Dining Out: Five London Restaurants I'm Excited to Try in 2025

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London is a city full of restaurants opening and closing at a rapid rate, which can be difficult to keep up with. I like that about it – there’s always something interesting or at least stupid going on, after all – but you do feel places falling in and out of favour pretty quickly because of the sheer turnaround.

That’s why I’m always most interested in new openings that feel designed to be the sort of restaurant you want to return to; the ones which don’t necessarily go in for big budget PR and #invite-heavy openings, but which, instead, tend to be places where the prices are decent, the food seems accessible, and having fun is baked in. They’re places that are actually built to last, in other words. Over the past couple of months (or half a year in one case), I’ve noticed a few spots that seem to fit this bill this springing up – so I thought that for this week’s paid post, I’d tell you about the places I’m excited to visit over the first few months of 2025, largely because they actually feel like they might well become keepers in my dining out (heh) Rolodex.

Rake

From 9th January, Rake is due to be the new residency at The Compton Arms which is a kitchen that birthed a) the burger they do at The Plimsoll and b) the great Tiella, with its comforting homestyle Italian cooking. As such, considering the lineage, it’s probably going to be pretty fucking good. The idea seems to be traditional British, Brexit Means Brexit cooking – beer battered cockles, beef and ale pie, a Cumberland sausage hotdog for Arsenal match days – in the vein of what Gengelly’s do at pubs in south London. SO, as a Big Pub Food Head, I’m looking forward to giving it a try, hopefully on a chilly evening when all I want in the world is a massive slice of treacle tart.