The team behind Dalston’s yakitori specialist Jidori have announced they will be bringing their Japanese small plates restaurant to Covent Garden on 27 February 2018. Occupying a terraced building on Catherine Street, the 50-cover restaurant is spread over the ground and first floor. The lower ground floor offers guests their very own private dining karaoke room, available for […]

Continue reading


A high-end hybrid Oriental restaurant combining Chinese and Japanese cuisines will open next month in the new Four Seasons hotel at Ten Trinity Square in the City of London. Mei Ume, a name bringing together the Chinese and Japanese words for “plum”, launches on June 9, joining star French chef Anne-Sophie Pic’s La Dame de Pic […]

Continue reading


Piccadilly’s long-running Japan Centre is to move into salubrious new premises off Leicester Square in September. Based on the Japanese concept of a “depachika” – the basement food hall in a department store – it will feature a 100-seat dining courtyard, along with specialist rooms offering Japanese teas, sake and miso, the latter available direct from the […]

Continue reading


One of London’s leading Japanese restaurants since it opened in Marylebone in 2006, Dinings is to launch a sister venue in Knightsbridge next month. Dinings SW3 aims to fuse Japanese tradition with European seafood bar culture, offering plateaux de fruits de mer fresh from Cornish dayboats, plus robata-style cuisine using a Josper grill, with a seasonal sake list […]

Continue reading


Zuma, the super-glossy Japanese-fusion haunt that’s a magnet for Knightsbridge eurotrash, has won its High Court battle against a dog-food brand of the same name. Chef Rainer Becker, who founded the restaurant in 2002, initiated the action against the “luxury” pet-food range launched in 2014 by Kingston-based Zoe Vanderbilt. She told the court that the brand was […]

Continue reading


Cotswolds-based MasterChef finalist and former banker Andrew Kojima is opening his first restaurant, Koj, in Cheltenham next week on the back of successful pop-up and crowd-funding campaigns. He trialled the venture – and the Regent Street venue – as a pop-up in the run-up to Christmas, generating enough interest to raise £55,000 from more than 200 backers. […]

Continue reading