Bubala opens a fourth London site on Garrick Street
The vegetarian, Middle Eastern-leaning group adds a 122-seat Covent Garden restaurant on 19 October, its largest dining room since its 2018 pop-up days.
Bubala opens its fourth London restaurant on 19 October, a 122-seat site on Garrick Street in Covent Garden.
The address sits two minutes from Leicester Square, in a three-storey building at 14 Garrick Street, WC2E 9BJ. The group calls it its "turbo-charged" branch: a 60-cover ground floor, a 32-seat dining room downstairs, and 30 more alfresco seats on Floral Street when the weather allows.
Bubala started as an East London pop-up in 2018, opened its first permanent site in Spitalfields in September 2019, and has since added branches in Soho and King's Cross. Marc Summers, a former general manager at Berber & Q, founded the group; Helen Graham, who has cooked at The Palomar, The Barbary and The Good Egg, has run the kitchen from the start.
Four addresses in six years turn a vegetarian pop-up into a West End habit.
The menu stays entirely vegetarian, built on Middle Eastern, Mediterranean, Israeli and Jewish influences. Covent Garden keeps the dishes regulars order most: halloumi with chamomile and fennel honey, and crispy confit latkes with toum. A new "Bubala Knows Best" set menu runs at £39 a head alongside the à la carte list.
Bubala Covent Garden joins the map
The expansion tracks a wider shift in London dining, where meat-free kitchens that once sat on the fringe now compete for prime addresses. Ottolenghi's new Edinburgh site, which opened the same week with its own vegetable-forward menu, points the same way outside the capital.
Covent Garden adds scale rather than a new idea: three dining areas under one roof, built to handle pre-theatre crowds as well as long lunches. The group has not announced further openings beyond this fourth site.
Booking before the pre-theatre rush
Garrick Street sits among the West End's theatres, where turnover matters more than it did in Spitalfields or King's Cross. A 60-cover ground floor should absorb walk-ins, while the downstairs room and the Floral Street tables give the kitchen somewhere quieter to send a table that wants to linger over the £39 menu.
Whether a fourth site dilutes a format built on small rooms and queues, or simply meets demand the first three couldn't, becomes clear once the pre-theatre crowd finds Garrick Street.
