The chef, who currently runs Grazing by Mark Greenaway at Edinburgh’s Waldorf Astoria Edinburgh - The Caledonian, says he has found a central London site for his first venue in the English capital, with a planned opening date of March 2021.
The as yet unnamed venue will be a 30-cover fine dining restaurant that is expected to open in the evenings for a tasting menu only offer, although Greenaway says the finer details are still being ironed out as to whether it might be for four courses, six courses or more.
Describing the new venture, he says. “Thirty covers is a nice introduction to London for me. It’s something that’s manageable and that I can focus on and get right.
“We want to do it properly, nice and small and make it special.”
The restaurant will likely serve some of Greenaway’s signature dishes from when he owned and ran fine dining Restaurant Mark Greenaway in Edinburgh, which was ranked in the UK's Top 100 Restaurants list, including his crab cannelloni with smoked cauliflower custard.
“I’ll be using Scottish produce although it’s not a Scottish restaurant, it’s only because it’s what I know,” he says.
Greenaway is currently split between Edinburgh and London, where he is running a six-month pop up in the former Wahlburgers restaurant in Covent Garden, which closed earlier this year. The venue has been taken on by coffee house and roasters The Gentlemen Baristas, for whom Greenaway is a consultant.
The chef says he’ll be using these six months to help build his team and get the supply chain in place for his new venture.
“I’ll use the time to find amazing suppliers. The idea is that the team that is employed here [Covent Garden] will be transported over to the new restaurant, so they will pretty much have six months of training, which is rare when opening a restaurant.”
Greenaway has also made changes to Grazing by Mark Greenaway in light of the Coronavirus pandemic, moving away from the restaurant’s initial sharing plate format to offering an eight-course tasting menu alongside a 5/5/5 a la carte offer.
He says the restaurant is fully booked on Fridays and Saturdays during September, but only for 60 covers rather than the 140 the room would normally hold because of the distancing measures it has introduced.
Greenaway closed his eponymous award-winning Edinburgh restaurant in 2018 after five years with plans to open a new venture in the Scottish capital.
He took over the restaurant offer at the Waldorf Astoria Edinburgh hotel from the Galvin brothers in April last year to open Grazing by Mark Greenaway.