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.

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.

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.

Since starting this Substack I’ve received a handful of reader questions about my thoughts on Michelin’s credibility. And it’s no surprise. For the past few years there’s been discourse on whether Michelin still holds the same weight it always has, or whether its monetisation through tourism boards has diluted its credibility over the past decade.

Before diving into that, first let’s look at how a French tire company become the most influential voice in fine dining and retained its position for over a century.

How Michelin’s authority was built

2026 marks 100 years since the first Michelin star was awarded, and its authority has compounded ever since.

The first Michelin Guide was released in 1900, when France had fewer than 3000 cars on the road. The first guide was a free book that listed mechanics, refuelling stops, city maps and a few places to eat and sleep. Michelin earned its early trust with an affluent French demographic on things a driver could verify…. was the map right?(yes!) … was there actually petrol at that stop? (yes!)

Michelin began charging for the guide in 1920, which increased perceived value, and hired its first inspectors the same year. The first star was awarded in 1926, and the three tier hierarchy we know today arrived in 1931.

Kitchen lineage is ultimately what embedded the system, starting with chefs who trained under Fernand Point at La Pyramide in the 1940s (Bocuse, the Troisgros brothers, Alain Chapel), then going on to earn three stars of their own in the mid 1960s, roughly twenty years after passing through its kitchen. “Trained at a three-star” became a measurable career credential, and every lineage since has reinforced Michelin’s position as the gold standard.

That currency exported when Michelin arrived in GB&I in 1974 and Britain took another twenty years to absorb it. Marco Pierre White worked his way through Le Gavroche, La Tante Claire and Chez Nico before opening Harveys in 1987, and earning three stars in 1995, the youngest chef ever to hold them at the time.

Today, Michelin has awarded stars in more than 30+ countries and is no longer just a symbol of professional prestige, it has become a mass cultural status symbol.

Michelin’s presence has transformed cities into major food destinations, and that authority became economically valuable, both to the cities and to Michelin itself.

Can Michelin remain an independent arbiter whilst capitalising off tourism boards partnerships?

For a company that spent nearly a century building its authority globally, that trust has become an economic asset. Capitalising off of that authority however, is an extremely grey area because authority is built on trust, but can authority still be trustworthy when its commoditised?

In 2017 Michelin entered into a five year agreement with Thailand’s tourism board worth $4.4 million. That contract was extended to 2027 and nine years on Thai officials have estimated Michelin’s impact to be about a 10% increase on tourism spending. That model has become the template for expansion into cities globally, and since then the guide has expanded via partnerships to South Korea, Singapore, and at least 10 US states.

That’s where many of Michelin’s critics start to push back. Is the guide still credible if cities now pay to play? But collaboration with tourism boards doesn’t actually guarantee starred restaurants, what it buys is a city’s eligibility to be considered for a star. The most telling example is Palm Beach’s collaboration with Michelin in 2025. The city’s tourism board paid Michelin $180k to make their city eligible, and got exactly one Michelin star in return.

Michelin’s collaboration with tourism boards has however changed my personal perception of cities with starred restaurants. Michelin previously had the power to transform a city into a food destination. Now when I hear a city has Michelin starred restaurants I group it into two buckets: the organic markets, that’s cities where Michelin exists without any funding from tourism boards (ex: France, UK&I, New York). And the sponsored markets, cities where tourism boards buy eligibility (ex: Colorado, Atlanta, Florida).

What I’ve found over the past decade, is that cities where Michelin exists organically, are much more consistent with quality across one another. For example, a starred restaurant in London is executed at the same standard as a starred restaurant in New York or Paris.

Whereas cities that buy Michelin eligibility, do offer good restaurants but they are usually less consistent with a New York restaurant (for example), but a good proxy for restaurant quality in their own given city. Obviously there are exceptions here, but as a general rule.

Should Michelin partner with tourism boards?

Michelin is a business with inspectors in 30+ countries. Inspectors are anonymous and therefore meals aren’t comp’ed, which is how Michelin maintains its objective evaluation of restaurants. That’s extremely expensive.

Michelin has built its authority for over a century, and are the most influential force driving dining decisions globally. It’s totally fair, and actually I think quite reasonable, to monetise their brand and authority.

However, the trust they’ve established is their asset and if a city is not worthy of stars (like Palm Beach), they must take a firm stance and not award stars even if it’s at the risk of not renewing a partnership contract with that city.

And for patrons, I think it’s important to know the context before dining, If I were visiting Atlanta I’d certainly use the guide as a point of reference because it’d showcase the best of Atlanta, but I’d adjust my expectations accordingly.

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

2 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

5 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.

Since 2022 there were 44 restaurants who earned their first Michelin star (or two).

I analysed every newly awarded star across five consecutive Michelin ceremonies (2022-2026).

I looked at opening dates, chef histories, ownership structures, and format.

I wanted to see whether the recognition that looks retrospectively obvious actually had signals at the point of opening.

It did. Three of them.

I’m calling these signals Pedigree, Format, and Platform.

Individually, each one barely moves the odds, but stacked together they’re close to a guarantee: of the fifteen restaurants to open with all three signals across five years, thirteen had a star within twelve months, the remaining two got their star in year two. That’s a 100% conversion rate to star.

Three signals that predict a future Michelin Star

Pedigree

Pedigree is a chef’s traceable lineage through kitchens Michelin already trusts. Not just “has worked in a starred restaurant” (that’s table stakes at this level) but specifically, has this person held a senior or leadership role in a kitchen operating at two or three stars? Both Clare Smyth and Matt Abé ran Restaurant Gordon Ramsay as head chef. Alex Dilling was head chef at a two star before he opened his own room at the Café Royal and went straight to two stars within six months of opening. That’s a different kind of signal than having staged at a three-star in your twenties.

Pedigree is essentially a proxy for invisible quality. It tells an inspector, before they’ve eaten a single course, that this person has been inside the machine, they know what that level of execution looks like from the inside, not from the outside looking in.

The kitchens that produce this signal most reliably: Le Gavroche, The Fat Duck, L’Enclume, Restaurant Gordon Ramsay, and Hélène Darroze, The Ledbury. Five of the 44 London stars awarded between 2022-2026, trace chef pedigree back to Restaurant Gordon Ramsay.

Pedigree as a signal works because Michelin is recognising something it has already rewarded, which makes it the most reliable predictor in the framework.

Format

Format is about clarity. Specifically, how quickly can an inspector form a confident view of what this restaurant is trying to be?

A tasting menu is the clearest possible way to do that. The chef has edited down to ten or so courses they stand fully behind. The price is set, the ambition is explicit, and an inspector can assess the entire arc in a single visit.

An à la carte room requires multiple visits, you might have ordered the wrong things, the kitchen performs differently at lunch, the register is harder to read. The same quality of cooking, assessed through two different formats, will be recognised at different speeds.

This is why omakase counters and chef’s tables star so quickly across cuisine types. It’s not because Japanese food is easier to recognise than West African food.

Rather the format, a set sequence, counter seating, one plate at a time, is an unambiguous sampling of what the kitchen can do. For restaurants that earn a star in their first year, this format compresses the assessment timeline significantly.

Platform

Platform is the organisational infrastructure behind the restaurant, who built it, who funded it, how established the operation is.

The two types that matter are luxury hotels and experienced restaurant groups. A restaurant opening inside The Peninsula or the Four Seasons arrives fully capitalised: full team, proper wine storage, trained front of house, none of the corners cut that every young independent has to figure out in their first year.

An experienced group like JKS or Jason Atherton’s operation brings existing supplier relationships, tested infrastructure, and (not irrelevant) an existing relationship with inspectors from prior restaurants.

What platform eliminates is a very specific question an inspector has to resolve before awarding a star: is this place going to still be here in two years?

A restaurant at Raffles is not going to close because the chef ran out of cash, that confidence accelerates the star.

Why the three signals compound

Each signal removes a different source of uncertainty.

• Pedigree answers: can this chef cook to this level?

• Format answers: can I assess that on a single visit?

• Platform answers: is this a stable proposition worth committing to in print?

When all three are present simultaneously, there’s almost no basis for hesitation. Which is exactly why Alex Dilling, Brooklands by Claude Bosi, and Bonheur by Matt Abé all went straight to two stars within their first year. Remove any one of the three signals and you reintroduce a source of doubt that adds, at minimum, another year before the star arrives.

What this looks like in practice

Bonheur by Matt Abé is the cleanest illustration of all three signals working simultaneously. Abé spent years running Restaurant Gordon Ramsay, not staging, not as sous chef, but as head chef of a three-star kitchen, before opening on the site of Le Gavroche in Mayfair.

That address carries more culinary weight than almost anywhere else in the UK: the room where the Roux brothers defined what serious French cooking looked like in this country, where Marco Pierre White trained, where a generation of chefs learned their trade.

Opening there is itself a declaration of intent. Add a fully capitalised backed venture with the infrastructure to open complete, and you have a restaurant that removed every source of inspector hesitation before the first service. The result: two Michelin stars on first recognition, within months of opening.

Corenucopia and Legado are more instructive because neither has all three signals. Both earned a star in year one on two signals, which makes them useful to look at side by side.

Clare Smyth is her own platform. When Corenucopia opened in December 2025, it arrived with her senior Core team intact, head chef, restaurant manager, head sommelier, plus a decade of inspector relationships, established supplier networks, and a team already calibrated to three-star execution, the pedigree is self evident. What she didn’t bring was the tasting menu. Corenucopia is a luxury bistro: à la carte, fish and chips made with Dover sole and lobster mousse, no ten-course menu declaring its ambition upfront. The format signal is absent, but one star, year one, regardless.

Legado makes a parallel argument from a different starting position. Nieves Barragán Mohacho built Sabor into one of London’s most respected Spanish restaurants and earned a star there. Behind Legado sits JKS Restaurants (whose portfolio includes Gymkhana, Trishna, Ambassadors Clubhouse, as well as others) one of the most credible operators in the city. Pedigree and platform are both strong. Format: an open kitchen, counter seating, dishes from across Spain, à la carte. Again, no tasting menu but one star, year one, from Shoreditch.

What the two together demonstrate is that format is the signal that separates a one-star opening from a two-star one. Its absence doesn’t cost you the star, but it almost certainly costs you the second one, at least on first recognition. Two signals is sufficient, and three is what makes the guide move fastest, and furthest.

The numbers

Here is the number that reframes everything else: fifteen.

Across five years and roughly twelve hundred serious London openings, fifteen restaurants opened with all three signals simultaneously. That’s fifteen out of twelve hundred restaurants, and every single one of them earned a star. I went looking for a three signal opening that failed to gain a star and couldn’t find one.

That’s the most valuable finding from this analysis, restaurants with all 3 signals = 100% conversion rate to star.

Signals buy speed

Whilst all three signals aren’t necessary to gain a star, the more signals a restaurant has the faster its path to star is in Year 1 vs Year 2 of opening.

The composition of who stars in year one versus year two tells the story clearly. All restaurants with three signals account for 50% of year-one stars and drop to 11% by year two.

One signal openings do the opposite, 12% in year one, 28% in year two and beyond. The restaurants with everything working in their favour get found first, the ones making inspectors work harder get there eventually, but later.

Restaurants opening with one signal starred in year one 38% of the time. Two signals: 40%… barely a move. All three signals star 87% of the time in year one.

Whilst meeting all three signals doesn't guarantee a year-one star, it nearly doubles the odds against everything below it, and across five years of ceremonies, there hasn’t been a single opening with all three signals that hasn’t eventually starred.

What this suggests is the restaurants where all three signals are present are the ones to watch out for, especially if you’re trying to

What the outliers tell you:

Here is what I find more interesting than the rule: the 6 restaurants that earned a star but met none of the three signals.

AngloThai ran as a pop up for nearly a decade before going permanent in November 2024 and earning a star three months later. Chishuru’s Adejoké Bakare is self-taught, relocated from Brixton to Fitzrovia, and starred within six months of reopening. OMA, Greek, sharing plates, Borough Market. Lita, open fire, à la carte, Marylebone, starred in Year 1. None arrived with a Le Gavroche lineage or a Four Seasons behind them.

What they had instead was years of earned credibility, critical momentum, long standing cult status, and a version of pedigree that doesn’t show up on a CV. AngloThai had a cult following before opening its permanent location. The framework explains most of the picture and the outliers tell you where its edges are.

When you look closely at those edges, two things emerge.

The postcode layer

Pedigree, Format and Platform are all clarity signals, but we also need to take a look at the role post code plays in all of this.

Of the 44 restaurants that earned their first star across the last five ceremonies, the overwhelming majority sit inside a tight corridor of central London: Mayfair, Knightsbridge, St James’s, Belgravia, Fitzrovia, Marylebone. That’s not a coincidence of quality, it’s the clarity that comes with post codes where serious intent is assumed, infrastructure exists to open fully formed, and inspectors return most frequently.

The most instructive data point in the entire analysis is Chishuru. Adejoké Bakare opened in Brixton in September 2020. Time Out’s Restaurant of the Year in 2022, but no Michelin star was awarded. She closed, rebuilt, and reopened in Fitzrovia in September 2023 and within six months, Chishuru received its first star.

Same chef, same cuisine, same cooking, but now in a different postcode.

An inspector visiting Fitzrovia arrives with a different set of assumptions than one visiting Brixton Market. That’s not a statement about the quality of either neighbourhood, it’s a statement about how assessment systems work and what they unconsciously weight.

Shoreditch is the one clear exception, Cycene, Plates London, and Legado all starred in year one from east London addresses. But each had something compensating for the postcode: a tasting menu, a pedigreed chef, or JKS Restaurants as the platform behind them. When you’re not in Mayfair, you need more of the other signals to make up the difference.

The areas to watch for slower, harder earned recognition: Peckham, Hackney, Bermondsey. Those restaurants will take longer, but they also tend to be the ones that reward attention paid early.

The cuisine problem

Geography and cuisine turn out to be the same problem framed differently. Both are questions about clarity, about which signals the guide reads fastest and which it takes longer to trust.

Modern French and modern European account for roughly a third of all 44 first recognition restaurants with Japanese omakase following closely behind. These are the categories where format and cuisine reinforce each other, and where inspectors have the deepest existing language for assessment.

Non-European cuisines tell a more complicated story. West African, Korean, Indian, Mexican, and Greek all appear in the dataset, but almost all took longer, or only starred quickly when presented in a format or postcode that made them legible on conventional fine dining terms. Chishuru in Fitzrovia, not Brixton. Somssi inside the Mandarin Oriental. DOSA at a marble counter in Mayfair.

Kol and AngloThai are the two that break this pattern most interestingly, and both appear in the outliers cohort for good reason. Neither had the conventional framework working in their favour, but both had built enough momentum that the guide had essentially already made up its mind before they opened a permanent door.

Which points to the conclusion the outliers section as a whole is really making: the guide is not indifferent to new categories, new postcodes, or new cuisines. But it needs a reason to believe in a restaurants potential, and Pedigree, Platform, and Format are the fastest route to providing that reason.

How to use this framework

The guide will never tell you where it’s looking next, that’s not how it works. But the signals are visible before the inspectors arrive, and once you know what you’re looking for, it becomes an informed bet on getting there before Michelin does.

The configuration to look for: a chef whose CV runs through a two or three star kitchen in a senior role, a format that declares its ambition clearly (tasting menu, omakase counter, or chef’s table) and a serious operator or luxury hotel behind it. All three present simultaneously is rare, but when it happens, it’s almost a sure bet to a star.

Two signals gets you there eventually, and one signal means you’re in a very large crowd. No signals and you’re either too early, or you’re watching something the guide will take years to catch up with, which has its own rewards when discovered early.

The practical implication: when a restaurant opens that meets all three criteria, book it immediately.

Next week, I’m applying this framework to every serious 2026 London opening to identify the restaurants most likely to be awarded a star in 2027. The list is shorter than you’d expect.

All data drawn from Michelin Guide Great Britain & Ireland ceremonies 2022–2026. Research was initially sourced using Claude Opus 4.8 and opening dates and chef histories verified across restaurant press and primary listings.

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 menu at Buvette has a pop-up in it. When you open the card, a paper bouquet of cutlery rises from the spine, the kind of engineering you’d expect from an expensive children’s book. We hadn’t ordered anything yet and Buvette had already handed us a piece of theatre.

This is the thing to understand about Buvette before you go… it isn’t a French bistro. It’s New York’s idea of one, arrived in Neal’s Yard via the West Village with its props intact. The frites come stacked in a drinking glass on a branded paper napkin. The grey marble is doing an impression of a century it hasn’t lived. The room is in costume, and the costume is, somehow, quite charming.

We went a few days before opening. The room was full of press and friends of the house, not an empty seat in it. The kitchen was still finding its rhythm, and midway through service the smoke found the fire alarm and it started to blare. What followed was the whole staff, every waiter, every runner, fanning the air in a kind of coordinated emergency choreography, faces arranged in expressions somewhere between professional calm and barely contained delight, while the alarm carried on above them. When it finally stopped, the entire room broke into applause.

In most restaurants this would be the anecdote you tell against them. Here it was the best scene of the night, because it revealed something true: I’ve rarely seen a room more completely, more instinctively, on a restaurant’s side. Whatever Buvette is doing, it’s doing it to people immediately.

The food is built for sharing. The carottes râpées arrive almost aggressively fresh, julienned carrot with pistachios, coriander and lemon, the kind of plate that cuts through richness. The steak tartare is chopped rather than minced, with cornichons, capers and sliced radishes doing the crunch work. The ratatouille tartine is lighter than it has any right to be, the vegetables roasted with actual patience. The salted butter and anchovy tartine is, let’s be honest, primarily butter, but the anchovies are doing emotional work.

The plate to order is the hachée au jambon cru: pearls of prosciutto with comté and honey, sweet and salty in a ratio I’m still thinking about days later. It was the best thing on the table, and also quite telling. No café in Paris would serve it. Buvette isn’t copying France, it’s New York’s invention of France. A real Paris café doesn’t try this hard, the trying is Buvette’s American showing, and it’s also, in the end, what makes you stay.

Next to us sat two French women who, at the end of their dinner, told the waiter it was one of the best meals they’d had all year. I had spent two hours quietly building the case that Buvette is a fiction. It turns out the only jury that matters had already ruled.

Go after the theatre. It’s Covent Garden, and this is a perfect second act.

Fergus Henderson, the chef behind St. John in London, has never displayed his Michelin plaques. They’re stored under a sink, which is either a statement or a joke, and with Henderson it’s probably both.

St. John opened in 1994. By the time it received a star in 2009, it had already appeared in the World’s 50 Best, been cited as Anthony Bourdain’s favourite restaurant in the world, and shaped a generation of British chefs who worked there before going on to open the places that now define how London eats. The star arrived fifteen years late, to a restaurant that had long since stopped needing it.

Restaurants are awarded Michelin Stars on five criteria: quality of ingredients, mastery of technique, the personality of the chef expressed through the food, value for money, and consistency across dishes, across visits, over time. These are rigorous, defensible things to assess, and many chefs spend entire careers building their restaurants around them. For most of the culinary world, the star remains the gold standard, the highest external validation a kitchen can receive.

But there’s a more interesting conversation happening alongside all of this. Not about the restaurants chasing the star, but about the ones that aren’t. The chefs who’ve rejected it, returned it, or simply never wanted it in the first place.

Marco Pierre White earned three Michelin stars at 33, making him the youngest chef in the world to do so at the time. In 1999 he retired from the kitchen, returning all three stars to the guide, the first chef in history to do so. His reasoning was simple: he’d spent years cooking for inspectors rather than for himself, and somewhere along the way the restaurant had stopped feeling like his.

Sébastien Bras told Michelin in 2017 that he wanted out. His restaurant Le Suquet, in the rural Aubrac region of southern France, had held three stars for eighteen years. The pressure of maintaining them, he said, had become incompatible with the kind of cooking he actually wanted to do, every one of the 500 meals that left his kitchen each day a potential inspection. Michelin obliged and removed Le Suquet from the guide entirely. Two years later, inspectors returned and reinstated it with two stars anyway. The guide, it turns out, is not an opt-in or out system. Bras shared that he no longer worried about the stars or the strategies of the guide. The restaurant was still his, the guide had just decided it couldn’t quite let go.

The late Skye Gyngell’s experience at Petersham Nurseries in Richmond tells a different version of the same story. When the restaurant received a star, Gyngell called it a curse. She said Petersham was never built for the expectations a star brings. There were no tablecloths, no formal service, bare earth underfoot. The star brought a new kind of diner through the door, one who arrived with complaints rather than curiosity. In 2011 the restaurant asked to have it removed. Gyngell said she hoped never to earn one again.

What makes each of these stories fascinating is the same thing. A Michelin star is a lifetime achievement for most chefs. Restaurants are built around earning one, menus engineered, kitchens staffed, services rehearsed with that single outcome in mind. These chefs had it, and walked away. Not because the food wasn’t good enough, but because the star had changed something about the restaurant they hadn’t agreed to change.

Then there’s a third category entirely. Restaurants whose ambition was never organised around the star in the first place. Not restaurants that rejected the institution, but restaurants that were never in conversation with it.

Ducksoup in Soho is a very clear London example. The menu changes based on what the kitchen feels like cooking. The wine list evolves daily. The room is small, unhurried, entirely unbothered. There is no framework here that Michelin could benchmark against a return visit, because the whole point of Ducksoup is that it will be different next time. That’s not a flaw in the model, that is the model.

Rochelle Canteen operates on the same logic. Farm to table, rigorously seasonal, cooked with soul in a room that has no interest in impressing you. Margot Henderson has built something that resists the kind of eligibility the guide requires, not out of indifference to quality, but because the quality lives in a register the star was never designed to reach.

So why does this matter? Because it changes how you think about the restaurants you already love.

I love exploring my way through a Michelin starred tasting menu with as much enthusiasm as anyone. But some of my favourite evenings have been in rooms the guide will never fully reach. Emilia in Devon, which we visited last year, is one of them. A Bib Gourmand, Michelin’s recognition for exceptional value, but not a star, and almost certainly never will be. The kitchen rotates around whatever ingredients are available. The dishes have the kind of soul that comes from a kitchen cooking exactly what it wants to cook. The room feels like somewhere that exists entirely for itself, not for an inspector who might walk through the door.

After spending time thinking about Henderson, White, Bras and Gyngell, I find myself looking at Emilia differently. Not as a restaurant that hasn’t earned a star. As a restaurant that was never in that conversation, and is better for it.

Next time you sit down in a room without a star, it’s worth asking which category it falls into. Is this a kitchen still building toward the guide’s recognition? Or is it somewhere that has quietly decided the conversation was never theirs to have, that the soul of the room, the freedom of the menu, the feeling of the evening was worth more than the validation? Often, it’s those kitchens that produce the most interesting food, not despite the absence of a star, because of it.

Entering Matt Abé’s Bonheur on Brook Street is walking into a room that holds decades of culinary history.

The basement at 43 Upper Brook Street in Mayfair is where Marco Pierre White staged, where Gordon Ramsay trained, and where Monica Galetti learned to cook. For nearly six decades, the Le Gavroche kitchen was the institution that produced the institution, the room that made the chefs who went on to make the restaurants that shaped how London eats. Walking down those stairs felt less like arriving for dinner and more like stepping into the footnotes of a culinary canon.

Which is exactly what makes Abé’s opening here so quietly loaded. He isn’t just launching a restaurant, he’s answering a question the room has been asking since Michel Roux Jr. turned off the lights to La Gavroche in 2024: what comes after a legend?

His answer, it turns out, is something entirely his own.

The Room

The room is unrecognisable. I’d never been to Le Gavroche but I’ve seen pictures, it was glossy black and red, dark, formal, designed to make you feel the weight of the occasion, and looked very dated. Abé and Russell Sage Studio have done something more interesting, they’ve kept the intimacy of the space but stripped out the theatre. Peach and ochre tones, curved lines, yellow leather tabletops that feel tactile and sculptural waiter stations that function as subtle focal points.

We were there for our first wedding anniversary. On the table when we arrived was a handwritten card, hand signed by every member of the team, and menus printed with our names and ‘happy anniversary,’ a detail that got our night off to a great start.

The Food

Before the menu begins, Bonheur sets its tone with canapés. Four in total, each one precise and considered, with the lobster tarte the clear highlight. An amuse bouche of basil and verbena consommé follows, clean and brilliant, a signal of what's coming. By the time the first course arrives, you already know what kind of meal this is going to be.

We ordered the Dream menu with the paired wine and non alcoholic pairing. James took the full alcoholic pairing; I did two alcoholic glasses, the rest non alcoholic. It’s worth knowing this option exists, because the sommelier clearly puts a lot of thought into this option.

Our tasting started with an Isle of Skye scallop, grilled, with peach, elderflower, and ajo blanco. The combination sounds almost too delicate, until it arrives. It came alongside a Mosel Riesling with a balance between sweetness and acidity. The pairing did what the best pairings do, it made both things taste even better than they were alone. The wine lifted the fruit and the scallop grounded the Riesling’s brightness, this pairing felt like a conversation.

The Quail Blanquette, wild asparagus, XO, is where Abé’s point of view becomes impossible to miss. XO sauce is the Japanese influence made explicit: fermented, deeply umami, the kind of addition that shouldn’t work alongside a French blanquette but it absolutely does. The quail itself was beautifully handled, but the sauce was the revelation.

The Native Lobster with grapes, cucumber, and vadouvan had a lightness that balanced the richness of the vadouvan’s spiced sauce and the two balanced each other out well. And the 125 day aged Cumbrian Blue Grey was tender in a way that felt almost structural, the result of time and sourcing rather than technique alone. Abé uses Lake District Farmers exclusively for this cut, aged to his specification, and you can taste the decision.

The Japanese influence runs through the whole menu, umami as a structural choice, it’s never overpowering, it simply deepens everything it touches.

This is food with a genuine unique point of view.

Then came the cheese trolley before dessert. There's something about a cheese trolley where I can always finds more room.

The Parallel Nobody Is Saying Loudly Enough

In 2016, Clare Smyth left Restaurant Gordon Ramsay, where she’d been chef patron of a three starred kitchen, to open Core in Notting Hill. Her first solo restaurant. Two stars in 2018 and three in 2021.

Matt Abé spent a decade as chef patron of that same restaurant after Smyth left, holding all three stars through her departure and through a pandemic. In November 2025, he walked out of Restaurant Gordon Ramsay and into the former Le Gavroche space to open Bonheur. Two Michelin stars arrived in February 2026, three months after opening, skipping one star entirely, the way Core did.

The parallel feels structural. This is what the path to three looks like: a decade of institutional preparation, a first restaurant with total creative freedom, and cooking that immediately signals a distinct point of view. Abé at Bonheur is Smyth at Core, their trajectory is the same. The question isn’t whether he gets there, it’s how long it takes.

What to Order

There are two menus: The Dream (7-courses), The Journey (5-courses). The Dream menu is the one to order, as it gives you the full picture of what Abé is doing. There’s also an à la carte option if you’d prefer to choose your own path, but if you’re going, commit to the seven courses.

Hot Tip

The menu lists an alcoholic and non alcoholic pairing, but there's no mention of splitting the two. If you’re trying to reduce alcohol intake but still want to enjoy the pairing, ask for it anyway. The non alcoholic options are considered rather than compromised, and it's the quiet solution for a long tasting menu if you want to actually remember the morning after.

The Occasion

A dinner that deserves to be the whole evening. This isn't a pre theatre or a long lunch. Bonheur is a destination, the kind of meal you build a Saturday around. If you're going with a group, book Petit Bonheur, the six-seat chef's table. You'll be required to order the Dream menu, and Matt Abé came out personally to talk the table through each course.

My Only Critique

The music the night we visited ranged from Mumford & Sons to the Beatles. My biggest critique of the space, and the one thing that felt out of place in a room that had otherwise been so carefully considered. The room filled up and buzzed, which helped, but the playlist remains the one thing I'd change.

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.