April was a bonanza month of new launches in London – giving us plenty of spots to sample as the days get longer and the sun finally shows its face. Here are 20 new restaurants, bakeries, wine bars and pubs to visit, spanning a boozer by London hospitality royalty, a Lebanese bakery, the latest by the Honey & Co crew and more.
• Accessibility is at the heart of Romano’s, the elegant new brasserie in Jeremy King’s reimagined Simpson’s in the Strand, with a £24.95 set lunch.
• Lebanese manakish – flatbread – has arrived in Dalston thanks to new bakery Edami, which is topping the bread with za’atar and cheese, chocolate, and tahini and carob molasses.
• Vietnamese diner Banh Banh has been reimagined as an oasis in the heart of Brixton doing dishes not often found in London.
• Eastern European natural wine is the star at Sova, a new Notting Hill wine and vinyl bar where a Moldovan chef is whipping up Slavic and Eastern European takes on classic dishes.
• Skewers hailing from Italy’s Abruzzo region dominate the menu at Auguste in London Fields, which is also doing £5 Campari spritzes and a 65 per cent Italian wine list.
• Sally Abé has spent her career building other people’s restaurants – but at Teal in Hackney, she’s going it alone and delving into British culinary history while she’s at it.
• The husband-wife duo behind Honey & Co have transformed their Great Portland Street restaurant into an all-day spot where the food revolves around the wine list, which has been designed by Noble Rot.
• Ravinder Bhogal’s “borderless” cooking – including turmeric and ginger pie, mushroom and egg congee, and spiced lamb sausage rolls – has arrived at the new V&A East museum in the form of Cafe Jikoni.
• Get handrolls, £12 caviar bumps and Japanese twists on classic cocktails at Kumori, a new counter restaurant in Soho.
• Nostalgia runs through Willett’s, a new Chelsea bistro doing mini crumpets with dollops of Dorset crab; a well-executed beef wellington; and a trolley of rhubarb and custard jelly, fudge, and millionaire’s shortbread.
• Century-old members’ club The Sloane Club has opened to the public for the first time, with a bakery by day and a natural wine bar at night.
• Jolene has launched its first central London outpost in the flagship store of luxury streetwear label Aries, where it’s doing pastries and an ever-changing line-up of sandwiches, as well as its merch.
• £6 cocktails are a big draw at The Cellar Club, the new dive bar below Bermondsey Italian diner Flour & Grape.
• A new ramen joint in Soho is open till 1am, serving punters looking for a late-night feed that doesn’t compromise on quality.
• Paris cafe Paperboy has taken over The Standard London’s ground floor terrace until mid-June with an all-day menu of New York-style sandwiches and buns with subtle Japanese influences.
• Padella number three has opened in Soho – and the Italian diner is as approachable as ever, with £9.50 pasta and wine maxing out at £8.50.
• The Papi founders have opened The Golden Tooth, a boozer with a difference in Newington Green: an 80 per cent British wine list, a disco ball and boppy music.
• A key London hospitality family – with St John, Rochelle Canteen and Caravel DNA – has launched a pub in west London doing “pub dishes in a beautiful way”.
• Ed McIlroy’s long-awaited follow-up to The Plimsoll and Tollington’s has arrived in the shape of Bar Etna, a pizza joint in collaboration with lauded Philadelphia pizza chef Joe Beddia.
• Historic northern Indian dishes are in the spotlight at Oudh 1722, the first London restaurant by Aktar Islam, the chef-patron of Birmingham’s two Michelin-starred Opheem.
