Juno at Olympia opens with 265 covers on 16 October

Juno at Olympia opens on Friday 16 October with 265 covers, in what Incipio Group calls the largest Italian restaurant in Britain.

The room takes more than 11,500 sq ft of the Grade II-listed National Hall on the Olympia estate in west London, and holds up to 500 guests across the whole site. Around 50 people will work there. Incipio said in 2024 that it would take 39,000 sq ft of food and drink space at the development; Juno accounts for a large share of it.

The menu is built in the order of an Italian meal rather than by category: aperitivo, then contorni and spuntino plates, antipasti, primi and secondi. Listed dishes include paccheri with tomato and mozzarella, crab linguine with chilli and vine tomatoes, and osso buco alla milanese with saffron risotto and gremolata. A pizza Napoletana counter seats ten in front of an electric Zanolli oven the group rates at up to 300 pizzas an hour. Desserts run to tiramisu, torched Italian meringue and a gelato tower of pistachio soft serve with chopped nuts and olive oil.

A room of 265 covers does not need a good night. It needs a good Tuesday.

What 265 covers at Juno Olympia look like

The fit-out keeps the hall's five-metre ceilings, structural pillars, big windows and timber, along with the original marble and tiled floor at the entrance. New work adds banquettes, hand-laid marble mosaics and a two-metre light strip above the back bar. There is a stage and a DJ booth, with weekends the stated focus.

"We wanted to create a restaurant that could work in different ways throughout the day, from an aperitivo or long lunch to dinner and drinks," said Ed Devenport, chief executive of Incipio Group. Read against the trading numbers, the design brief is doing a job: a room this size has to fill at lunch, at six o'clock and at eleven to make the rent.

A big room in a thin market

Olympia is the £1.3bn redevelopment of the old exhibition halls, where Incipio already runs Wolves of Tokyo, Lillies and Arbour. Big-box openings arrive in a market that has been shedding sites at speed: closures ran at about 20 a day this spring, and Whitbread shut 106 Beefeater restaurants this week.

Bookings open before the launch. The number to watch is not the 265 seats but how many of them are sold on a Tuesday in February.