August is traditionally a fallow month in the world of London restaurants. Chefs post photographs from Puglia, half the city disappears and, frankly, this year it was too hot for anyone to do much besides nurse something cold in front of a fan at home.September is when everybody comes home and, apparently having learnt nothing about diary management, opens a restaurant at once. This year, the return is particularly frantic. Sertaç Dirik, the chef who helped turn Mangal II into one of London’s most talked-about restaurants, has left Dalston for Soho. Florence Knight is back in a permanent kitchen. Romy Gill has one again, too. The people behind Dorian are putting two successful Japanese residencies under the same Notting Hill roof. The Levan lot have come north of the river. Elliott Kaye, formerly of Norman’s, would still quite like to feed you a cheeseburger. Pubs, meanwhile, continue their march towards becoming some of the city’s most interesting restaurants, only with better opening hours and something sensible to eat with it. September brings three worth knowing about, including an Indian pub in Shepherd’s Bush and a new Clerkenwell project from the people behind The Pelican and The Hero. This is the edited version. Not everything opening in September has made the cut, which still leaves a fairly serious problem for anyone hoping to have dinner at home.KID, SohoSertaç Dirik swaps Dalston for Soho with one of September’s most anticipated openings (KID)Some restaurants merely open. Others arrive already impossible to book. KID belongs firmly to the latter. Sertaç Dirik made his name alongside his brother Ferhat at Mangal II, transforming the family ocakbasi in Dalston without sanding away everything that made people love it in the first place. He left in 2024 and has now reappeared in Soho with David Carter, whose recent form includes OMA and AGORA and who is presently opening restaurants with unnerving accuracy and more capital letters.KID is rooted in Dirik’s Turkish heritage, interpreted through British ingredients and a wood-fired oven. Tombik pide will emerge blistered from the fire; içli köfte comes stuffed with aged ex-dairy beef; Cornish scallops get the coal treatment; the animal that donated its name to the restaurant is braised overnight in clay. There is a bakery downstairs, counter seats looking onto the grill and enough expectation surrounding the whole thing to make a table at 6pm on a Monday sound suddenly quite attractive. If one opening defines September, it’s probably this. Open now | 55 Frith Street, London W1D 4SJ | WebsiteNakimushi, Notting HillDorian founder Chris D’Sylva brings two cult Japanese residencies under one roof (Nakimushi)Chris D’Sylva has developed something of a Midas touch in Notting Hill. Dorian has a cult following, Eel Sushi, directly opposite, is superb, so expectations are understandably high for Nakimushi, a Japanese restaurant bringing together two concepts already tested nearby. Downstairs, Robin Kosuge turns his Robin’s Ramen residency into a permanent ramen bar. Upstairs, Yuji Shimokawa Kelly expands the cooking he developed at Urchin into a 25-seat restaurant and bar, where the menu moves beyond noodles into dishes such as red prawn and courgette gyoza, quail tempura and Ibérico-Duroc pork with red almond miso.Both chefs previously cooked out of Supermarket of Dreams in Holland Park. Now they have a timber-panelled townhouse in Kensington Mall and a clientele who have already demonstrated their willingness to go wherever D’Sylva tells them to.Nakimushi means “crybaby”. This may prove useful vocabulary when you cannot get a reservation.Opens 7 September | 7 Kensington Mall, London W8 4EB | WebsiteCassette, Covent GardenThe Levan team heads central with French cooking, serious speakers and a coq au vin jaune pie built for Instagram (Cassette)Covent Garden has spent years trying to convince Londoners it is somewhere to eat as well as somewhere to watch The Lion King and accidentally spend £47 on hand cream. Or somewhere to avoid in general. Cassette should help the campaign. It comes from the team behind Levan, the Peckham restaurant that has spent the past eight years making low-intervention wine and very good Comté fries look like perfectly ordinary neighbourhood behaviour. Their first central London restaurant takes over a handsome old building on Maiden Lane, with former Planque chef Essa Fakhry in charge of the kitchen. The reference points are French, which puts Cassette neatly in step with a London restaurant scene that has spent the past few years becoming quite unhinged about bistros, butter and anything that can plausibly be served with a carafe. Food includes raw scallop with cucumber and basil, fromage de tête with tarragon, a cep and smoked egg yolk vol-au-vent and a coq au vin jaune pie with a chicken leg sticking out the top, which is one way to make sure nobody scrolls past it on Instagram.Music is unusually central to the idea. Co-founder Mark Gurney is a DJ and record-label owner and has installed 1970s Grundig Audiorama speakers, which should at least ensure the inevitable complaints about the music being too loud have been carefully considered in advance. If the lighting is also too dark, Cassette may have completed the modern bistro set.Opens 23 September | 42 Maiden Lane, London WC2E 7LJ | WebsiteLunette, StrandFlorence Knight has been away from a permanent restaurant kitchen long enough for people to become sentimental about Polpetto. She later led the cooking at Sessions Arts Club, but Lunette is her first restaurant of her own and, in keeping with current London custom, it is on top of a hotel. The hotel is St Clement, Nick Jones’s new project at 180 The Thames, where Cafe Clement downstairs has already demonstrated that a former Soho House boss can still summon a dining room full of recognisable people. Knight will be 11 floors above them. Lunette will be small and tasting menu-only, with views across the Thames doing some of the decorative work. Knight’s menu will change with the seasons; an early dish of pomme souffle stuffed with smoked eel and finished with nasturtium suggests she has not suddenly developed an interest in being dull. The room, meanwhile, is intended to lean into the building’s brutalist bones rather than smother them in velvet, which counts as a small act of bravery in a London hotel. Opens mid-September, date TBC | Level 11, St Clement, London WC2R 2NF | WebsiteTalli Queen, Shepherd’s BushAvinash Shashidhara has the CV for a rather serious restaurant. Instead, the former River Cafe and Pahli Hill chef has taken over a 120-year-old pub in Shepherd’s Bush and decided London could use more draught beer, Kerala chilli beef and Bangalore after dark. Talli Queen takes its cues from Kerala toddy shops, Bangalore pubs and the food Shashidhara grew up around. There will be chicken and liver pepper fry, military canteen-style meatballs, kebabs, goat nihari and Bangalore-inspired dosa, alongside the papadi chaat he cooked on Great British Menu. Sunday lunch gets reworked too, with slow-cooked lamb shoulder and biryani made for sharing. No need to argue about which meat Yorkshire puddings are supposed to go with here.Crucially, they have remembered the pub part. There are 18 draught lines and considerable emphasis on the bar rather than the strange modern phenomenon where one is technically in a pub but must first explain to a host whether one has a booking.Of all September’s openings, this is the one that sounds most likely to turn into somebody’s local.Opens September, date TBC | 412 Uxbridge Road, London W12 0NR | WebsiteMarrion’s Bar, HackneyNorman’s became famous for serving British caff food with such conviction that grown adults crossed London for fried eggs and beans and Burberry actually took over the place for fashion week. Elliott Kaye is now trying something different, although happily not so different that he has developed an interest in foams. Marrion’s Bar opens on Morning Lane in Hackney, with Kaye drawing on a CV that also includes Lyle’s, The French House and Leroy. The stated ambition is essentially to create a place where people can have a drink and eat something good without being subjected to a concept presentation first. So the menu runs to devilled crab rarebit, moules frites, tuna melts and a cheeseburger, while the drinks lean towards wine and Spanish vermouths of the sensibly sessionable sort.It sounds almost aggressively uncomplicated. In 2026, this may be the more radical move.Opens 10 September | 177 Morning Lane, London E9 6LH | WebsiteThe Horses, ClerkenwellPublic House Group has worked out that London’s favourite new restaurant format is a pub that looks as though the plasterer packed up slightly early. The company behind The Pelican, The Hero and The Fat Badger is bringing the formula east for the first time, taking over the old Coach & Horses on Ray Street in Clerkenwell. The pub is becoming The Horses, complete with the scrubbed wood, foxed mirrors and studied absence of anything remotely new-looking that have become signatures of the group. Food is still being kept partly under wraps, although the kitchen has admitted that it will focus on seasonal produce, independent suppliers and British seafood, with ingredients coming in from the group’s Cotswolds farm. Given what happened at its other pubs, expect the distinction between “popping in for a pint” and spending £100 over lunch to become blurry.London arguably has enough expensively restored pubs. Apparently, it keeps producing ones people want to visit.Opens September 2026 | 26-28 Ray Street, London EC1R 3DJ | WebsiteRomy Gill at The Pem, St James’sRomy Gill returns to a permanent London kitchen with a menu travelling from Punjab to Kerala and Bengal (The Pem)Hotel restaurants can be where good intentions go to be upholstered. Romy Gill is a considerably better reason to visit The Pem. Gill closed Romy’s Kitchen in Gloucestershire in 2019 and has spent much of the intervening period writing, broadcasting, travelling and generally being Romy Gill everywhere except behind the stoves of a permanent restaurant. From 17 September, she takes over the kitchen at The Pem inside Conrad London St James. The menu travels around India rather than settling on one regional shorthand, drawing on Punjab, Kerala and Bengal. Gill’s butter chicken will be there, naturally, beside samosa chaat, sukha crab with coconut and curry leaves, hand-dived scallops with raw mango, ghee-roasted quail and slow-braised lamb with Kashmiri morels. The cocktails have been put on the same flight: cardamom turns up in an Old Fashioned, coconut and cumin in a highball and pomegranate in a Negroni. The useful part is Gill herself. London has not had enough opportunity to eat her food recently. Now it does.Opens 17 September | 22-28 Broadway, London SW1H 0BH | WebsitePearl, MayfairLisa Goodwin-Allen brings Mediterranean cooking and a large terrace to Mayfair’s raised Brown Hart Gardens (Pearl Mayfair)Mayfair is not short of restaurants, terraces or people capable of turning lunch into a five-hour administrative exercise. Pearl at least has the advantage of being somewhere rather unusual. The new restaurant from The Beaumont sits in Brown Hart Gardens, the raised garden tucked above an old electricity substation near Selfridges. The gardens themselves have been relandscaped and will remain public, while Pearl gets a terrace of its own. Lisa Goodwin-Allen, the chef best known for Michelin-starred Northcote in Lancashire, oversees the food, which heads south towards Italy, Spain and Greece. Pearl opens from breakfast, beginning with coffee and pastries before moving through lunch, dinner, aperitivo and the point at which a spritz starts to look medicinal. It should be particularly useful during that narrow annual window in which Londoners insist it is still warm enough to eat outside because the calendar says September.Opens 14 September | Brown Hart Gardens, London W1K 8UH | WebsiteBunso, Kentish TownOmar Shah’s latest Kentish Town opening is a Filipino bakery by day and pizzeria by night (Bunso)Omar Shah seems to regard Kentish Town as a personal hospitality laboratory. Having already put his fingerprints on Guanabana, Mamasons, Ramo Ramen and, most recently, Belly, he is opening Bunso on Hawley Road.Its identity changes with the clock. During the day it will operate as a Filipino bakery, before turning into a pizzeria in the evening with pasta, wine and a rather different reason to visit after dark. Shah says he wants Bunso to belong to the neighbourhood. The interesting part is the Filipino bakery side, an area of London eating which has grown considerably but still rarely receives the attention afforded to the city’s 400th opening involving sourdough and a wood-fired oven. By night, admittedly, Bunso is also making pizza. London can only resist for so long. Opens late September | 1A Hawley Road, London NW1 8RP | WebsiteThe Albatross, City of LondonThe City gets a 400-capacity pub where £6 Guinness shares the billing with lobster and king crab (Wild Group)The City’s latest pub is 200 seats, 400 standing and comes with tanks of live lobster and Norwegian king crab. Nobody could accuse it of undercommitting. The Albatross takes over the huge former Commonwealth Bank of Australia site on Old Jewry and comes from Wild Group, the people behind Goodman, Beast and Wild Izakaya. Its proposition is pitched somewhere between proper City boozer and serious seafood restaurant: oysters, turbot, schnitzel and shellfish brioche rolls on one side, Guinness at £6 on the other. There will also be beef jerky, pork scratchings and sticky toffee pudding, because even Norwegian king crab occasionally needs to know when to stop showing off. The group has hired a landlord who previously worked at New York’s much-missed Spotted Pig and clearly expects people to use the place for drinking as well as dinner. Given it holds 400 standing, that is probably wise.The City pub has, in recent years, been enjoying an unexpectedly glamorous second act. The Albatross is its most enormous expression yet. Opens 7 September | 8-10 Old Jewry, London EC2R 8DN | WebsiteBeefbar at Dear Jackie, SohoJapanese Kobe, Australian wagyu and very little interest in restraint at Broadwick Soho’s new Beefbar (Beefbar)Beefbar has at least spared us all the conceptual riddle. It is a restaurant about beef.Riccardo Giraudi opened the first in Monaco in 2005 and has since exported the idea around the world, putting Japanese Kobe and Australian wagyu into suitably expensive-looking rooms from Paris to Mykonos and New York. London previously had Le Petit Beefbar in Chelsea; that closed earlier this year and the grown-up version is now taking over Dear Jackie and its street-level sister bar at Broadwick Soho.The room has been redesigned, there is a new terrace and alongside the steaks will be lighter dishes inspired by the Riviera and a handful created specifically for London. Nobody is pretending restraint is the chief attraction. Broadwick Soho is already one of the West End’s more theatrical hotels. Installing an international luxury steakhouse underneath it feels about as surprising as finding a martini in the bar. After all the earnest discussion elsewhere this month of heritage grain, low-intervention wine, own-farm produce and rediscovered regional traditions, sometimes a person simply wants some wagyu in a red room. Opens 10 September | 20 Broadwick Street, London W1F 8HT | Website