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September has traditionally been the point at which London’s restaurant scene wakes up from its August stupor. This year it appears to have set several alarms.
Dishoom is plotting another major London opening, Jamie Oliver’s mentor Gennaro Contaldo is getting back into the business for the first time in nearly 20 years and two Michelin-starred chefs are moving their surf-and-turf restaurant into a Victorian Clerkenwell pub.
There is also an improbable amount happening away from the conventional restaurant circuit. John Lewis has built a 300-seat restaurant on Oxford Street, a Quebec sports brasserie is using Kensington as a springboard for international expansion and Professor Green wants London to start eating his flying saucer-shaped sandwiches.
Meanwhile, two Soho and Covent Garden newcomers – Saltwater and Cassette – are already attracting the sort of early doors chatter that usually means getting a table is about to become annoying.
Here is your shortcut through the week’s restaurant noise.
Bolo: Jamie Oliver’s mentor wants his pasta back
Old-school Italian cooking is coming back to Soho with a fairly persuasive spokesperson.
Gennaro Contaldo, Jamie Oliver’s mentor, long-time collaborator and one of the chefs who helped introduce a generation of British viewers to Italian home cooking, is opening his first new restaurant project in almost 20 years.
Bolo will be a 32-seat trattoria on Glasshouse Street, named after Contaldo’s bolognese and serving a deliberately pared-back menu of traditional Italian dishes and freshly made pasta. There will even be a one-wine-per-colour policy, which feels pleasingly resistant to the modern restaurant tendency to hand diners something the dimensions of an atlas.
Contaldo, 77, last ran Passione in Fitzrovia, which closed in 2009. His new restaurant is being opened by Brava Hospitality Group, the owner of Prezzo, which also brought Jamie’s Italian back to Leicester Square earlier this year, though Bolo sounds rather less interested in resurrection than simply cooking pasta properly.
At a time when London’s Italian restaurants are increasingly specialised, regional and painstakingly fashionable and arriving faster than anyone could possibly eat at them, there is something appealing about one of the old guard returning to show everyone how he thinks it should be done.
Opens autumn 2026 | 40-42 Glasshouse Street, London W1B 5JY | Website
Dishoom: The bacon naan land grab continues
The bacon naan empire rolls on, with Dishoom now setting its sights on the South Bank (Dishoom)
Dishoom had barely finished telling us about its forthcoming Borough Market restaurant before it set its sights further down the river.
The Bombay-inspired group has submitted plans to take over the former Las Iguanas beside the Royal Festival Hall on the South Bank, with proposals for a covered veranda over the existing outside dining space.
There is no opening date yet, but Dishoom is now one of those brands capable of making a planning application feel like essential restaurant news. The inevitable queue, presumably, will come later.
It would continue a brisk period of expansion for the group, which has opened in Leeds and Glasgow, has another London restaurant planned opposite Borough Market and is preparing for its first New York site. From one Covent Garden restaurant in 2010, the bacon naan empire rolls on.
Opening date TBC | Festival Terrace, Southbank Centre, Belvedere Road, London SE1 8XX | Website
Island: When 600 covers is 540 too many
Tom Brown and Brad Carter are swapping the vastness of Mare Street Market for a 60-seat Clerkenwell dining room (Island)
Size clearly matters for Tom Brown and Brad Carter. The two Michelin-starred chefs are swapping a 90-cover restaurant inside a venue capable of feeding around 600 people for something considerably more intimate.
After just over a year at Mare Street Market in King’s Cross, Island will reopen on 16 September in a 60-cover dining room above the restored George & Dragon in Clerkenwell. Carter has already admitted there were “some challenges” to making the restaurant work in such a large space; the new arrangement – proper pub downstairs, Brown and Carter cooking upstairs – sounds rather more contained.
The surf-and-turf idea survives the move. Expect Brown’s wild fish, Carter’s rare-breed meat and a blackboard of larger cuts sold by weight, alongside dishes such as shawarma prawns, steak tartare with prawn crackers, mussels with curry sauce and piri-piri chicken with crab sauce.
For two chefs whose food has never exactly been small in personality, 60 seats may turn out to be plenty.
Opens 16 September | George & Dragon, 240 St John Street, London EC1V 4PH | Website
Platter at John Lewis: Come for the duvet cover, stay for the martinis
John Lewis would like you to stay for lunch – and perhaps a martini (John Lewis)
The department store restaurant is back. Or at least John Lewis hopes it is.
The retailer has unveiled Platter, a new 300-seat restaurant on the fifth floor of its Oxford Street flagship, complete with open kitchen, in-house coffee roastery, deli, dessert parlour, Champagne and cocktail bar and 50-seat terrace overlooking central London.
It sits some distance from the traditional department store pit stop of a pot of tea and a scone on polypropylene chairs underneath unforgiving lighting. Diners can move from breakfast to hand-stretched pizzas, patisserie, cocktails, waffles and sundaes, all without technically leaving John Lewis.
Platter is eventually due to replace the all retailer’s own-run restaurants around the country, but Oxford Street is the full-fat version: part restaurant, part bar, part bakery and part attempt to give people a reason to linger in a department store again.
Go in for a new duvet cover, come out three martinis and a sundae later. Retail may yet have a future.
Open now | 300 Oxford Street, LondonW1C 1DX | Website
La Cage: Poutine, Premier League and a lot of televisions
Poutine, Premier League and plenty of screens are coming to Kensington (La Cage)
London has never suffered from a shortage of places showing football. La Cage would like to improve what you eat while doing it.
The Montreal-born “sports brasserie” opens its first UK restaurant on Kensington High Street on 4 September, more than 40 years after the original was founded in Quebec.
Rather than the wings-and-nachos school of sports-bar catering, the menu leans heavily into Montreal: poutine, 24-hour smoked beef short rib, lobster rolls, Montreal-spiced rib-eye and a short-rib burger with Jarlsberg and maple bacon. Drinks include Canadian beer and cocktails involving varying quantities of maple syrup.
The two-floor restaurant has been designed to screen several fixtures simultaneously, from football and rugby to cricket, Formula 1 and hockey. In other words, nobody need ever again negotiate over whether the Arsenal game takes precedence over qualifying at Monza.
Kensington is La Cage’s first move outside predominantly French-speaking markets and is being treated as a test for further international expansion. Apparently, London gets to decide whether poutine and Premier League football are natural bedfellows.
Opens 4 September | 201-203 Kensington High Street, London W8 6BA | Website
Proper Good: Professor Green would like to sell you a UFO
Professor Green’s Proper Good is bringing its UFO-shaped hot rolls to Soho (Proper Good)
Professor Green is returning to Soho, although this time lunch is involved.
The rapper, real name Stephen Manderson, is bringing his fast-food brand Proper Good to Soho Street in September following its debut in Glasgow earlier this year.
Its signature is the “UFO” hot roll: a Korean-inspired stuffed brioche bun sealed around the edges until it resembles, as advertised, a small flying saucer. There are also customisable rice boxes and salads.
Manderson says the intention is to take on conventional fast food with better ingredients and more choice. London has heard grander claims from considerably less famous restaurateurs, so we will see.
Celebrity restaurants have a sufficiently chequered history that London is entitled to approach the claim cautiously, but a Professor Green-backed fast-food restaurant in Soho is at least more interesting than another celebrity name being hung above 50 restaurant doors they have probably never walked through.
Opens mid-September | 3 Soho Street, London W1D 3QF | Website
Cassette: London’s next impossible reservation has a date
Cassette is bringing Parisian bistro food and very serious speakers to Covent Garden (Cassette)
One of the restaurants London’s food crowd has been waiting for now has a date: Cassette will open in Covent Garden on 23 September.
It comes from the team behind Levan in Peckham and takes over a Grade II-listed former stained glass workshop on Maiden Lane.
The inspiration is the sort of Parisian bistro, neighbourhood wine bar and rural French auberge around which people increasingly seem willing to organise entire weekends. Former Planque chef Essa Fakhry will head the kitchen, while the room comes with enormous vintage 1970s speakers and a soundtrack given almost as much consideration as the food.
Steak frites, Calvados, clafoutis and unnecessarily serious speakers: Covent Garden could do considerably worse.
Opens 23 September | 42 Maiden Lane, London WC2E 7LJ | Website
Saltwater: Can the Australians fix sad desk sushi?
Saltwater is betting London wants something between supermarket sushi and full-blown omakase (Saltwater)
Saltwater has technically been open since 13 August, but in the past week it has become difficult to spend much time looking at London restaurant social media without encountering it.
The Berwick Street sushi counter comes from Elliot Milne, founder of Australian-inspired restaurant group Milk Beach, and is attempting to occupy the considerable space between supermarket sushi and an expensive night sitting in reverential silence in front of a sushi master.
There is a more serious pedigree behind the fish than you will find at Itsu or Wasabi, though. The menu was developed by Shaulan Steenson, formerly of Michelin-starred Endo at the Rotunda and Hakkoku in Tokyo.
But the idea itself is deliberately uncomplicated. Handrolls and nigiri are prepared to order in front of customers, with nigiri starting at £1.30, handrolls from £3.40 and donburi from £10.90.
That pricing may explain the attention. Soho is not generally where one goes looking for a £1.30 lunch component.
“Restaurant-quality grab-and-go sushi” sounds suspiciously like the sort of category London will either embrace enthusiastically or turn into another £25 desk lunch. Given the early attention Saltwater is getting, we may soon find out.
Open now | 3-4 Berwick Street, London W1F 0DR | Website
Dining and Cooking