Bubala cuts its set menu by 20% as it opens a fourth site
The vegetarian-led group opened in Covent Garden on 19 October and dropped its Bubala Knows Best menu to £39 across all four London sites.
Bubala, the vegetarian-led restaurant group, opened its fourth London site in Covent Garden on 19 October and cut the price of its Bubala Knows Best set menu by almost 20%, to £39, across all four locations. The group frames the cut as a response to cost pressures facing both diners and the wider hospitality sector, rather than a one-off discount tied to the opening.
The new restaurant sits on Garrick Street in a Grade II-listed building, with 60 covers on the ground floor, 32 in a downstairs dining room and 30 outside overlooking Floral Street. It follows sites in Spitalfields, Soho and King's Cross.
Founder Marc Summers, 36, started Bubala with pop-ups before taking a permanent unit on Commercial Street in Spitalfields. He previously worked at Berber & Q and The Palomar. "We want it to feel just as warm and personal as the first site did," he said of Covent Garden, adding that "parts of it reminded us of Spitalfields."
A nearly 20% cut to its signature menu is Bubala's bet that volume beats margin in a tightening market.
A discount while rents and bills climb
London hospitality operators have spent 2026 absorbing higher rates, wages and energy costs, and price rises have been the more common response; earlier this year, separate NIQ data found the UK is losing 19 hospitality venues a week. Bubala's move runs against that pattern, betting that a cheaper set menu across a larger estate can outweigh thinner margins per cover.
The set menu itself keeps its structure; what changes is the price, down from the roughly £46-£48 charged at some sites before the cut. A separate weekday lunch menu, Bubala Mezze, remains priced apart from the dinner offer.
Awards without a Michelin star
Bubala has built its reputation without a star: the group won CODE Hospitality's Happiest Places to Work in 2025, was named in The Times' Best Places to Work 2026, and received OpenTable's Restaurateurs' Choice Impact Award 2026. Summers published his debut cookbook, Bubala, last year.
The menu draws on his time at Berber & Q and The Palomar, with halloumi in chamomile and fennel honey, crispy confit latkes with toum, and charred oyster mushroom skewers as recurring favourites, alongside seasonal specials such as slow-roasted beetroot and feta pastilla. Four sites in, Bubala is still a single-city business; whether the Covent Garden economics work at a lower price point will shape any decision to leave London.
For context on how other London openings are reading the market, Nonna Bakery chose the same neighbourhood for its second UK site this autumn.
