Lists of new restaurants in London are the least reliable thing in London food writing, because most of them are announcement lists. A room with a signed lease and a press release appears on them months before anybody eats there, and a fair number never open at all.
This is a list of the best new restaurants in London built the other way round: what has actually opened, where the money went this year, and what it takes to get a table once a place is being written about.
Where the new money went
One pattern dominates 2026 and it is worth knowing before you plan an evening. The new openings are concentrated in Mayfair to a degree that is unusual even for Mayfair.
On one trade listing of this year’s London openings, eleven of the fifty four were Mayfair addresses. That is one in five of everything notable that opened in a city of thirty two boroughs, in a district you can cross on foot in fifteen minutes.
The practical consequence: if you want to eat somewhere new, you are probably going to W1. And the cluster means you can hold two or three reservations in the same square half mile and decide late, which is worth doing when a new room is still finding its feet.
The new London restaurants worth the trip
Simpson’s in the Strand
100 Strand, WC2R 0EZ. The biggest story of the year. Jeremy King has reopened Simpson’s, and their own description of it is the right one: the revived “home of the English roast, the silver carving trolley and chess.”
Two rooms, the Grand Divan and Romano’s, booked separately. Reservations by telephone on 020 7836 9112 as well as online, which tells you something about how the place intends to operate. Breakfast is served daily, and Romano’s takes late suppers from 9.45pm Monday to Saturday, which is the easiest way in.
If you only go to one thing on this page, this is it. A London institution reopened properly is rarer than a good new restaurant.
Langosteria, The OWO
Enter via Whitehall Place, SW1A 2BD. Tuesday to Saturday, lunch 12pm to 3pm, dinner 5pm to 11pm. Closed Sunday and Monday.
Milan’s cult seafood restaurant, and the London room is the group’s first outside Italy and the Alps. Its own page calls it “a new chapter, the same passion for hospitality and a quest for excellence in every detail.” Menus written for London rather than transplanted. There is an oyster bar, open kitchens and a private dining room.
It sits inside the Old War Office, which also holds one of London’s nineteen Forbes Five-Star hotels. Worth knowing if you want the whole evening in one building.
Trèsind, Mayfair
13 to 14 Hanover Street, W1S 1YH. Tuesday to Saturday, lunch 12pm to 2.30pm, dinner 5.30pm to 11.30pm. Closed Sunday and Monday.
From the group whose Trèsind Studio in Dubai holds three Michelin stars, with Himanshu Saini leading. The stated philosophy is “Tradition is not preserved, It is reimagined.”
There is a separate cocktail room, Tryst, running 5.30pm to 11.30pm Tuesday to Thursday and to 11.45pm on Friday and Saturday, shut on Sunday and Monday like the restaurant. Reservations on 0800 369 9555, on +44 20 3179 3232 from abroad, or by email.
This is the most serious new arrival in the Indian fine dining bracket in years, and the one most likely to be holding stars of its own before long.
Chez Rose, Mayfair
5 Pollen Street. Reservations on 020 7870 3730. On the former Little Social site, and it opened in June. Spencer Metzger, previously running the kitchen at Row on 5, in his first restaurant, in partnership with Jason and Irha Atherton. It is named after his late grandmother Rosemary, whose warmth and love of food their own page credits with starting him cooking.
French bistro cooking on British produce, in their words seasonal British produce with the spirit and technique of classic French cooking. It is a small room, which is the thing that matters: at that size a table is genuinely scarce rather than theatrically scarce. One practical warning: their own reservations page was returning a 404 when we checked, so telephone rather than click.
Vesper, Exmouth Market
Jackson Boxer in Clerkenwell, and the most critically praised opening of the year. It has no website, only an Instagram account, which is increasingly normal for a restaurant of this size and increasingly annoying.
Tables are hard. See the next section.
How to actually get a table
A new restaurant that is being written about behaves differently from an established one, and the rules are not obvious.
Find out when the booking window opens. Most new rooms release tables on a rolling window, commonly thirty days ahead, at a fixed time of day. Booking on the morning the window moves is the whole game. Turning up to the website at random and finding nothing tells you only that you arrived on the wrong day.
Take the bar. Almost every new London restaurant holds bar seats for walk-ins, and at a forty six cover bistro the bar is a genuinely good seat rather than a consolation. It is also the only way into somewhere like Vesper at short notice.
Take lunch. The pressure on a new opening is overwhelmingly on dinner. Trèsind and Langosteria both serve lunch and both are materially easier at midday.
Ring. Simpson’s takes bookings by telephone. So do a surprising number of the better rooms, and a phone call reaches a human who can see a cancellation that the online system has not released yet.
Go on a Tuesday. Several of these close Sunday and Monday, which compresses demand into four nights. Tuesday is the softest of them.
Practical notes
An opening date is not an opening. Restaurants slip by months and some never arrive. Do not build a trip around a room that has not served anybody yet.
This has been a heavy year for closures as well as openings. London hospitality is under real cost pressure, established names have gone with no notice, and chains have cut sites in numbers. A new restaurant is not automatically a safe booking.
Check the day before. That applies to everything on this site, and it applies twice over to a room that has been open for a few months.
Give it a month. The gap between a new restaurant on its second week and the same restaurant in its third month is larger than most people expect. If a place matters to you, going slightly late is better than going first.
Everything here was taken from the restaurants’ own published information and rechecked on 28 September 2026. This page dates faster than anything else on the site, so treat the detail as a starting point and confirm before you travel.
Where to go next
The best restaurants in London covers the field once the newness has worn off, and the Michelin starred restaurants covers the top of it. For a table with a different job to do, the romantic restaurants are chosen on the room rather than the kitchen.
Questions we get asked
How do you book London's newest restaurants?
Earlier than you would expect, and sometimes by telephone. One of the most talked about takes reservations on 020 7836 9112 as well as online, which tells you something about how the room intends to operate. Where a telephone number is published for a new opening, it is usually because the diary is being managed by a person rather than a system.
Do new London restaurants have separate rooms?
Some do, and they are booked separately, which catches people out. One has two rooms, the Grand Divan and Romano’s, taking bookings independently of each other, so checking availability for the restaurant is not the same as checking availability for the room you actually want. Ask which room your table is in.
What are the opening hours of new London restaurants?
Typically Tuesday to Saturday, with lunch from midday to about 3pm and dinner from 5pm or 5.30pm until 11pm. The Monday closure is close to universal at new openings, because a new kitchen protects its staff and its prep. Do not assume a seven day week at anything that has opened recently.
Written by Robert J Wills, no. 41 in the guide.
Last checked 28 September 2026 against the venues' own published information. Nobody pays to appear here and we take no bookings.
