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The London restaurant industry is nothing if not predictable. The easiest call of my life was to suppose the then newly opened Yellow Bittern would become the talk of the town in the autumn of 2024. To identify paradigms as regards New York-style pizza, smashburgers and “home comforts” last year felt only straightforward.
And so forgive my hubris moving into 2026. Many wheels are already in motion. Spice bags are a mainstream “a thing” — the fact a version of the Irish takeaway is available in Spoons speaks volumes — and only furthers Britain’s current obsession with Irish lore. And if you’re not already in the queue for a sandwich at Logma, a new Iraqi-Iranian bistro in Hackney, good luck getting one.
Some developments are cyclical: mince on toast will again migrate from the folds of country cookbooks to the here and now. And then there are such fancies as cosmos, schiacciata (an alternative to focaccia), Greek island wine and whatever new pasta shape the industry decides to latch onto. My reckoning is crozets from Savoie but it could just as likely be cascatelli, a curved, frilly type invented by a podcaster in 2021.
Here are five other food and drink predictions for 2026.
amirali mirhashemian-
Smashburgers will sustain but to some extent fade away. I can’t imagine there’ll be queues outside Supernova in 2026, or at least not ones to any notable length. The smashburger trend was fun but went too far — some new versions became so thin it was like eating a beef flavoured mousemat from a school IT room. In their stead, provincial-style pub burgers will arrive. You know the ones? Thick, juicy, the sort you ate in 2007 with your folks in a nondescript beer garden not far from the M25. They came with a side of fat floury chips and a simple salad comprising lettuce, tomato, cucumber and cress. Possibly a mound of cheap coleslaw. So long as the beef is of serviceable quality, these burgers are a happy mix of unpretentious and comforting. Inside a soft white bap, they must be topped with a hunk of oozing cheddar and paired with sliced white or red onion. The real old guard will scatter chopped parsley over everything.
Beamish
Not for a moment will Guinness slide into obscurity or even lesser-intrigue. It will remain the most-sold beer in Britain again in 2026, creamy pints thrust proudly on Instagram, ingrained into the discourse like the weather. But the new Guinness Storehouse in Covent Garden is an evolution that catapults the drink into new less favourable territory. The Storehouse isn’t chic or interesting. Rather, it’s for out-of-towners, stag parties and those for whom Guinness remains something of a novelty or a personality trait. The fact of the matter is this: it is just a drink, just a pint. And so I think some will clamour for Beamish in 2026. To some degree, anyway. They’ll still enjoy Guinness but where there’s an opportunity to enjoy the best pint out of Cork (sorry, Murphy’s), they’ll take it. Beamish has remained something of a mystery in Britain until now. A new Heineken (Beamish owners) deal with beer importer Cave Direct signed late last year means it’s a growing force. There are 10 pubs with the stout on draught in London now and more will follow.
Vincenzo’s
London’s meteoric rise to become a proper pizza city has been well documented. First came a wave of Neapolitan pies, then other varieties, New York slices most notably. Last year saw the Bushey-born Vincenzo’s open in Shoreditch, following Paulie’s down the road; Gracey’s finally pitched up on Tottenham Court Road having enticed so many Londoners to St Alban’s in the years before. What’s next? That’s less obvious. There could well be a Roman, tonda-style resurgence (remember Pizza Express?) and more grandma pies and what some herald as “London pizza”. That is to say, an amalgamation of Italian and East Coast techniques. Breadstall might be the foremost example right now. But here’s what is likely to happen more broadly: the expansion of existing brands. Pizza is now a safer bet — that’s not to say it’s in any way easy, by the way — than many other, arguably more ambitious restaurant ideas. TL;DR: pretty much everyone loves pizza and a vast proportion of the population can afford the £15 bill. Expect to see big names start rolling out, not too rapidly, but perhaps we could see two- and three-site pizza groups form in 2026.
Courtesy of Kinkally
Georgian food is nothing new in London. Little Georgia has been an Islington mainstay for years and then there’s Iberia in Pimlico, Kartuli in Dulwich, Geamos in St John’s Wood and Aba-Ra! near Spitalfields. To name but a few. But Georgian food has yet to hit the mainstream proper — a preserve of diehard food fans and the more curious in the city. The closest the country got to anything that cut-through was Kinkally, a modern Georgian restaurant on Charlotte Street with an excellent cocktail bar below. The twisted dumplings are sellable thanks to their affordability and soft familiarity, with just the right amount of adventure (like driving a Volvo to Calais; I’ve used this gag before). Anyway, Georgian food is deserving of its time in the sun. The country is seeing a tourism boom — ever a sign — and there is also the matter of the wine: ask any sommelier in town, at least any east of Mayfair, and they’ll extol the virtues of its vino.
Cloth and the Simpson’s Tavern
Courtesy
Anyone who’s eaten at Cloth will know that it’s superb. There in one of the City’s winding lanes is a candlelit enclave so cosy it’s as if eating inside a duvet, with staff any hospitality enterprise would die for and a wine list rarely matched. It’s little wonder the team behind the restaurant, Joe Haynes, Ben Butterworth and chef Tom Hurst (formerly of the excellent Brawn, later Lasdun), bought last year Simpson’s Tavern, an institutional boozer that closed in late 2022 owing to a rollicking rental dispute. There was a public outcry — why would anybody think it okay to close an establishment that served a single sausage with every dish? That was frequented by the likes of Dickens, Pepys and Thackeray before the financiers, taxi drivers and butchers of today? It will reopen in 2026 and will be one of two Simpsons restaurants to cause a hubbub. The other is on the Strand, is of equal historic value, and is under the careful, knowing stewardship of legendary restaurateur Jeremy King. Instagram will be awash with interest. But among these launches, it could be that Cloth, a place only open Monday to Friday, for lunch and dinner, gets its dues. It could be the restaurant of the year in 2026.
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