Fresh Pasta Concepts Lead UK Restaurant Openings Wave in April 2026

Padella will open its third London restaurant at 2 Kingly Street, Soho on 16 April, with a 50 per cent-off soft launch running on the 14th and 15th before the full opening. The 80-seat room is co-founders Tim Siadatan and Jordan Frieda's first West End address and a tenth-anniversary statement for the brand, which launched its Borough Market original in 2016. The basement level includes a private dining room for up to eight covers, a format the Shoreditch site never offered.

Padella's core menu travels to Soho intact: pici cacio e pepe and pappardelle with eight-hour Dexter beef shin ragu alongside new recipes developed for the Kingly Street kitchen. The pici is the shape that has always made Padella's case for fresh pasta over dried. Pici is a Tuscan hand-rolled strand, made by pressing and rolling lengths of pasta dough between the palms rather than through a machine, which produces irregular thickness and a rough surface that grips sauce differently from anything cut by a die or a roller. Against cacio e pepe, a sauce of just Pecorino Romano and cracked black pepper, the imperfect texture of pici is not an accident but the point.

At the other end of April, the team behind Michelin Guide-listed Lupa in Highbury will open Ornella on Wilton Way, E8, in Hackney, taking over the former Fran's site. The 48-cover room is actor Theo James, Carousel co-founder Ed Templeton, and head chef Naz Hassan's second opening, arriving just nine months after Lupa launched in June 2025. Where Lupa worked the Roman trattoria register, Ornella is pitched as "less trattoria, more ristorante," with Hassan and collaborator Alessandro Boscolo cooking the butter-rich, Alpine-influenced food of Milan, the city where Hassan grew up.

The pasta to study at Ornella is the tagliatelle al burro e Parmigiano: broad, flat egg noodles from the Emilia-Romagna and Lombardy tradition, finished with high-fat butter and Parmigiano-Reggiano alone. No cream, no shortcuts. The dish belongs to the same school of restraint as cacio e pepe but draws on northern Italy's dairy culture rather than central Italy's sheep's milk tradition. Getting butter and starchy pasta water into a stable emulsion that coats each noodle, rather than pooling at the base of the bowl, is the technique at stake, and it is harder than it looks. Ornella's menu also includes penne alla vodka, whose tomato cream sauce rewards a kitchen that understands how to keep acid and fat in balance without leaning on either.

Two very different arguments for what fresh pasta in London looks like in 2026: one at 2 Kingly Street and one on Wilton Way, separated by a few weeks and about four miles.