‘Wild Food’ Specialists in Covent Garden Announce Surprise Restaurant Closure

Covent Garden’s famous-for-foraging restaurant Native has today announced its imminent closure, via Twitter.

In a lunchtime post, the restaurant explained: “Today it has been confirmed that we have to leave our Neals Yard site in the very near future (...) so come and enjoy our last few days with us in The Yard!”

The restaurant, which opened on the Covent Garden site in early 2016 following a number of years of successful market stall and pop-up operation, garnered a devoted following for its founders’ devotion to foraged wild ingredients and British game.

Owners Imogen Davis and Ivan Tisdall-Downes’ ethos may not have impressed Jay Rayner — in the pursuit of an apparent army of straw men, he described it as an “irritating mission statement” of “utter, dribbling, incoherent tosh” — but the cooking certainly did; “what really matters is what’s on the plate, and here at Native that makes the best argument for itself.”

Others, presumably not so personally offended by the premise, found in Native a restaurant that was “genuinely exciting and unusual, with seriously clever cooking,” and “ludicrously good value”.

So it is that Neals Yard has lost a valuable asset; one of a class of intimate, honest restaurants that “simply don’t come along very often.” The restaurant gave no indication as to the reasons behind the closure, and did not respond immediately to requests for comment, but promised its followers that today’s news doesn’t mean the end of Native:

More soon.