Vegan

If you're ever wondering what the sign of a hot restaurant is going to be in advance then look no further than the upcoming return of chef Kirk Haworth's Plates restaurant. The Great British Menu 2024 winner announced last night that bookings had opened for Plates' new venue in Shoreditch and the deluge of bookings promptly crashed the website. More than 70k people were trying to get hold of a table with

Given the huge popularity of their other restaurants, it's a pretty safe bet that Club Mexicana's first south London restaurant will be a big hit when it opens in Brixton this autumn. You'll find the group's latest restaurant on Market Row where the 35-seat spot will be serving up the vegan tacos and cocktails they've built up a reputation for.

On the menu in Brixton will be a mix of signature dishes - like the Tofish and

Rishim Sachdeva's Tendril has found a permanent home in Mayfair, so we thought it was time to see what this "almost vegan" kitchen is all about. 

Studio Gauthier sees chef Alexis Gauthier bring some of the extremely accomplished (and Michelin-starred) cooking from his Soho restaurant to a more casual affair in Fitzrovia. We went down for a look. 

11/6/23 - updated with the opening date

Following their Borough Market opening back in 2021, a second plant-based Mallow restaurant is on the way to Canary Wharf.

Mallow comes from the same people behind the Mildreds restaurants but here they're a 100% plant-based affair. And for Canary Wharf, the menu will include a few new dishes like:

• Spinach Dahi

5/6/23 - updated with the opening dates

Chef Alexis Gauthier is bringing not one, but two new restaurants to Fitzrovia. Much like his existing places, Gauthier Soho and 123V (inside Fenwick's), each will be championing vegan food. They're both within the BFI Stephen Street building in Soho - a space that will be split into two. 

Up front will be 123V

They only recently launched at The Ritzy in Brixton, but now the Indian-inspired and plant-based food of En Root has opened up in another new home, The Railway Tavern in Tulse Hill.

They've just taken over the kitchen there and this makes it their fourth

A Hot Dinners exclusive

If you're looking for a positive thing you can say about the lockdowns, they do seem to have given a lot of people the push they needed to open their own business. One such lockdown-generated company is Jam Delish. Co-founder Jordan Johnson was furloughed during lockdown, which is when he took that opportunity to start up his own popup. Jordan, whose mother is

Not only is Romesh Ranganathan all across your TV right now, he's even managed to spare time to slide into the restaurant world this month with a collab with Yard Sale Pizza. The vegan comic has teamed up with the pizza group to come up with his very own pizza for Veganuary.

The Romesh Spesh, which goes on sale today, is topped with Sri Lankan curried aubergine, coconut sambol, mint raita and

South London's plant-based group En Root is heading to Brixton. The brainchild of South Londoners Nish Modasia and his cousin Harshil Modasia, who also have places in Peckham and Clapham, the new cafe is being touted as the first vegan cafe to open in a UK cinema.

If you haven't been to one before, En Root focus on what they describe as an Indian fusion menu, inspired by Nish's Gujarati

If the thought of California-style street food gets your motor running, or if you were already making pilgrimages to Club Mexicana at their Kingly Court or Seven Dials locations, then news of an upcoming Spitalfields location will make the job of hunting down vegan tacos even easier.

Located in the former HotBox site, Club Mexicana Spitalfields promises an even bigger menu and some serious bar

After a popular (and much extended) pop-up at The Sun and 13 Cantons, chef Rishim Sachdeva is bringing back Tendril for another pop-up (with a permanent restaurant to come too). 

The new pop-up will be just off Regent Street (most recently where Bindas Eatery was and Stem before that). As before, it will be all about (mostly) vegan dishes using his

You may have caught them in pop-ups and residencies over the past couple of years. but now Flat Earth pizza are getting ready to unveil their first restaurant (which just happens to be where they held their first-ever pop-up). 

Set up by Sarah Brading and Rich Baker, Flat Earth are all about meat-free pizzas with an added focus on sustainability. Together they

We'd been hearing that Burger King were going to be trying something new with the reopening of their Leicester Square restaurant - and they've certainly done that, going completely meat-free. 

We've had meat-free Prets, and a recent meat-free Honest Burgers but we think this is the first of the big fast-food giants to take the plunge.

This new restaurant adds fifteen new

Vegan restaurant Mao Chow has come to an end - but Facing Heaven is rising to take its place.

Julian Denis, the man behind Mao Chow, has closed that restaurant in Hackney but is opening just around the corner in a new guise. It's a bigger space which means that they can do a little more with the menu, broadening their influences to take in Cantonese, Yunnan and Shaanxi cuisines as well