This piece began with a meal at Impala. I want to say that clearly, because what follows is not about Impala, the group behind it, or the other restaurants connected to the same ownership. It is about London, a city I care about, whose chefs I care about, and whose restaurant scene has been quietly doing something I find worth examining. A recent visit was the prompt. The question it opened is the city’s own.

 

The Formula

Stand outside Kiln on Brewer Street, then walk to Mountain, then to Impala. Do it in that order. By the third frontage, something will register: pale wood joinery, wide glass, amber light. The specific warmth of a room, built to make you feel immediately at ease. All three are owned by the same group, all built around fire cooking. The cuisine rotates: Thai, Basque-inspired, North African. The spices change, the welcome does not.

These are good restaurants. Impala does things with flatbread and harissa that are genuinely worth travelling for. The cooking across all three is skilled, the produce carefully chosen, the atmosphere reliably lively. They are full most nights, and they deserve to be.

They are also only one example, among many in London right now, of a particular kind of restaurant. Comfortable by design, built to lower your guard from the moment you arrive. Sharing plates, fire, wine, warmth. There is something almost evolutionary about it. Fire is the oldest human technology; it signals safety. A growing number of London restaurants understand this and use it well, and the formula, in its many variations, works so reliably that you will find versions of it across Soho, Shoreditch, Marylebone, Fitzrovia: different names, different culinary references, the same amber light, the same invitation to relax and spend. At least one dish will be described as perfect for sharing. At Impala, six of us received five flatbreads and a portion of sweetbreads sized for two. Sharing, it turns out, has its limits.

The wine list at places like these, incidentally, tends to reveal the real architecture of the evening. Often, there appear to be two: a simpler selection at the back of the menu, and a separate list of prestigious labels. At Impala, the food writer within our group who had possession of the list when we were there, noted bottles averaging around £150. Fun, warmth and fire cost money. That is fine; nobody is being deceived.

The group behind these restaurants is genuinely independent, genuinely committed to its suppliers and to the seasons, genuinely good at what it does. That is almost the point.

But at some point, walking between these frontages, it is worth asking: is this what we wanted London to become?

 

What Soho Was

Soho was not always like this. For decades, it was the opposite: chaotic, louche, genuinely unpredictable. Music venues and sex shops and members bars and some of the best Cantonese cooking in Europe sharing the same few streets, sometimes the same building. The energy was never particularly culinary. British food culture in Soho’s heyday was still emerging from its post-industrial shadow, thin and uncertain. What Soho had was friction: between worlds, between people, between things that had no obvious reason to coexist. That friction fed music, fashion, nightlife, and a particular kind of creative restlessness. It made the neighbourhood impossible to fully predict, and therefore alive.

That friction is largely gone now. The clubs are gone or going, and the licensing is tighter. The new residents who moved into the flats above the venues are, in several documented cases, the same people who then filed noise complaints until the venues lost their licences and closed. London introduced a planning principle in 2018 specifically to address this, the Agent of Change rule, which holds that whoever brings new housing near an existing venue is responsible for soundproofing it, not the other way around. Venues are still closing. The rough edges have been smoothed, one planning application at a time, and what fills the space is beautiful, warm, amber-lit and entirely legible from the outside.

Shoreditch is going the same way. It just started later.

 

The Ones That Don’t Fit the Model

London did produce culinary outliers. Silo, Douglas McMaster’s zero-waste restaurant in Hackney Wick, was a genuine act of conviction, radical in concept and quietly delicious in practice. It also struggled to survive in its own city. Many Londoners never visited, nor did a significant number of foreign food writers who passed through regularly. Too far, people said, meaning Hackney Wick. In London, thirty minutes on the Overground is considered expedition territory. Silo never hosted press trips. It had no hospitality budget, no group behind it, no machine generating coverage. In London, that is close to invisible. It has since closed. The formula restaurants do not have this problem.

 

The Corporate Appetite

It is tempting to blame the economics. Rents, rates, the staffing crisis, the long shadow of the pandemic – these are real. But Copenhagen rents are comparable to London’s. Paris is not cheap. Yet both cities sustain thriving ecosystems of independent, risk-taking restaurants in a way London does not. The economics are a partial explanation, not an excuse. The difference is elsewhere.

London is a deeply corporate city. It is full of people whose professional lives are built around eliminating risk, who stay in Marriotts and Hiltons not because they are unaware that better options exist, but because the already known is the point. The same logic, scaled down to dinner, produces a very specific kind of restaurant. Not bad, not dishonest, just free of surprises. The man expensing a £200 bottle of Barolo at dinner is, in a different city the following Tuesday, standing in a McDonald’s queue without irony. Both choices make complete sense. Not ignorance, but the comfort of something recognisable. These restaurants have built an elegant, expensive version of exactly that.

Copenhagen still has its dive bars. The rough edges are still there, in the city and in its restaurants. The food culture that produced Noma and everything that followed did not develop despite that friction; it developed inside it. San Sebastian has held its identity across generations of chefs, sustaining both the serious end and the extraordinary democracy of the pintxos bar, where a single bite can be as technically considered as anything in a tasting menu. Paris, written off as irrelevant for a decade, is producing some of the most alive small-restaurant cooking in Europe right now, driven by independent chefs in tight spaces with very specific things to say. What those cities share is an excitement for the particular. For restaurants that exist not because a formula proved scalable but because someone had an idea that needed to exist, something that might surprise you, unsettle you, send you home arguing about what you just ate.

 

The Question

The question is not whether comfortable, well-made restaurants should exist. Of course they should. The question is whether they should be almost everything.

Right now in London, the restaurants with no obvious commercial logic, too personal, too specific, too dependent on one chef’s obsession to attract a group or satisfy an investor, struggle to open and struggle harder to survive. When they do open, often in inconvenient postcodes with no PR budget, the city’s attention is elsewhere. Silo is the cleanest example, but not the only one.

This is not just a food industry problem. A generation of young Londoners, people in their late twenties and thirties who grew up in this city, are starting to describe it as plastic: Instagram-ready, tourist-optimised, sealed against surprise. They miss clubs that no longer exist. They find it hard to locate restaurants that might genuinely unsettle them. What remains is frequently beautiful, occasionally delicious, and oddly inert.

Cities change. London has found new energy before, usually from the edges, from places and people with nothing to lose. The question is whether enough edges remain. Whether the rents allow it. Whether the licensing permits it. Whether the food media, when something genuinely strange opens in an inconvenient postcode, makes the trip.

I love this city. I am not issuing a verdict. I am asking a question, with affection and some impatience, while there is still time for the answer to be interesting.

Soho used to answer it without being asked.

 

Andreja Lajh is the founder of Haut de Gamme, a London-based agency working with chefs, restaurants and food producers worldwide. She writes about food, wine and the restaurant world at hautdegamme.net.