The Counter: My Favourite Openings of 2026 So Far

The Counter is a weekly column from award-winning restaurant writer and broadcaster Jimi Famurewa. Sign up to get The Counter first, sent to your inbox every Wednesday.

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One of the major issues with the restaurant world’s traditional end-of-year list season is the hectic nature of London’s dining calendar. How much should you allow for recency bias? Does that place that you loved in the afterglow of its opening still deserve inclusion? What about the spot where a founding chef has since fallen out with the proprietor and left the business in a kind of muddled, existential limbo?

Memories falter. The capital’s hospitality narratives play out at warp-speed (data has shown that 2025 was still the city’s biggest for restaurant openings since 2017). And, sometimes, it really can feel like London crams about a year’s worth of incident into six months. With that in mind, here is my equivalent of a mid-term report: a run-down of the openings from the first half of 2026 that rank among my favourites. It is not in any sort of hierarchical order. There are absent, highly rated places (hello Burro, Cafe Clement and Johnny Boy’s) that I haven’t yet tried. All the same, these are the spots that, often across multiple visits, have given me the most joy in the past 27 weeks or so.

The Spiteri-Arnold clan's Latimer Road pub – raised up by an early tide of industry goodwill – seems, to me, to be growing more fully into itself. A recent impromptu lunch there was characterised by the contrast of gently infernal heat (there is an overworked little fan in lieu of air-conditioning) and quietly majestic cooking. An icy, pitch-perfect cucumber and melon salad. Terrific skin-on chips. A chilli cheeseburger with an appealing daintiness and tickling, moreish burn. A family affair to be cherished and savoured.

If this was a list of the best dish names of the year then it would probably start and finish with this Welsh-inspired Peckham cafe’s masterwork: the Caerphilly Cheesesteak. And the best bit? The sandwich itself – leek, ribboned beef and pale, tangy cheese sauce bursting the banks of its housemade, sesame-seeded hoagie roll – absolutely lives up to the joyful, cross-cultural spirit of that pun. The same goes for the dank slabs of bara brith and cockle-strewn Swansea breakfast plates. A singular, warmly run and better-than-it-needs-to-be endeavour that encapsulates so much of what makes London’s dining scene special.

Is there much left to say about Meedu Saad’s category-defying live fire behemoth? Probably not. In fact, more recently, it has begun to feel like Super 8’s biggest-ever opening has reached the point in its hype-cycle where some are tentatively querying everything from the prices to the outsize fuss. Look, it’s a game of opinions and Impala’s vision of North African-inflected, produce-driven grill cooking is uncompromising, visually stark and unapologetically premium. But I cannot pretend that the dishes I’ve eaten there – the duck in sticky fig molasses, the life-changing bordelaise-glazed sweetbreads, courgettes, ethereal yoghurt and dried mint like a dissembled tzatziki – are not some of the most exhilarating and unforgettable things to have passed my lips this year.

To say that this long-awaited London Fields debut from Sally Abé paddles against the Hackney tide is to put it mildly. Small plates, low-intervention chilled reds and culture-splicing dollops of housemade gochujang? You won’t find any of them in the alluring little airing cupboard of a space on Wilton Way. What you will find is assured, twinkly service and the sort of honed, tradition-forward British cooking – think bacon-wrapped prunes plugged with chicken liver parfait, lamb rump beside a nuanced, highly lickable wild garlic emulsion, a marmalade ice-cream sandwich with just the right nudging hit of citric bitterness – that makes sense in any postcode.

Hulking barbecue smokers in the yard. Tablefuls of drinkers in the sunshine. Amiably chaotic service. From its somewhat unwieldy name out, Cue Point’s long-term residency at this Notting Hill enormo-pub feels like a welcome antidote to the rigorously moodboarded slickness that dominates London’s restaurant landscape. But the infectious anarchy and lively day sesh atmosphere belies the deep craft and whirling creativity of Mursal Saiq and Joshua Moroney’s Afghan- and Caribbean-accented interpretation of Texan-style barbecue. Get the brisket with a butter-slicked “cowboy naan”, a glass of something cold, and give yourself over fully to one of the summer’s most distinct and irresistible sensory experiences.

You may have heard about the inventive confections at this abominably popular Middle Eastern-inspired bakery and cafe in Leyton – the buns primed with chai custard, the tahini-spiked banana brûlée pastries, the roast aubergine danishes, thickly paved with muhammara, and the brown sugar cardamom coffees. But what I don’t think you can truly appreciate until you step into the bustle of the mid-morning rush here is what a beautiful, lovingly rendered space it is, all thoughtful lighting, womb-like grotto nooks and glinting Moroccan-inspired tile. A wonder of a community space that’s absolutely worthy of a pilgrimage.

Confession: despite the fact it opened in March, it was only in the last week or so that I finally got around to properly dining at Jeremy King’s richly textured hit reboot of Simpson’s. Anyway, whether it was my innate contrarian streak or just a particularly busy start of the year, I don’t know what it is that took me so long. The space in the Grand Divan especially, all soaring ceilings and buffed panelling, is extraordinary. The carving trolley rib of beef is conversation-haltingly good. And basement bar Nellie’s (soon transitioning into a members club, I hear) is a dim-lit, under-the-radar treasure. A four-in-one British gastrodome that has soul to match its breathtaking scope.

Have we actually checked whether Jackson Boxer has some rudimentary cloning technology hidden beneath a bed sheet in a Stockwell basement? Either way, his ability to mount and manage a dizzying array of culinary projects (Brunswick House, Dove, Below Stone Nest, Henri, Taq, a Selfridges concession that, yes, still seemingly exists) genuinely needs to be studied. Logic would dictate that Vesper – a transfer of Dove’s successful, pleasure-forward spirit to a prime Exmouth Market corner site – might be the point at which his creative wellspring runs dry. Not a bit of it. Instead, a starkly handsome, zinc-panelled room is the frame for a freewheeling, generous-spirited and deeply sexy mode of London Continental cooking (raw tuna-heaped spring onion pancakes; slurpable palourde clams and coco beans in a cider cream sauce; a refined update of perhaps London’s best burger) that feels like the city’s present and future all at once.

It has been a very good year for those of us who bought a figurative mountain of Dara Klein stock way back in The Compton Arms days. Not only has the New Zealand-raised, Pugliese-heritage chef just published her debut cookbook to a fair bit of early buzz, she also opened a Columbia Road Italian that managed to genuinely cut through even amid 2026’s crowded field of new wave trattorias. How did Tiella do this? Well, with not just the expressive, homely potency of Klein’s cooking – I genuinely think about the passatelli in brodo, chicken Milanese and jiggling hillock of fig leaf panna cotta at least every couple of weeks – but also with a room and team that seemed to remind London of the sparkling miracle of sure-footed, sparky service. Legitimately an instant classic.

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