From a central London pizza slice joint to a long-awaited pop-up comeback, the capital’s kitchens clearly did not get the summer slowdown memo.
August is supposed to be the quiet month, the traditional lull after a genuinely relentless run of openings across the spring and early summer, the point where London’s restaurant editors finally get to sit down, eat something that is not for a review, and remember what their own kitchen at home looks like. This year, someone appears to have forgotten to send that memo to the actual chefs, because the capital has still managed to squeeze out half a dozen genuinely exciting new openings even in the supposed slow season.
Top of my own list, entirely unashamedly, is the long-awaited return of Tasca, one of last year’s most talked-about pop-ups, finally making a comeback that half my group chat has been anxiously awaiting since it first vanished. There is something particularly satisfying about a beloved pop-up returning properly rather than simply becoming a wistful memory people bring up at dinner parties, a small, specific kind of London joy reserved for the food-obsessed among us.
Islington’s Carmela’s, already a favourite for pizza by the slice, has expanded into central London with a new outpost focused specifically on snappy, order-and-go service, three types of individual slice available, cheese, pepperoni, and a rotating special, plus whole pies for anyone with slightly more ambition and slightly more time. There is a particular kind of relief in a genuinely good slice joint opening centrally, somewhere you can actually get to at short notice rather than trekking halfway across a zone or two purely for lunch, and I suspect this branch is going to become a fairly regular fixture in my own week purely on convenience alone.
A handful of the capital’s most beloved smaller chains have also expanded this month, including new outposts for Bancone, Superette, and It’s Bagels, each bringing their own already-established, already-loved format to a new corner of the city, which is, in its own quiet way, a genuinely reassuring trend in a restaurant scene that can sometimes feel like it is chasing novelty purely for novelty’s sake. Sometimes the best opening is not something entirely new, but simply more access to something the city has already decided it loves.
None of this changes the fundamental, ongoing tension every London food lover currently lives with: there are, genuinely, more excellent places opening in any given month than any reasonable person could actually afford to visit, especially not at the pace this city’s food scene currently demands of anyone trying to keep up. I have accepted, at this point, that I will simply never catch up, that my list of places to try will always outpace my actual bank balance and available evenings, and that this is, somehow, despite the very real financial toll, one of the genuinely better problems a city can hand you.
So, August, supposedly the quiet month. If this is quiet, I am not sure my wallet is prepared for whatever September has planned, but I will, inevitably, be there for it anyway, one slightly too expensive booking at a time.
What genuinely strikes me, sitting down to actually write this up, is how much this specific wave of openings reflects a food scene that has stopped chasing novelty for its own sake and started, instead, doubling down on things it already knows work. A returning pop-up. An expanded chain. A central branch of an existing neighbourhood favourite. None of it is flashy in the way a genuinely brand-new concept restaurant tends to be, and all of it, frankly, is exactly what I actually want from my August: familiar quality, made slightly more convenient to reach, rather than another entirely new thing demanding I learn what it even is before I can decide whether I love it.
I will be booking Tasca’s comeback the moment reservations open, obviously, alongside roughly everyone else in my group chat. Some things about this city’s food scene, thankfully, never change, even in the supposedly quiet month.
More from this author at Lowri Griffiths, prat.uk.