kept the stars for itself has switched sides: the chef’s name is over the door, and the room is hers. Darroze took over in 2008, won a star in 2009, a second in 2011, a third in 2021, and hasn’t dropped one since. Eighteen years, one name, three stars.

There’s a symmetry worth naming here that I stumbled on when doing my research. Darroze arrived to work in the office at Le Louis XV in 1990 after receiving her business degree. The same year it became the first hotel restaurant anywhere to hold three stars, and Ducasse pulled her from behind the desk onto the stove. The chef who has kept The Connaught steady for nearly two decades was made by the man, and the room, that started the modern hotel restaurant.

Now let's go back to Gordon Ramsay at Claridge's. This arrangement, like every one of these deals, had an end date. Ramsay's lease ran ten years, was extended in short stretches, and in 2013 he walked away from renewing it. The restaurant didn't fail, the contract simply ended, and a Michelin starred room closed because the paperwork ran out. The thing that makes a hotel restaurant a success, a prestigious chefs name tied to it, is also the most fragile part of the whole model.

Which brings us back to those fourteen seats at the Mandarin Oriental Mayfair. Two names went over that door in eighteen months, Akira Back, then Jihun Kim. Both won a star. Both restaurants closed.

Here is the part I left out at the start: the chef never changed from Dosa to Somssi. Jihun Kim ran the kitchen under Back’s name and won Dosa its star. He reopened the same room under his own name and won it again. Same hands, same room, same food. Only the name over the door changed and each time the name left, the restaurant died with it. The restaurant was attached to the name but the star was attached to the chef.

The model is fragile because the deal lets those two drift apart, the name can leave, the cook can leave, the contract can lapse. But when they hold together, the licensed restaurant doesn’t just survive, it produces the best hotel dining in the world. Somssi is what it looks like when the pairing breaks. Hélène Darroze at The Connaught is what it looks like when it holds.

Table for Two lives at the intersection of food and culture, not simply recommendations, but a considered point of view on why dining matters, and where to find the best of London's table culture. If this piece resonated, please support us by subscribing.

I wrote about Maré a few weeks ago. The latest restaurant to fit this category is Tavern, from the team behind Restaurant St. BARTS, which holds both a Michelin star and a Green Star. It takes over the old Nest site on Old Street, which was by the same group but Nest was a more formal dining experience. The team reopened the room as Tavern, somewhere that feels like a neighbourhood spot.

From Fulham, Old Street is a decision and not somewhere I go to often. But I was meeting my friend Gaby, who works in east London, which felt like a great reason to make the trip east.

East London is such a trek to get to which always leaves me with the inevitable question after the meal finishes, was it worth it?

Tavern is a room that reads as high-end medieval tavern, and somehow pulls it off.

We start with the chunion, the dish that’s been dominating my feed for weeks, and the fire bread with house miso butter. The chunion is fine. That’s the problem: fine is not what you expect from a dish working so hard on Instagram, and on its own it wouldn’t justify the trip from Fulham.

The fire bread should have been my kind of thing, I tend to love anything with miso or butter in the name, so the two together had the makings of everything I want in a bread course. Instead it arrived without leaving a mark: the bread was a touch dry, and I’d forgotten we’d even ordered it until I found it in my photos from the evening.

The evening changes trajectory with the scallop. Isle of Skye, dressed in cobnut XO: juicy, sweet, the sweetness balanced by the umami of the sauce. It’s the first thing all night that tastes like the kitchen I was promised.

The Hereford sirloin with peppercorn sauce, and a side of chips and salad, this keeps the pattern going, just not the one you’d expect. The steak is good. But the sauce is better. Which is the wrong way round: on a plate built around a piece of beef, the beef should lead. Instead the chips become delivery vehicles for the peppercorn sauce.

Then the dessert reorders everything. The sunflower seed brown butter cakes arrive looking like nothing, just small, plain, easy to underestimate, without a doubt the best dessert I’ve eaten all year. The flavour is disproportionate to the size; the texture is faultless. I loved it enough to order an extra to take home for James.

So: worth the crossing? Not for the chunion, regardless of what Instagram tells you. The verdict lands where I least expected it, on a plain little cake only slightly bigger than a petit four, the one dish nobody’s photographing.

At Tavern, the support keeps outperforming the lead… the sauce beats the steak and the humble dessert beats everything else. It’s a strange way to experience a restaurant. It’s also, it turns out, a reason I’d make the journey west to east again.

Table for Two lives at the intersection of food and culture, not simply recommendations, but a considered point of view on why dining matters, and where to find the best of London's table culture. If this piece resonated, please support us by subscribing.

June was a very strange and very full month. There’s been no shortage of great food, but it was complicated offline, and I’m grateful for the people I’ve been able to sit across a table from this month to talk, to laugh, to cry.

I’m grateful too for this small, growing community on Substack. June was my first full month posting and we’re at 35 subscribers. I mean it when I say thank you for being here.

The peak of the month: James and I celebrated our one year wedding anniversary. I can’t quite believe it’s been a year since we got married in San Sebastián surrounded by the people we love most. We marked it with a food filled weekend with dinner at Bonheur, then lunch the next day at The Bull in Charlbury, in the Cotswolds. It was the perfect mix of what we love most in meals: precision and ambition at Bonheur, then my first ever pie at The Bull the next day. Eight and a half years living in this country and I'd never had one. My English husband has claimed it as the best pie he's ever eaten, and says that I'm ruined for pies forever now.

National Restaurant Awards 2026: A Year of Surprises

The National Restaurant Awards list was released earlier this month, voted on by an academy of over 300 chefs, restaurateurs and food writers, each casting votes for the best meals they've personally eaten in the UK this year. It's a different model to Michelin's anonymous inspectors. Less mystery, more insiders judging insiders. I still don't know which one I trust more.

The list was full of surprises this year. The top three alone have had me thinking since it was announced.

Bouchon Racine jumped from #5 in 2025 to the top spot in 2026, unseating The Ritz as the UK’s #1 restaurant. I’ve never been to Bouchon Racine (good luck to all of us trying to get a reservation now), but it has gotten me thinking about what this says about dining culture in the UK. Look at the winners from the five years prior: The Ritz (2025), The Ledbury (2024), Ynyshir (2023), Ynyshir (2022), Moor Hall (2021). All of them fine dining establishments with set tasting menus, priced between £215 and £450 per head, before drinks.

Bouchon Racine is a French bistro with an à la carte menu that changes daily, written on a blackboard with items crossed out as the kitchen runs out. That’s a real shift from what we’ve seen these past few years, and I don’t think it’s a coincidence.

The list is reflecting a shift in the culture. People still crave exceptional food, formal technique and time around the table. They just want it without the pretension (or the price tag).

Osip and The Ritz tied for second place, a first in the awards’ history. Second place carries real weight and two restaurants sharing it feels almost like an “everybody’s a winner” in a list that’s supposed to draw sharp lines.

Plenty of people have opinions on whether Dorian deserves the #3 spot. I’m not adding to the discourse. What I do want to talk about is Dorian’s co-owner and executive chef, Max Coen, who announced he’s stepping down from the restaurant just days after the result. No word yet on why, or what’s next but I’m watching this one. And wondering who will Dorian bring in as their next head chef?

Why does eating out cost so much?

I really enjoyed this piece by Dan O'Regan, a Bristol restaurateur behind BANK and Lapin, who broke down the real numbers behind running a restaurant on his Substack.

He walked through a £227 dinner for two: HMRC takes nearly £34 of it, staff wages another £25, and once every other cost runs through, the restaurant is left with about £7. It’s worth the read in full, and I’ll be trying Lapin if I find myself in Bristol.

Notes on a Napkin

You Think Restaurants Are Expensive?

This piece started with a question from my agent, Borra Garson — so thank you, Borra. If you've got an idea for something you'd like me to write about, drop me a message. I read everything…

Read more

6 months ago · 90 likes · 35 comments · Dan O'Regan

And whilst we’re on the topic: if you haven’t already, sign the live VAT’s the Problem petition, pushing to reduce hospitality VAT from 20% to 10%. Led by Tom Kerridge and UKHospitality, the goal is one million signatures to persuade the government to bring UK VAT in line with the rest of Europe.

Hospitality has been hit hard these past few years, between rising National Insurance and minimum wage increases, and the UK’s rate is extremely high by comparison. Ireland just cut its VAT rate for hospitality to 9% this week. Germany sits at 7%. France, 10%.

Whilst reducing VAT might not mean lower menu prices, it gives your favourite restaurant the margin to run sustainably and hopefully some room to grow.

Would you eat Paxo Stuffing flavoured ice cream?

With the heatwave last week, and the one looming next week (oof), the only things I want to eat on the hottest days are either sushi or ice cream.

Which brings me to Anya Hindmarch's Ice Cream Project. Returning to 11 Pont Street in Belgravia for its fifth year, this year's flavours lean further into pantry cupboard territory: Paxo Stuffing, OXO stock cube, Kikkoman soy sauce and Jacob’s Mini Cheddar amongst them.

The Paxo Stuffing tasted exactly like the real thing, just cold and creamy instead of hot and crumbed. Not bad, but it does confuse the senses with the flavour of one food arriving in the texture and temperature of another. A few "what's going on here" pings straight to the brain.

I’ve sampled six flavours so far across two visits (I’m calling it research) and my favourites were the Jacob’s Mini Cheddar and Paxo Stuffing.

The pop-up is around until 16th August, and I hear queues are quite long on the weekends, so try to go during the week if you can.

Restaurateur Mario Carbone says Michelin stars are decided by an algorithm

Well, this was a clip that got me to stop mid scroll. New York restaurateur Mario Carbone of Major Food Group (Carbone, Torrisi, Dirty French, and more), says he couldn’t care less about the Michelin star. He says he finds it hard to believe Michelin is what they claim to be, and that it seems inconceivable, in this day and age, that inspectors are still anonymous and still visiting every restaurant in person. His theory: it’s an algorithm, like everything else.

My initial instinct was that he might feel differently if Carbone’s New York location hadn’t lost its Michelin star in 2022, after holding it for eight years (though Major Food Group still holds a star for Torrisi).

He goes on to ask the question: think about the payroll it would take for Michelin to sustain that many in person reviews across that many cities, just by selling guides.

I’m not saying I agree (to be clear, I don’t), The Michelin Guide is funded primarily through partnerships with tourism boards. But I do keep thinking about this clip. The full podcast episode is worth a listen, and they cover other insightful topics like the business of running a restaurant.

Either way, I’m still not going to Carbone London.

You Cook, She Draws: The chefs favourite food illustrator

Food illustrator (@nomkakaii on Instagram) has spent the past month sitting inside some of London's best kitchens for a series she calls You Cook I Draw. She sketches a Michelin starred chef's dish whilst they cook it in real time. Watching how fast she works and the kitchens she's chosen are proof of a sharp eye: Akoko, Evelyn's Table, Mauro Colagreco at Raffles, Trinity, Helene Darroze at The Connaught, amongst others.

At the end of each clip, she turns the sketchbook around and shows the chef, or the restaurant staff, what she's made.

So much of the restaurant content on my Instagram looks the same, this is the first new format I’ve actually enjoyed in a while. A wholseome 60ish second watch. Clip below.

That’s June. Five things I can’t stop thinking about, and at least one I’ll be bringing up at the dinner table this month.

July is my birthday month. I’ll be staying in the UK for it this year, but making the most of it with a few reservations I’ve been trying to get into for a while, including The Fat Duck Restaurant, by Heston Blumenthal. More soon!

Table for Two lives at the intersection of food and culture, not simply recommendations, but a considered point of view on why dining matters, and where to find the best of London's table culture. If this piece resonated, please support us by subscribing.

The room is candlelit, buzzing. Big enough that you’re not sitting on top of your neighbours, small enough to still feel intimate. Super 8’s fingerprints are all over it… if you’ve been to Mountain, you’ll recognise the DNA, although Impala somehow feels more lived in. The open kitchen runs along one wall, the charcoal grill and wood fired oven dominating the space, glossy bronzed ducks hanging above the flames.

We started with both bread options from the oven. The aish baladi (Egyptian flatbread), chewy and slightly charred, is good. But it’s the honey and olive oil bread that stopped the table. Subtle sweetness, the kind of bread course where you want to pace yourself because you know what’s coming, but still can’t stop tearing into it.

The crab kibbeh came next. The heat doesn’t show up instantly, it’s a slow uncovering. The pounded white beans with wild herbs and bottarga arrived looking almost humble, a beige smear on a plate, and then delivered one of the most startling mouthfuls of the evening. Bottarga’s salt, the grassy bite of the herbs, the beans as a creamy base for everything else. Don’t be fooled, this is much more than your average bean dip.

The beef tartare with baklouti (a Tunisian chili, fruity and mild, the pepper at the heart of harissa) was sensational. Served with a fried crouton.

Then the short rib arrived, and we hit the one stumble of the night. I wanted to love it, but the ratio of fat to meat was so unbalanced we could barely eat it. We set it aside.

What followed more than recovered. The birds tongue pasta with spiced oxtail, and I should note that James spent a good two minutes at the ordering stage genuinely, earnestly trying to convince me this was pasta made from actual bird tongues. It is not. It’s the literal translation of the Arabic name, lisan al-asfour… it’s simply what they call orzo. It arrived in a deep bowl with the most tender oxtail, spiced in a way that’s warming and subtle, cinnamon appearing somewhere in the middle of each bite.

The duck roasted in molasses with fig sauce has been the most talked about dish since Impala opened, so of course we had to see what all the fuss was about. Stuffed with black lime spice paste, roasted slowly over the fire. The fig sauce brings sweetness without weight. We ordered it with the freekeh with pickled grilled onion, the smokiness of the grain cutting through the duck’s richness. In retrospect, this was the perfect order.

We finished with the date and pistachio custard tart, the only dessert on the menu. It’s a little salty, a little sweet, and the base is as good as pastry gets. I understand why they don’t offer anything else, nothing else is needed.

There’s a bigger question lurking underneath all of this. Super 8 has a history of changing the direction of London dining. When Brat opened in Shoreditch in 2018, wood fire cooking wasn’t new, Tomos Parry drew it from the Basque tradition, but Brat made it a London obsession. Within a few years, a wood fired oven was a design statement as much as a cooking technique, and it’s now in kitchens across every price point and London postcode. Super 8 made London fall in love with fire.

North African food has never had that moment in London. There are restaurants doing it, but no restaurant has made it feel modern and unmissable in the way that Impala already does after just a few months. The Mediterranean boom is well underway, Greek and Turkish cooking is everywhere, and rightly so. But Egyptian, Tunisian, the North African charcoal tradition that Saad is working from, that gap in London’s dining culture is real, and Impala is, as far as I can tell, the first serious attempt to fill it.

Whether it has the same downstream effect as Brat, whether we’re eating pounded white beans with bottarga in restaurants across the city in five years, I genuinely don’t know. But I’m watching closely.

And in the meantime, I’ll be refreshing that bookings page.

Table for Two lives at the intersection of food and culture, not simply recommendations, but a considered point of view on why dining matters, and where to find the best of London's table culture. If this piece resonated, please support us by subscribing.

Last week I published a piece on the framework to predict whether a new restaurant will earn its first star built around three signals: pedigree, format, and platform. If you haven’t read it yet, start there.

This week I’ve run every serious 2026 London opening through that framework. A caveat before we begin: this list is built entirely on data and signals: chef pedigree, format, platform. I have not yet dined at all of these restaurants. What I have done is apply the same framework that predicted every three signal opening over the last five years correctly. This is also, (not coincidentally) my personal booking list for 2026.

The restaurants are organised into three tiers:

• Definitely getting a star - all three signals present. The arithmetic is almost insultingly straightforward based on historical data (remember 100% of restaurants with all 3 signals have earned a star in the last five years)

• Good chance it’s getting a star - two signals present. The signal is strong, the star is probably coming

• Maybe it’ll get a star - one signal, or a structural headwind that complicates the picture

Highest Chance of Getting a Star: 3 Signals Present

In last week’s piece I looked at five years of data across every London restaurant that opened with all three signals present: pedigree, format, and platform. Fifteen restaurants cleared all three criteria at opening, and every single one earned a star. That’s a 100% conversion rate. 87% of them (13 of 15) were recognised in their first year.

When all three signals are present, a star is as good as a given.

There are two 2026 openings that clear all three criteria.

Igni by Theo Clench
Mayfair | Live-fire | Opened: April 2026
Pedigree ● Format ● Platform ●

Every restaurant Theo Clench has ever run he’s either retained or earned a Michelin star. Every single one. Bonhams, Portland, Akoko, Cycene, four kitchens, four stars, no misses. He has now opened Igni, a 34-seat live-fire restaurant in Mayfair where everything… every single dish… is cooked over flame without gas or electricity. The tasting menu is seafood forward, delicate, and by every account so far, extraordinary. Clench has been explicit: he is here to win a star. Based on his record, I'd take that bet.

See also: My full review of Igni (visited after publication of this article)

Trèsind
Mayfair | Modern Indian | Opened: May 2026
Pedigree ● Format ● Platform ●

Last year, Trèsind Studio in Dubai became the first Indian restaurant anywhere in the world to earn three Michelin stars. Now it's open in Mayfair. The tasting menu is £125 a head (remarkable value for a kitchen operating at this level) and early reviews have been extraordinary. This is the most exciting Indian restaurant to open in London in years.

Good Chance of Getting a Star: 2 Signals Present

Two signals is not a weak position. Corenucopia opened last November with two signals and had a star by February. The restaurants below all have two of the three criteria present, and at least one of them I'd argue is as close to a certainty as anything in the tier above.

Coreus by Clare Smyth
St James’s | British Seafood | Opening: Autumn 2026
Pedigree ● Format ○ Platform ●

Coreus is the third London restaurant from Clare Smyth, the most decorated female chef in Michelin history, currently holding four stars across two restaurants. It has two of the three signals, not three. By the data, that puts it here rather than in the top tier. But Corenucopia had exactly the same two signals when it opened last November, and had a star by February. If I were a betting woman (can you imagine?), I know where I’d put my money. Reservations open this autumn.

Oudh 1722
Borough | Indian | Opened: May 2026
Pedigree ● Format ● Platform ○

Aktar Islam’s Opheem in Birmingham was the first Indian restaurant outside London to hold two Michelin stars. Oudh 1722 is his London debut, three floors of a listed Victorian building near Borough Market. The only signal missing is platform: this is an independent, no hotel, no group behind it. Islam on the subject of a star: “I genuinely believe no one else in the world cooks Indian food like this. I think it will be very obvious in London as well.” I certainly will be booking before March.

Chez Rose
Mayfair | French Bistro | Opened: June 2026
Pedigree ● Format ○ Platform ●

Spencer Metzger earned two Michelin stars at Row on 5 alongside Jason Atherton, the pedigree is real and the platform behind Chez Rose is the same proven Atherton operation. By the signals, this belongs in Good Chance. However the format is a French bistro… steak tartare, poulet en cocotte… and bistro cooking (however accomplished) sits in a different register to what inspectors are hunting. The closest comparison is Josephine by Claude Bosi: two signals present, critically adored, almost certainly heading for a Bib Gourmand rather than a star. I will be booking regardless.

Maybe Getting a Star: 1 Signal Present

Hundreds of restaurants open every year with one signal. Most never see a star. But one signal is not nothing, and within this category, a few things separate the ones worth watching from the ones that won’t make it.

As I wrote last week, location and cuisine type are the two factors that matter most: a one signal restaurant in Mayfair is playing a different game to the same restaurant in Wandsworth, and Modern French and Modern European convert faster than almost anything else in the dataset. The restaurants below have one signal and enough of these factors working in their favour to be worth your attention.

Impala
Soho | North African / Live-fire | Opened: Spring 2026
Pedigree ○ Format ○ Platform ●

Impala is the latest addition to the Super 8 portfolio, the group behind Brat, Mountain, Kiln, and Smoking Goat and whilst it only meets the platform signal, I’d be genuinely surprised if it didn’t end up with a star. Not only is it the buzziest opening of the year (good luck getting a reservation that isn’t a Tuesday at 9:45pm), the food and atmosphere are by all accounts truly exceptional. It’s also in the heart of Soho, and as the data shows, location matters.

See also: My full review of Impala

Teal by Sally Abé
Hackney | British Bistro | Opened: March 2026
Pedigree ● Format ○ Platform ○

I’m throwing this one in as a wildcard. The only signal present is pedigree: Sally Abé was Head Chef at The Harwood Arms in Fulham, London’s only Michelin-starred pub. The location in Hackney doesn’t help, one-signal restaurants need every structural advantage they can get, and zone 2 east isn’t it. But the buzz is real and the early reviews are warm. This is one of those spots I’ll be making the trip to East London to find out for myself.

Osteria Vibrato
Soho | Italian | Opened: February 2026
Pedigree ○ Format ● Platform ○

One signal for Osteria Vibrato, this time format, and located in Soho which bodes well for a star. A tight, singular, inspector-legible room in the heart of Soho with extraordinary critical reception since opening. The room alone is worth the visit: candlelight, cream tablecloths, a wine list that even serious collectors are talking about. No pedigree chain, no group backing, but occasionally stars are awarded in the absence of both. This is one of those rooms that feels like it was built to be inspected.

That's my 2026 list. Eight restaurants, that I'll be working my way through all of them before March and I'll (of course) be reporting back. If you think I've missed one, tell me in the comments. And if you've already been to any of these, I want to know what you thought.

Table for Two lives at the intersection of food and culture, not simply recommendations, but a considered point of view on why dining matters, and where to find the best of London's table culture. If this piece resonated, please support us by subscribing.

Last Saturday James and I woke up and decided to leave London, no plan beyond fresh air, movement and the countryside. We drove south and went for a long walk somewhere near Brighton. By late afternoon James had done what James does, and booked us somewhere exceptional for dinner.

Maré is Rafael Cagali’s third restaurant, and his first outside London. The chef behind two Michelin starred Da Terra in Bethnal Green and the more casual Elis, Maré sits somewhere between the two, seasonal, coastal, with plates shaped by Cagali’s Brazilian heritage. Maré opened in September 2025 and received its Michelin star five months later, Brighton’s first star in over fifty years.

That tension is felt before you’ve even walked in. Maré sits on an unassuming street in Hove, across the road from a kebab shop. Bistro curtains, glowing interiors, Maré stands out from everywhere else around it. People were there celebrating anniversaries and birthdays, but the room doesn’t demand occasion, we’d just finished a long walk, and that felt entirely sufficient.

We ordered à la carte, the tasting menu is £90 a head, which is very reasonable by any London measure, but we had the drive home ahead of us.

It starts with the one bite snacks, that quickly remind you that whilst Maré feels casual, you’re eating in the restaurant of a two Michelin starred chef. The native lobster claw tartlet with ginger and caviar was exceptional, one mouthful that moved through textures and flavours. We also ordered the onion croustade with beef and tonnato, and an artichoke and pea tartlet, and enjoyed both of these very much.

Then come the small plates. If the snacks feel structured with the discipline of Michelin star dining, the small plates feel like they have more breathing room and a bit more fun. The standout for us was the pulled lamb shoulder tacos, BYOT (build your own taco). We also ordered the torched Sussex mackerel with rhubarb. The rhubarb was perfectly pickled, but the rest of the dish fell short with flavours that lacked depth.

The lobster rice, though, redeemed it. The meat was tender and deeply flavoured, the kind of lobster you only get in an experienced kitchen.

The cassava chips were a near miss, we only ordered them after noticing the table next to us receive a plate and doing an immediate reassessment, we needed them. Confirmed they are an absolute must.

For dessert: the tiramicoux mascarpone, which was lovely, and the cachaça elderflower baba, which the Michelin guide lists as the dish you’ll be loath to give up. We left it unfinished...the cachaca was way too overpowering.

Maré is doing something that’s harder than it looks… fine dining made accessible without being diluted. The room earns the star without trying to hard for it. For Brighton, Maré isn’t just a restaurant opening, it feels like potential of what the future of the city’s dining culture could be.

Table for Two lives at the intersection of food and culture, not simply recommendations, but a considered point of view on why dining matters, and where to find the best of London's table culture. If this piece resonated, please support us by subscribing.