It was a very good year: Jimi Famurewa
(Picture: Daniel Hambury/Stella Pictures Ltd)If 2022 began with cautious optimism among the hospitality sector, then it ends with a familiar buffet of existential challenges: soaring energy and food costs; never-ending staff shortages; rail strikes. The mood has generally been one of tightening belts, and a slow awakening to the fact that perma-crisis is now a part of our dining reality.
And yet if the post-pandemic era has taught us anything then it is this: London restaurateurs can conjure magic in defiance of even the grimmest odds. For all the doomy economic pronouncements, my foremost memories of eating out this past 12 months are of grinning faces, free-flowing cocktails and dining rooms that were uniformly mobbed. Here, then, are my 12 favourite new restaurants from an especially vibrant and varied crop of openings.
Prices indicate the cost of a meal for two with wine.
Lisboeta
Arguably the year’s first real blockbuster opening, Nuno Mendes’ textured ode to Lisbon’s food culture felt like both a significant return and a soft reboot of his cooking style. Orchestrated by an uncommonly charming team, technique-heavy molecular gastronomy largely gave way to a butch, tactile elegance — most evident in delicate, crumbling vindalho pork pies or the glimmering shared tacho of red prawn and seafood rice. The pork fat set custard, with its sweet richness and faint bacon-y undertow, remains one of the most abominably delicious things to have passed my lips this year.
£170, 30 Charlotte Street, W1, lisboeta.co.uk
Acme Fire Cult
Would this mostly outdoor, live fire restaurant in a Dalston car park have been anywhere near as effective if it opened in the frigid depths of winter? Hard to say. But I do feel that chefs Andrew Clarke and Daniel Watkins’ joint venture with 40ft Brewery — pitched up amid shipping containers and wafting smoke just as the late spring weather got especially bright and pleasant — really did meet its moment in more ways than one. Inventive, ambitious and commendably veg-forward (as best expressed via a leek and pistachio romesco dish), it was the only place to be this summer. The cooking only seems to have grown in scope and confidence since.
£130, Abbot Street Car Park, E8, acmefirecult.com
Plaza Khao Gaeng
Chef Luke Farrell may have first collaborated with JKS in 2021, but this was the year that he broke out in a big way. In autumn, it would be Speedboat Bar’s eye-popping theming and Thai-Chinese fusion. But before that was this: a strip-lit portal to southern Thailand’s egalitarian curry and rice joints, perched above the revamped Arcade Food Hall, and lent fire-breathing authenticity by Farrell’s specially cultivated ingredients and nerdy eye for detail. Searingly hot, complex and pungent — but quelled by the world’s greatest, crisp-skirted fried eggs — it is food with a strange, almost hallucinogenic power; a gastronomic thrill-ride to hop on again and again.
£90, Arcade Food Hall, 103-105 Oxford St, WC1, plazakhaogaeng.com
Arcade
Food halls probably say something quite bleak about our collective need for near-infinite choice and yes, Arcade is full of suitcase-lugging out-of-towners. But even so, JKS’s reboot of this misbegotten former “food theatre” beneath the Centre Point has been one of my most reliable culinary standbys this year. The food is better than it has any right to be — especially true of Sonora Taqueria’s quietly extraordinary Mexa — and anywhere that plays wall-to-wall UK Garage and shameless wedding disco bangers has my respect.
£70, as above, arcadefoodhall.com
Cadet
A collaboration between wine importers Beattie & Roberts, charcutier George Jephson and chef Jamie Smart, there is more to this Newington Green bar than meets the eye. True, it is spiritually similar to other dim-lit, natural wine cupboards that do artfully plate high quality deli items. But what Cadet’s tiny one-person kitchen manages to turn out — transfixing duck mousse with pickled chanterelles, mussels and bread in a lake of garlic butter, sugar-dusted, dark crags of a cherry stone craquelin — is utterly remarkable. Like the best bit of a continental mini-break transposed to a spot on the number 73 bus route.
£100, 57 Newington Green, N16, cadetlondon.com
The Tamil Prince
In a year clogged with pubstaurant launches, this was the one that seemed to bring something new to the party. I will leave others to decide whether Tamil Nadu-born chef and Roti King veteran Prince Durairaj’s venture is either south Indian enough or a desi pub in the purest sense. What is not up for debate is that the sharply-executed, richly-spiced delights here — hot, lacy nests of onion bhaji, springy pulled beef uttapam and the puffed majesty of giant channa bhatura fried bread — were about as good as it got at a table in 2022.
£120, 115 Hemingford Road, N1, thetamilprince.com
Cavita
Exceptional, authentic Mexican food is not the rarity it was when London was dominated by sombreros and microwaved nachos. All the same, this Marylebone restaurant from Adriana Cavita felt like a precious addition. Set in an atmospheric indoor courtyard of decorative masks and hanging plants, it is a place of ruggedly charred “Cesar” salads, mind-bending kingfish aguachiles, beef shin quesabirria crowned by a bubbled pane of fried cheese, and all manner of other refined, roadside delights. It may be one of the more underrated great openings of the year. I implore you to go.
£170, 60 Wigmore Street, W1, cavitarestaurant.com
Miznon
Though it had been planning to launch in the UK for a while, Israeli restaurateur Eyal Shani’s madcap global pita chain felt perfectly attuned to the times. What else speaks to a year that gave us a self-immolating government, Will Smith’s slap, and The Queue like an enormous cottage pie jammed in flatbread? Nothing about this opening, from its Comic Sans menus to the ornamental tomato on every table, made much sense. But once you tasted the food — astonishing cauliflower, say, or best-in-class hummus — you understood that this was just part of its confounding brilliance.
£90, 8 Broadwick Street, W1, miznon.co.uk
Caia
Long before Notting Hill’s restaurant resurgence had been widely certified, I had noticed I was cycling my little Brompton westwards more and more. All of the openings responsible for this unexpected rebirth have their virtues, but this spot on Goldborne Road, a listening bar and live fire restaurant, is the one that truly has my heart. Canadian-born chef Jessica Donovan sets perfect monkfish on ambrosial creamed corn, pairs pork belly with supercharged pineapple salsa, and generally announces herself as one of the city’s foremost talents.
£160, 46 Golborne Road, W10, caia.london
Mount St. Restaurant
Bacchanalia may be good for a guilty gawp but this other art-heavy, Mayfair opening traffics in more lasting highs. Set above a sensitive revamp of The Audley pub in a sexy, technicolour gallery of Freuds and Matisses, hospitality group Artfarm’s first major entry into London is ritzy club dining with the neat twist of enormously talented chef Jamie Shears at the tiller. Mock turtle croquette; pigeons in Pimlico; bubble and squeak chips are all masterpieces in their own right. The new king has reportedly eaten here, but it isn’t half as fusty as that makes it sound.
£200, 41-43 Mount Street, W1, mountstrestaurant.com
Evernight
It is not immediately obvious why Nine Elms was the chosen spot for chefs Lynus Lim and Chase Lovecky’s take on a Japanese izakaya. Nonetheless, the chilly, sanitised wilds of this part of town probably only add to the majesty of the experience and food at this quietly-launched sleeper hit. Here, it is all about the slow-build — the sips of sake, the outrageous gushing flavour bomb of sweetbread curry katsu bun, the nuanced wonder of Aylesbury duck rice donabe — and dazzling technique nudging you towards blissful nirvana.
£170, 3 Ravine Way, SW11, evernightlondon.co.uk
Tatale
Despite the growing health of West African gastronomy in the capital, there was a lot riding on Akwasi Brenya-Mensa’s flagship restaurant at the all-new Africa Centre. That Tatale (named for a plantain pancake dish) succeeds is testament to the Ghanaian-British chef’s determination, way with subtly refined flavours, and ability to cultivate a supper club-style warmth. The dishes — recently shifted to a very reasonable £35 set menu — hop nimbly across the broad Black diaspora. But it is the omo tuo nkatewan that you are here for: a mashed puck of faintly flavoured rice, set in a slurpable groundnut soup that shimmers with warmth and sweetness.
