Aba-Ra brings khachapuri and qvevri wine to Soho
Founder Lia Walsh's second London restaurant lands in the West End this November, with a 76-cover room built around khachapuri, khinkali and a cellar of Georgian qvevri wine.
Aba-Ra opens a second London restaurant in Soho this November, bringing khachapuri, khinkali and qvevri wine to the West End.
The 76-cover site spreads across three floors. A 40-cover ground-floor restaurant includes eight seats at an open kitchen counter, where a dedicated oven bakes khachapuri and a charcoal grill handles skewers. Below it, an 18-cover lounge leads down to an 18-cover wine cellar and private dining room.
For the dishes and addresses that define eating out in the city, see our guide to what to eat in London.
We're not trying to reinvent Georgian cuisine; we want to show just how incredible it already is.
A tasting menu in the cellar
The cellar runs its own programme: a tasting menu built around a more refined reading of Georgian cuisine than the à la carte list upstairs. It is the first time Aba-Ra has offered a set menu of this kind.
Founder Lia Walsh opened the original Aba-Ra on Brick Lane in 2023. Her family has worked in Georgian food and hospitality in London for 25 years, and the Soho site carries a format built in the East End into the capital's more competitive West End restaurant scene.
"Aba-Ra Soho is something we have dreamed of creating for a very long time," Walsh said. "We're not trying to reinvent Georgian cuisine; we want to show just how incredible it already is."
Wine carries equal billing with food. The list draws on Georgian producers working in qvevri, the clay vessels used to ferment and age wine underground for months or years. Among the bottles: Baia's Wine Tsitska-Tsolikouri Churi 2024, a white from the Imereti region, and Binekhi Kakhuri Mtsvane Qvevri 2014, an amber wine aged on its skins. A sommelier recruited from Georgia will run the list.
Khachapuri meets Soho's design crowd
Design studio Dtwo worked with Walsh on the interiors, paired with bespoke artwork by Georgian artist Giorgi Sisauri. The look sets Aba-Ra apart from the trattorias and cocktail bars that dominate the surrounding streets.
The menu keeps the dishes that built the Brick Lane original: khinkali, the soup-filled dumplings eaten by hand, and khachapuri, baked to order rather than reheated. Georgian cooking has had a slow but steady run in London over the past decade, mostly through smaller, family-run rooms; a 76-cover Soho site is a larger bet than most of them.
Aba-Ra has not released an exact opening date beyond November, or menu prices for the new site. Georgian cooking's reach now extends well beyond Tbilisi's own restaurants, and London is becoming one of its more visible outposts. The Soho opening also lands in a season when London's bigger hospitality groups are reshuffling their kitchens, a reminder of how competitive the city's dining scene has become.
