Yauatcha closes for a Wong Kar Wai makeover, and Gennaro Contaldo opens Bolo (3 October 2026)
A fortnight in which Soho lost one of its defining dining rooms for a year and gained a small pasta bar from one of the best known Italian cooks in Britain. A Carnaby chicken and steak grill has a date, and a pub group from Chelsea is heading for Cambridge Circus.
Yauatcha Soho closed on 26 September for a year-long redesign
Yauatcha served its last lunch at 15-17 Broadwick Street on 26 September and will stay shut for about a year while the room is rebuilt. The creative consultant on the redesign is the Hong Kong film director Wong Kar Wai. "A great film starts with a great story, and so does a great restaurant," he said.
The menu is being reworked too. Fan Choi, formerly of Aulis Hong Kong and the Michelin-starred Mora, has joined the group as research and development chef and is moving the cooking towards a more seasonal menu. Alan Yau opened Yauatcha in 2004, when good dim sum at a fair price was still rare in London, and the room looked like nothing else in Soho at the time. Reopening is billed for late 2027, so anyone who relied on it for dim sum near Berwick Street will need a stand-in until then.
Source: Hot Dinners, 22 September 2026.
Gennaro Contaldo opened Bolo on Air Street on 25 September
Bolo by Gennaro opened at 17 Air Street, W1B, on 25 September, taking over the old Il Conte site next door to a Prezzo. It is Contaldo's first restaurant in almost 20 years, and he has done it with the company that recently revived Jamie's Italian; Contaldo was Jamie Oliver's mentor, and the two have known each other since the early Nineties.
The format is deliberately small: 32 seats and six pasta dishes, built around Bolognese. Contaldo's pork and beef ragu comes with tagliatelle, and the list also runs to orecchiette with octopus and 'nduja bolo, and tagliorini with Amalfi lemon butter and mint. Starters include bruschetta and bolo arancini, and there are only two desserts, ricotta doughnuts or gelato and sorbet. A short pasta menu a minute from Piccadilly Circus is useful before a show or after Regent Street shopping.
Source: Hot Dinners, 28 September 2026.
Solis opens on Kingly Street on 20 October
Solis, the chicken and steak grill from the TA TA Eatery team of Ana Gonçalves and Zijun Meng, is leaving the Arcade food hall format for its own restaurant at 26 Kingly Street, W1B, opening on 20 October. The unit was previously a Breddos and before that a Patty&Bun.
The food hall staples stay: a grilled half chicken with smoked Aji-Aji chilli oil and a flat iron steak with Solis steak sauce. The bigger kitchen adds Chateaubriand with chimichurri and aji picante, rotating butcher's cuts on a blackboard, a South American torta pascoalina in filo, croquetas and a Uruguayan-style prawn cocktail. Drinks are sangria, low-intervention South African wines and new cocktails. It is the second Arcade concept to go standalone after Manna.
Source: Hot Dinners, 23 September 2026.
The Magpie will take the old Ape & Bird pub at Cambridge Circus
Ardent Pubs, the group behind The Cadogan Arms, The George and The Hound, is opening The Magpie at 142 Shaftesbury Avenue in early 2027. The building has been a pub for a long time, most recently a BrewDog and before that Russell Norman's Ape & Bird. The founder, Dominic Jacobs, has a family tie to it: it was his grandfather's local when he worked at the Soho fire station.
No menu has been released. The group's other pubs pair classics with steaks, chops and dishes such as Iberico pork ribs and osso buco, and this will be its most central site so far, on the Soho edge of Cambridge Circus.
Source: Hot Dinners, 2 October 2026.
Also nearby
- Heard, the smash burger bar from former Michelin-starred chef Jordan Bailey, opens its third site at 33-35 Wellington Street, Covent Garden, in November, in an old Byron, with a downstairs dessert and cocktail bar. Source: Hot Dinners, 28 September 2026.
Previous roundup: Beefbar takes over Dear Jackie, and Soho gets its own design district.