Celeb chef du jour, Nuno Mendes, who closed Viajante last year and headed for Marylebone’s über hot Chiltern Firehouse (pictured), has opened a casual, new tavern in east London. Mendes, perhaps the first chef to put Bethnal Green on the culinary map with his tour-de-force restaurant at the Town Hall Hotel, launched Taberna do Mercado in Spitalfields Market yesterday (4 May).

The 40-cover all-day venue serves food and wine from Mendes’s native Portugal. A soft opening is currently running until 10 May with booking available via http://www.tabernamercado.co.uk/.

Mendes himself will stay on as executive chef at American hotelier Andre Balazs’s Chiltern Firehouse – which despite being a like a flame for celebrity moths was decidedly put in its place by our survey reporters who found the food a bit “meh” and the place itself full of “paparazzi and poseurs”.