April is the month Londoners collectively lose the plot. The clocks go forward, there are two consecutive days above 14 degrees, and suddenly everyone’s convinced it’s rooftop season, booking outdoor spaces and showing up in a t-shirt and a light jacket. It’s a delusion, but a productive one – and this April, the openings are good enough to justify it.
The Italian count alone is worth noting: Bancone’s biggest site yet lands in the City, Ornella brings Naz Hassan’s Milanese cooking to London Fields, and Weezie’s is making thin-crust pizzas even more hip in Belgravia.
There’s also a rooftop, a wine vault, a robata grill, a pool hall, and a sandwiches takeaway place. Overwhelmed? Don’t be – here’s all you need to know about our favourite launches in April.
We will continue to update this list as more details become available, so do check in again for further info.
Our favourite April restaurant and bar launches in London
Sova
ZIMA has been introducing Londoners to Eastern European food and drink since opening in Soho a decade ago. Sova is their new project, taking over the old ZIMA Notting Hill site on Blenheim Crescent and going in a different direction entirely: less restaurant, more 40-seat wine and vinyl bar, with the focus falling squarely on low-intervention and skin-contact wines from Georgia, Armenia, Ukraine and across the region.
The wine list, curated by sommelier Cristian Vega – previously of Wilton’s and Pollini at Ladbroke Hall – moves from pét-nats and a Ukrainian Brut through orange varietals and Georgian whites, into chilled reds from Bosnia to Bulgaria and everything in between. Vinyl was sourced with input from the team at Rough Trade, and there are guest DJs throughout the week.
The food, from Moldovan chef Denis Calmis, is unfussy sharing plates with a Slavic edge. Think beef tartare on Borodinsky bread with horseradish mayo, whisky and honey-roasted baby chicken, miso-glazed duck confit with Jerusalem artichokes and plum sauce, dark chocolate mousse with sea buckthorn. Bread comes from Notting Hill Bakery around the corner.
When: 8th of April
Where: Notting Hill – 9 Blenheim Cres, London W11 2EE
More info here: @sova.london
Weezie’s
Weezie’s is the new pizza spot opening in Eccleston Yards in April, from Abbie Roden and Will Sandbach, the couple behind Amie Wine Studio next door. The name is a nod to Abbie’s Kentuckian grandmother Louise – which tells you something about the register this place is going for: personal, unfussy, neighbourhood. Head Chef Sumant Sinai comes with solid pizza credentials, having previously worked at Circus Pizza at Panzer’s and Share a Slice.
The menu centres on thin-crust pizzas made with regeneratively farmed flour and British ingredients, alongside small plates and a Kentucky ranch that ties the whole thing back to where the name came from. On drinks: Amie wines by the glass, Harbour Brewery lagers from Cornwall, and a short cocktail list. It’s walk-ins only, with takeaway available – the idea being you start next door at Amie and drift over when you’re ready to eat.
When: 7th of April
Where: 14-15 Eccleston Yards, 21 Eccleston Pl, London SW1W 9AZ
More info: @weezieslondon
Mitsu
Mitsu, which opens on the 9th of April on Willow Street, isn’t just another Japanese restaurant in Shoreditch. Co-founded by Steven Bonnington, the concept is built around the izakayas of East Tokyo and the creative energy of the neighbourhood it’s landing in. The room – designed by Astet – makes the intention clear before you’ve even sat down: a corridor of LED arches and pulsing sound on arrival, soaring ceilings, dramatic floor-to-ceiling drapes, and an imposing island bar surrounded by semi-private dining areas. It’s late-night energy through and through.
Executive Chef Aaj Fernando runs the kitchen, with a menu built around the energy of robata cooking and the traditions of izakaya dining. The kitchen moves from punchy opening snacks – spicy edamame, shishito peppers, chicken karaage – through to hamachi sashimi, wagyu sandos, soft-shell crab tempura, and kushiyaki skewers. Main acts include the robata, whole sea bass, Angus T-bone, and hanger steak.
Behind the bar, Soul Shakers has put together a sake developed in collaboration with Kanpai Sake Brewery, and there’s Japanese whisky on draft with Suntory. DJs run through the evening and onto the terrace on Willow Street, which has its own decks and isn’t planning on shutting down early.
When: 9th of April
Where: 50 Willow St, London EC2A 4BH
More info here: Mitsu
Sabine Holborn
Sabine is taking over the rooftop of the NYX Hotel in Holborn this April — their second site after St Paul’s, which has built a decent following on the back of its views, DJ nights and a menu that runs to achari chicken tacos, mac ‘n’ cheese croquettes and arancini. Not reinventing the wheel, but a wheel that clearly works. The Holborn space has been stripped of its predecessor’s dark interior and redone in coral and terracotta, patterned upholstery, a central illuminated bar – warmer, brighter, more Sabine. A retractable roof and retractable windows mean it functions year-round rather than just when London cooperates.
Specific menu details for Holborn haven’t dropped yet, but if St Paul’s is the template – cocktail-led, sharing plates, bottomless brunch on weekends, DJ Munro on Wednesday, Thursday and Saturday evenings – you know roughly what you’re getting (a splendiferous time).
When: 1st of April
Where: Holborn – 50-60 Southampton Row, London WC1B 4AR
More info here: Sabine London
Mondo to Go
Mondo Sando started during lockdown with a pub residency at the Grove House Tavern in Camberwell, and has been building a south London following ever since – first through the residency, then through Cafe Mondo, their own diner on Camberwell Grove. Mondo to Go is their third site, opening on the 10th April at in Deptford Market Yards: takeaway-focused, with a 50-seat outdoor terrace for eating on the spot.
The menu carries all the Cafe Mondo signatures – the Mondo Frango (peri-peri chicken, matchstick fries, shredded lettuce in a sesame sub roll), the Mondo Combo, the Everything Cutlet, pickles and latkes – plus exclusives you won’t find at either Camberwell site. Tom Cummings, who designed Cafe Mondo, has done the interiors in the same retro caff aesthetic, primary colours and formica, with a small Museum of Stones exhibit for good measure. Drinks run to pints, cherry lemonades, grapefruit green tea slushies and rotating house sodas. Co-founders Jack Macrae and Viggo Blegvad put it simply: they spent years working five minutes from Jack’s flat in Camberwell, so it was only fair to open somewhere five minutes from Viggo’s in Deptford.
When: 10th of April
Where: Deptford – Arch 5, Deptford Market Yards, London SE8 4BX
More info: @mondo.sandwiches
Kinz
KINZ takes its name from the Arabic word for treasure, which sets the register pretty clearly: this isn’t another Edgware Road institution or a trendy mezze-and-natural-wine situation. Opening on the 15th of APril in the former Lloyds Bank building on Notting Hill Gate – a 1930s Sir Edward Maufe-designed space, triple-height ceilings, extended arches, the original bank vault now repurposed as a wine room – it’s the first restaurant from Rasha Khouri Bruzzo and brothers Jad and Karim Lahoud, whose parents were both chefs and whose approach here is rooted in the kind of cooking that doesn’t get written down.
The all-day menu runs from breakfast through late dinner: egg dishes and traditional sandwiches in the morning, then mezze, house-made breads and sharing plates through the afternoon and evening. Larger plates include Lamb Kafta, Warak Enab – vine leaves and baby courgettes wrapped around fragrant rice and spiced lamb – and Fattet Aubergine, baked and layered with pine nuts, tomato, yoghurt and crisp pita. Wine leans heavily on Lebanese producers from independent wineries, from £8 a glass, with cocktails reworked with regional ingredients. You enter through a deli stocked with house-made preserves, spice blends and olive oil – lamb and pine nut kibbehs and spinach fatayers to take home if you can’t face leaving empty-handed.
When: 27th of April
Where: 50 Notting Hill Gate, London W11 3JD
More info: Kinz
MA/NA
MA/NA is the latest addition to the Thesleff Group – the London hospitality company behind Los Mochis, LUNA Omakase and the recently launched Sale e Pepe. This luxury Japanese restaurant and bar is opening on the 20th of April in Mayfair, with a concept rooted in the Japanese idea of “mana” – a spiritual energy said to exist within all ingredients. Executive Chef Leo Tanyag leads the kitchen with a menu spanning tiger shrimp tempura with wasabi, M5 Wagyu seared on Himalayan salt stone, and truffle and garlic fried rice, while Bar Director Pietro Collina (formerly of Nomad and Eleven Madison Park) heads up a bar programme drawing on rare spirits and 1970s Tokyo bartending traditions.
The space has been designed with the same deliberateness as the menu: dark wood panelling, warm amber lighting by OV&CO, a dragon-shaped banquette coiling through the lounge, and a handblown Magma lighting sculpture by EWE Studio. Founder Markus Thesleff – who has personal ties to Japan through his father and grandfather, the latter a Finnish Ambassador to the country -describes MA/NA as “a celebration of ritual and the quiet mastery behind it.” The venue also includes a private dining room for up to 20 guests, and transitions into a cocktail bar later in the evening with resident DJs.
When: 20th of April
Where: 30 Upper Grosvenor Street, London W1K 7PH
More info: manarestaurants.com
The Latimer
The Latimer is the kind of opening that means more if you know who’s behind it. Jon Spiteri – original partner at The French House, St John with Fergus Henderson, and Sessions Arts Club – and Melanie Arnold, co-founder of Rochelle Canteen, are opening a North Kensington pub with their sons Lorcan and Fin, who ran Caravel, the floating barge restaurant on the Regent’s Canal, and daughter Molly, business development lead at Koya. That is, collectively, a remarkable amount of London dining history in one family, and this is the first time they’ve all worked together.
Lorcan leads the kitchen, with a menu that moves from black pudding confit potato with homemade brown sauce and poached trout mayonnaise in little gem, through to brown crab tagliolini with bisque and lemon, oxtail with mash and horseradish, and almond cake with custard and poached rhubarb. The bar menu – for those just dropping in – runs to masala monkfish with tartare sauce and tempura oyster mushrooms with pickles. Sundays swap the à la carte for sharing platters of meat with seasonal vegetables.
When: 21st of April
Where: Ladbroke Grove – 274 Latimer Rd, London W10 6QW
More info: The Latimer
Bancone City
When Grace Dent called Bancone “casually orgasmic” back in 2018, it was their first site in Covent Garden and they had one dish that everyone was ordering – Silk Handkerchiefs with walnut butter and confit egg yolk, which they’ve now served over a million bowls of.
Seven consecutive Michelin Bib Gourmands later, they’re opening their biggest site yet: 170 covers at 7 Princes Street in the City on the 22th of April, with a bar, a 30-cover private dining room downstairs, and the signature bancone counter running through the space for anyone who wants to eat watching the kitchen.
The Silk Handkerchiefs are obviously still on, but executive chef Ben Waugh has added things worth ordering alongside them. The Carbonara Raviolo is a single large raviolo filled with cacio, smoked potato purée and an oozy St Ewe egg yolk, topped with crispy guanciale – the kind of dish that requires no explanation.
There’s also a Porchetta: brined and rolled with confit garlic, basil and parsley, slow-roasted then finished over charcoal and brushed with guanciale fat, served with a Calabrian chilli red cabbage slaw and crispy pig skin.
When: 22nd of April
Where: City of London – 7 Princes St, London EC2R 8AQ
More info: Bancone
MIKO Mei Fair
Samyukta Nair has built quietly one of the most coherent restaurant empires in Mayfair -Jamavar (Michelin-starred), Bombay Bustle, MiMi Mei Fair, KOYN, Nipotina – all within a few streets of each other, all with a distinct personality, and all reliably full. MIKO Mei Fair, opening on the 23rd of April on Curzon Street, is her latest move: a 50-cover Thai restaurant born from a merger of two things she already does well. The concept draws on KOYN Thai’s fire-led, ingredient-driven cooking and drops it into the Georgian townhouse that houses MiMi Mei Fair – teal and timber panelling, red leather banquettes, gold-leaf lotus motifs.
The kitchen is led by Soonthorn Apaipat, Head Chef of KOYN Thai, and the menu carries over KOYN signatures – Chiang Mai Sausage, Lamb Massaman, Yellow Crab Curry – alongside new dishes like Lobster Choo Chee and what is surely the most Mayfair dish of the year: MiMi’s apple wood Peking Duck folded into a Penang curry. The bar follows the same logic as the kitchen, cocktails built around tropical fruit, warm spice and citrus.
MIKO is open for lunch and dinner Monday to Saturday, and lunch and dinner on Sundays. Reservations are open now.
When: 23rd of April
Where: 55 Curzon St, London W1J 8PG
More info: Miko Mei Fair
Ornella
LUPA, the 28-seat Roman osteria that Carousel co-founder Ed Templeton and actor Theo James opened in Highbury last year, has been one of those bookings that disappears the moment it goes live – its true draw being head chef Naz Hassan, whose instinctive talent and obsessive attention to detail defies the apparent simplicity on the plate. Born in Bangladesh and raised in Milan, Hassan is now cooking the food of his childhood – and Ornella, opening end of April on Wilton Way in London Fields, is where he gets to do it properly.
Where LUPA was Roman, Ornella is Milanese – butter-rich, Alpine-influenced, built on dairy and grains. The kitchen lives and dies by its risotto and cotoletta, which tells you everything about the register. The menu follows the classic Italian structure: antipasti through dolci, with crowd-pleasers like Mondeghili meatballs, Penne alla Vodka and Tagliatelle al burro e Parmigiano alongside signatures like Vitello tonnato, an ‘elephant’s ear’ Cotoletta di Vitello, and a Zuppa Inglese for dessert. Hassan’s long-time collaborator chef Alessandro Boscolo is in the kitchen alongside him.
The space seats 48 (nearly double than LUPA) with a handful of sunlit window seats held for walk-ins and a terrace for when London permits it.
When: end of April
Where: 51 Wilton Way, London E8 1BG
More info: @ornella.restaurant
Read more
March in food: The most anticipated restaurant launches in London
February in food: The new restaurant and bar launches we’re bookmarking