The Battle to Keep London Restaurants Great: Howard Chua-Eoan

More than 250 new restaurants opened in London this year, according to a running list of scheduled debuts by the independent restaurant news site Hot Dinners. Shoreditch has replaced its hipsterish appeal with savory new tenancies by the likes of Legado — a more opulent incarnation of Nieves Barragan’s Sabor just off Regent Street; meanwhile, exhausted spaces in tourist-mobbed Borough Market have been resurrected by projects like Barang, chef Tom Geoffrey’s take on Khmer cuisine. Even much-snubbed South London got Norbert’s, a rapturously good rotisserie chicken haven run by veterans from the city center. In April, The Standard declared that “London has the dining ...