New opening

• Gouqi chef jumps ship to 3 Gorges, a new luxury Cantonese restaurant on Goodge Street

  

  Fitzrovia's dining scene looks set for a shake-up with the arrival of 3 Gorges, a new Hubei and Cantonese restaurant that's promising a high-end experience. So it's good news for them that they've managed to persuade Chef Qian who headed up the kitchen at Gouqi in St James to join them. Qian, who also worked at Mimi Mei Fair and Hakkassan, has arrived with a menu that includes everything from

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• Violet Cakes has opened a secret cafe in the Alaïa store in central London

  

  London is no stranger to interesting cafes in high-end stores - check out our guide to some of the best here. But we'll admit we missed out on the news just before Christmas that another noteworthy spot had opened. The cafe in question is Violet Cakes and it now has a central London location

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• Blackwood is a huge new sports bar for Piccadilly Circus

   

  The team behind other bars like Greenwood in Victoria and Beechwood in Shoreditch is getting ready to open a new sports bar and it's in the most prominent site yet. If you've been around Piccadilly Circus recently, you may have seen the billboards for something new opening at the corner of Shaftesbury Avenue and Denman Street - that's Blackwood.

  The company responsible for all these

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• All-you-can-eat lasagna restaurant Senza Fondo is coming to Shoreditch

  

  Cementing London's current love affair with all things Italian American is new East London restaurant Senza Fondo, a self-styled 'premiumised lasagneria'. The concept is all about big plates and communal dining with the key offering being an all-you-can eat lasagna for just £20. It's taken over the old Rossopomodoro site just off Hoxton Square so it's going to be a pretty large place complete with a bar at the

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• The Arding Rooms sees a private members club arrive at Clapham Junction

  

  Back at the end of November 2023, the ground floor of the redeveloped Arding & Hobbs building at Clapham Junction reopened as Botanica Hall. Now the upper part of the building is getting ready to open, and this part is being billed as "Clapham’s first private members club", The Arding Rooms.

  Inside, it looks like the design will benefit from the restored domed atrium of the

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• The big new London restaurants opening in February 2025

  

  Moving into February, Gordon Ramsay goes big (and high) with a number of restaurants inside the 22 Bishopsgate skyscraper, Patrick Powell does pub food, The Berkeley gets a fancy new restaurant and lots more. 

• Is Big Mamma coming to the City?

  

  News reaches us that the Big Mamma Group has designs on the City of London. While we wait to hear what they're doing over in Canary Wharf, we hear that they're also looking at opening a new restaurant in the heart of the financial square mile. According to reports they're fairly far down the

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• Restoration Hardware are coming to Mayfair with RH London

  

  It's been many years in the works, but it looks as though the plans for the American 'is it a gallery or a shop' RH (also known as Restoration Hardware) to open in the heart of London are properly underway.

  They're going to be opening one of their gallery/lifestyle shops just off Savile Row in a development across three Grade II listed buildings, one of which was last occupied by Abercrombie & Fitch. Plans submitted to

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• Crunch and their brioche sandwiches are coming to Soho

  

  They've run pop-ups and a very popular stall at Spitalfields Market but now the Crunch team are getting ready to bring their brioche sandwiches to Soho.  

  The folk behind it are Sacha Yonan, Michael Medovnikov and Joni Francisco -  who has experience at

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• Krept & Konan are opening Saveways supermarket in Croydon

  

  Rap duo Krept and Konan are diversifying their brand, getting into the supermarket business for the first time. More specifically they're opening a huge store in Croydon called Saveways which they say will celebrate "cultural diversity through food while setting a new standard for halal and world food retailing in the UK."

  It's a genius business idea too, catering for the area's diverse community which they estimate to

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• Bar Valette in Shoreditch is the next opening from The Clove Club's Isaac McHale

  

  Updated 15/1/25 with opening date

  Recently, Isaac McHale parted ways with the other founders of The Clove Club, Johnny Smith and Daniel Willis, with each side talking about the promise of new restaurants to come. McHale, who hung onto The Clove Club, is not getting ready to open his first restaurant since the split. 

  He's opening a more casual

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• Björn Frantzén parts ways with Harrods as The Grill on Fifth takes over

  

  Just over two years after the glitzy opening of Björn Frantzén's much-vaunted restaurant at Harrods, the Swedish chef has very quietly closed the doors on that partnership. The announcement was made on Boxing Day on Studio Frantzén's Instagram feed, so understandably most of us missed it. Kudos then to restaurant guide ...

• Marta pizzeria in Chelsea is all about thin Roman-style pizzas

  

  In the run-up to the end of last year, we were so focused on the recent openings of Alley Cats and Zia Lucia in Chelsea that we missed another very promising new Chelsea pizza opening, called Marta. 

  It opened on Fulham Road (taking over the space from L'Artigiano) and it shifts away from the predominant Neapolitan focus of many London pizzerias and instead is all about Roman pizzas. Those are large,

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• Sourdough Sophia is heading to Highgate for her next bakery

  

  Having started during lockdown in Crouch End and now with a fully fledged bakery there and in Islington, the North London baker Sophia Handschuh and her husband Jesse Sutton-jones are gearing up to open their third place.

  The pair revealed the location of their next bakery in a cryptic post on Instagram, asking followers if they could work out where it was. And it took fans a few hours to track

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• The Great Indian is Archway's new Indian gastropub

  

  Londoners love their pubs and love a good Indian, so the growth of Indian-based pubs in the City isn't altogether surprising. Arriving off the back of the huge success of The Tamil Crown and Prince comes new Archway gastropub The Great Indian. If the name rings a bell it's because owner Aman Dhir also runs an Indian takeaway in Hackney under the same name. Up in Archway he's taken over the old Prince Alfred pub, just off the

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