Padella to open first West End branch in Soho on April 16

Padella is bringing its handmade pasta to Soho on Thursday, April 16, opening at 2 Kingly Street as its first West End branch and third restaurant overall. The move puts the Borough Market cult favorite into one of London’s busiest dining districts, where theatergoers, tourists and office workers will be able to get to the brand without crossing the river.

The Soho site is being set up to handle that traffic. Padella says the restaurant will have an open kitchen with counter seating, subterranean dining and tables outside on Kingly Street, while its careers page says the new layout is modelled on the Borough Market original. It will also have a larger banquette seating area upstairs, plus a bar and large table dining room downstairs. Independent reporting says the restaurant will seat 80 covers across two floors, a meaningful jump for a brand whose appeal has long rested on demand, pace and a tightly focused menu.

That scale matters because Padella has grown slowly. The company says it has expanded carefully since opening Borough Market in April 2016, and Soho arrives almost exactly 10 years later. Shoreditch opened in 2020, making the West End debut the brand’s third site and its clearest step yet into a more mainstream part of the city. Even so, the pitch remains recognizably Padella: fresh handmade pasta, a strong identity and a room built around the same open-kitchen energy that made the original such a draw.

Padella has also made clear that Soho is not a copy-and-paste exercise. The venue page says the new branch will include West End exclusives and is designed as a pre-theatre feast, which gives it a sharper commercial edge than a simple neighborhood opening. That positioning should suit Kingly Street, where the evening rush from nearby stages can mix with daytime trade from shoppers and workers.

To mark the launch, Padella will run a two-day soft opening on Tuesday, April 14 and Wednesday, April 15, with 50% off the entire bill. Tim Siadatan said he is “pumped to be opening in Soho and bringing our pasta to the neighbourhood.” The opening gives Padella a bigger, busier stage than Borough Market, and it will show whether the restaurant can keep its cult pull while serving the footfall of the West End.