Award-Winning Chef and Serial Restaurateur Partner on Big Westminster Opening

Award-winning chef Alex Harper will open a number of restaurant and bar operations at a new London luxury hotel. Great Scotland Yard, operated by Hyatt’s ‘Unbound Collection,’ will open later this year. Harper has been advertising for bakers and chefs for a project “opening in early summer” on Instagram, and a caption posted to Instagram by supplier Full Circle Farming, in Sussex, names the restaurant as “Great Scotland Yard.” Restaurateur Robin Gill, of The Dairy, Sorella, and the upcoming Darby’s in Nine Elms, “selected” Harper as chef for the group.

Industry newsletter Code mentioned the project in its weekly Monday briefing, but gave no concrete details about location, or the nature of the “central London project”:

“A central London project launching this summer. The Dairy’s Lewis Wright will run front of house at the nature-led kitchen, which will focus on traditional cooking techniques. Their site will also include a modern tea room and a bar focusing on Celtic whiskeys. They are currently on the search for chefs and front of house team members of all levels.”

Great Scotland Yard, which connects Whitehall and Northumberland Avenue, is the former home of the Metropolitan Police, and sits very close to Corinthia Hotel London, where Tom Kerridge and Andre Garrett oversee restaurant operations. Those two hotels, alongside The Standard’s appointment of Peter Sanchez-Iglesias and Adam Rawson, Albert Adrià’s appointment at Hotel Café Royal, Claridge’s’s new restaurant from Eleven Madison Park’s Daniel Humm and Will Guidara, The Goring’s poaching of Nathan Outlaw from The Capital, and Patrick Powell’s appointment at The Stratford Hotel, all contribute to a trend of bankable chefs opening in spaces with guaranteed footfall and mitigated risk: a potentially winning formula amidst downturn and an increasingly uncertain Brexit.

Harper, who won the Young British Foodies (YBF) Best Chef award in 2017, was most recently at Neo Bistro, which he opened in partnership with Mark Jarvis of Stem and Anglo. The Mayfair restaurant closed in January 2019 after Jarvis’ departure. Gill, meanwhile, is currently working on the opening of Darby’s restaurant at Nine Elms, while maintaining operations at The Dairy, Sorella, and Counter Culture in Clapham. He is understood to no longer be connected with the new opening.

Eater has contacted Harper for further details about the restaurant(s). More soon.