Major New High-End Japanese Restaurant Is Set for Former Television Centre [Updated]

Updated 20.03.19 — Endo at the Rotunda will open on 19 April. Two menus will be available in the evening: “Signature Omakase — 18 courses, £180 and the “Rotunda Omakase — 15 courses, £150. At lunch there is a “Lunch Omakase” — seven course, £60. There will also be an al a carte offering.

One of the directors of Ichibuns, the fast casual Japanese wagyu beef burger brand, which launched in London last year, is planning to open a new, high-end restaurant in the top-floor, rotunda of the former BBC Television Centre building in White City. It is thought the restaurant will be called Endo at Rotunda.

Eater has learned that entrepreneurs and investors, Benjamin Goldkorn and ex-Nobu Busaba Eathai’s Robin Leigh, have joined forces with Zuma’s renowned executive sushi chef — and third-generation sushi master — Endo Kazutoshi ahead of a major new project which has privately stated its ambition to win Michelin starred status. The company is also understood to have engaged the services of Japanese architect Kengo Kuma.

Last year, although Kazutoshi’s involvement in Ichibuns was mooted, he wasn’t named as an official partner in the business. In September, it was also announced that he would open his own eponymous sushi restaurant on Beak Street in Soho last autumn. A holding website for that restaurant remains live. And yet, both Goldkorn and Leigh are named as directors in a company called Endo Kazutoshi Limited; the former’s appointment taking place in September last year. Kazutoshi himself is not named as a director, though did post a photo to Instagram earlier this month saying that a new restaurant in which he was involved was “coming soon” to Television Centre.

Photo by Matt Cardy/Getty Images

In addition to Ichibuns, Goldkorn is involved in a number of comparatively nascent restaurant businesses in London, including Kazu, the recently opened “contemporary Japanese restaurant in Fitzrovia.” Goldkorn and Leigh are also named directors of Infinitum Hospitality, which is planning to open a restaurant on the site of the Café Pushkin that never was, close to Berkeley Square, in Mayfair. Plans for that site remain unknown.

It is also understood that the planned roll-out of Ichibuns will commence this year.

More soon.