A year after fire destroyed his White City flagship, Endo Kazutoshi has opened a 10-seat omakase in Chelsea, with a listening bar upstairs.
On October 1, a year after fire destroyed his flagship at the Rotunda in White City, Endo Kazutoshi opened the doors of Endo, a 10-seat omakase counter at 8-9 Blacklands Terrace in Chelsea. The address is the former townhouse of the Michelin-starred Five Fields. The room is a brooding box of blackened wood and brick, and it is already one of the hardest seats in London.
Kazutoshi himself frames Chelsea as a continuation, not a comeback. Writing on Instagram ahead of the opening, he put it this way: "To hang the noren once again is not about recovering what was lost, nor is it about repeating the successes of the past." The fire last September closed the Rotunda original; every member of the team got out safe. Chelsea is the same restaurant, resumed.
The ground-floor room is designed in the manner of a traditional Japanese ryokan, the inn, with deliberate references to the omakase counters of 1920s and 1930s Tokyo. Nothing here follows the blond-wood minimalism of the typical modern omakase. The counter itself is made from 200-year-old Kyoto hinoki wood, the material fact around which the whole room is organised.
Two sourcing facts anchor the counter. The nori comes from Hayashiya at Toyosu Market in Tokyo. The shoyu is saishikomi, double-brewed, from Kajita Shoten in Ehime, a house operating since 1874. The rest of the supply chain is deliberately undocumented in the opening reporting, which is itself a statement: the counter, not the provenance list, is the argument.
Kazutoshi was born in Yokohama, south of Tokyo, and moved to London in 2006, recruited by Rainer Becker, the founder of Zuma. He opened Endo at the Rotunda in White City in April 2019, and the restaurant took its first Michelin star in the 2020 guide. That pedigree is the context for Chelsea: this is not a debut, but a starred kitchen re-forming around its chef after a year of enforced silence.
What the ten seats are served is, by design, Kazutoshi's own account of his cooking: everything he has learnt and everything he believes about sushi, in the restaurant's own words, brought together in one small room. The detail of the menu belongs to the counter and changes with it; the structure, a single chef cooking in front of ten guests, does not.
Upstairs is Moga, the listening bar: a more contemporary room than the counter below, with custom Taguchi speakers and a private drinking den. Its playlist is curated with Ken Sakamoto, Kazutoshi's friend and a manager at Comme des Garçons. The menu takes its cues from the chef's travels across Paris, Milan, Madrid, Hong Kong and Tokyo: a red mullet sandwich, a favourite from the Rotunda days, and Cocido Madrileño, the Spanish chickpea stew. The drinks programme is built with London tea specialists Postcard Teas.
Demand has answered the question the fire left open. Its own site states that Endo is fully booked through November and December, is taking no reservations beyond that for now, and is running a waitlist for cancellations. Ten seats, one chef, and a queue: the continuation is fully subscribed.
Filed from the Tables desk.
The second Philippine selection grows to 127 establishments, as Helm holds two stars in Makati and every starred restaurant from the first edition keeps its rating.
The London seafood group opens at 45 Great Queen Street on November 28, restoring its portfolio to four restaurants on the former Margot site.
The Japanese Restaurant at The Chedi Andermatt was promoted to three stars, leading a Swiss selection of 133 starred restaurants for 2026.
The week's essential tables, in your inbox every Sunday.
Free. Unsubscribe anytime. Read our privacy policy.