London Restaurant News September 2026: Quaglino's Returns

London restaurants are rather fond of rebirth. Close the doors, rip out something expensive that somebody else installed five years ago, add a bar, call it a "new chapter" and hope everyone has forgotten what the old one was like. This week's London Restaurant News September 2026, courtesy of The Independent, has a few comebacks genuinely worth paying attention to, alongside a handful of ambitious new openings across the city.

Quaglino's Brings Back the Nineties

There are restaurants with history, and there is Quaglino's, where history apparently had a permanent table. The St James's institution, founded by Giovanni Quaglino in 1929, reopens on 7 October following a major refurbishment intended to revive the extraordinary excess of its Nineties heyday. This is the restaurant where Queen Elizabeth II dined with Prince Philip and the Queen Mother in 1956, an occasion recorded as the first time in living memory a reigning monarch had eaten in a public restaurant. Princess Margaret reportedly had a table permanently held for her, Princess Diana was said to slip in through the kitchens to escape photographers, and Judy Garland held her wedding reception there.

The latest incarnation is not exactly pursuing restraint, with three bars, live entertainment and a Champagne bar carrying 24 bottles on its list, plus a dessert counter called the Tabac selling chocolate cigars and chocolate ashtrays. The food, overseen with input from former Humo chef Miller Prada, draws on Quaglino's Italian origins, French technique and British history, including vitello tonnato skewers, pissaladière, turbot Mountbatten and lamb cutlet Milanese.

Wong Kar Wai Takes on Yauatcha

Yauatcha Soho closes after lunch on 26 September for a refurbishment lasting until late 2027, with acclaimed Hong Kong filmmaker Wong Kar Wai, director of In the Mood for Love, Chungking Express and 2046, serving as creative consultant on its new look. Yauatcha was a genuinely significant opening when Alan Yau launched it in 2004, winning a Michelin star in its first year with Christian Liaigre's dark, blue-lit interiors once considered startlingly modern. Parent company Mohari Hospitality says the overhaul will cover interiors, food and the wider guest experience, with chef Fai Choi leading development of a more seasonal menu.

Roast Leaves Borough Market for the First Time

For 20 years, Roast has sat above Borough Market serving the kind of British lunch that requires both Yorkshire puddings and a clear afternoon. The restaurant will open its second site at Virgin Hotels London-Shoreditch on 21 October, its first move beyond Borough Market since opening there in 2005. The new 135-cover restaurant includes an orangery, bar and chef's table, with a menu retaining the beef Wellington, Full English breakfasts and 42-day-aged roast beef the brand has built its name on, alongside steak, ale and bone marrow pie on Mondays, roast suckling pig on Thursdays, and a separate halal menu.

Firangi Tests Ideas Through Residencies

Ruhi Parmar Amin and Simar Deol have begun their longest Firangi residency yet at Top Cuvée in Highbury, spending three months testing a nine-dish menu built around regional Indian cooking before eventually opening a permanent restaurant of their own. The menu spans dishes including jowar and lamb tartare with betel leaf, chicken thigh with corn kees and turnip achar, bavette with Chamba chukh peppercorn sauce, and Coorg-style pork belly with quince fudge, deliberately reaching beyond the pair's own Punjabi-Gujarati and Delhi backgrounds. The residency runs until 20 December, after which the pair plan to return to India to continue researching the northeast and south.

A Former Kiln Chef Opens Two Restaurants

Karla Knowles, formerly head chef at the celebrated Kiln, is opening two restaurants of her own: PAM, launching on Charterhouse Street in Farringdon in October, and AREE in Notting Hill next year. PAM will be Knowles's first standalone restaurant, marrying Thai cooking with British seasonal produce, while AREE is billed as a fire-led Thai restaurant taking over the former e&o site on Blenheim Crescent.

Kudu's Team Returns to South London

A year after closing their Peckham and Nunhead operations to consolidate into one large Marylebone restaurant, Amy Corbin and Patrick Williams are heading south again. Braai Bird opens in November in the former Kudu Grill on Nunhead Lane, centred around an enormous wood-fired rotisserie serving slow-roasted chicken and chips with South African sauces including monkey gland and Cape Malay, alongside sharing sides, cocktails, beer and South African wine.

Solis Leaves Arcade for Its Own Front Door

Solis, the chicken-and-steak grill from TA TA Eatery founders Ana Gonçalves and Zijun Meng, will leave Arcade for its first standalone restaurant, opening at 26 Kingly Street in Soho on 20 October. The larger space allows for an expanded menu beyond the half chicken and flat iron steak that built its following, including chateaubriand with chimichurri and aji picante, rotating butcher's cuts, mushroom and cheese croquetas, and Uruguayan-style prawn cocktail.

Between a royal-approved reopening, a filmmaker's take on a dim sum institution, and chefs finally claiming their own front doors, this week's London restaurant scene proves that a good comeback, done right, still earns its audience, a lesson that applies just as well to a chain sandwich as it does to a St James's institution with a royal seal of approval, as seen in this week's roundup of the best meatball parm subs from restaurant chains across America.