Celebrated Pimlico Restaurant Devastated by Flooding Will Reopen

Celebrated Pimlico restaurant Lorne will reopen in early September. The restaurant has been closed since 29 May owing to flash floods.

Lorne, which together with A. Wong, makes Wilton Road in Pimlico one of the better places to visit in the surrounds of Victoria station, is run by sommelier Katie Exton and chef Peter Hall. With the drying regime coming to an end, Exton told Eater:

The forced closure has been much longer than we ever thought, but Pete and I both felt it was important to take every measure to get Lorne back to exactly where we were before the flood. Luckily we have been able to retain most of our staff, who have been using the break to help out in other restaurants and so we hope it should be business as usual at Lorne pretty soon. There won’t be any big changes at Lorne, we’ll keep doing what we were doing before and everyone is looking forward to welcoming back the familiar faces of our regulars and hopefully seeing lots of new faces too.

Speaking about the effect of the floods back in May, manager Angus Davies told Eater: “Our little restaurant was severely flooded on Tuesday 29th May and we have had to close temporarily.

“All the team here are gutted and are working very hard to get everything back to normal as soon as possible. We can’t say at the moment when we will be able to reopen so we are not taking any reservations for June or July.”

The floods were a serious blow for a widely-acclaimed restaurant, in a challenging location in an area that has long been without the footfall normally needed to sustain this kind of small neighbourhood operation. Lorne opened early in 2017, under a team who had previously worked at the River Cafe and the Square (under Phil Howard) — it received a series of favourable reviews in the weeks and months after it opened: from Giles Coren, who followed Grace Dent, David Sexton, Marina O’Loughlin, and Lisa Hilton.