Called simply 'Frog', the restaurant will be located in the site previously occupied by Thai restaurant Manorom Too.
The 2,929 sq ft unit has taken a year to renovate and will be the flagship restaurant for The Frog group, with a weekly changing menu and a more formal feel and offering than its sister site The Frog E1 in Shoreditch.
The new restaurant will have 50 covers in the main dining room, with an additional 20 covers in a large, private basement dining room, complete with its own kitchen. Breakfast, lunch, and dinner will be served all year round and the restaurant will employ 60 staff in total.
“The new site will draw a different clientele to the first restaurant in Shoreditch, and I want it to be unlike anything else currently available in Covent Garden,” says Handling, who made his name at the Caxton Grill at the St Ermin's Hotel in Westminster. “The site is three months behind schedule but I wasn’t going to open it until it was 100% perfect.”
The new opening follows the launch of the first The Frog restaurant last summer. Earlier this year, the chef opened a coffee shop and deli called Bean and Wheat near Liverpool Street Station that uses some of the leftover ingredients from the nearby The Frog.
The group, which has further sites in the works, has announced that any subsequent restaurants launched will, like The Frog E1, be named after the postcode in which they are situated.