Din Tai Fung and Pizza Pilgrims to open at Selfridges London

Din Tai Fung and Pizza Pilgrims are to open restaurants in Selfridges London as part of a new dining area on the fourth floor.

The brands will join El&N cafe, Bubble Magik and Adesse, a plant-based restaurant from American chef Matthew Kenney, in the new area, which will be open until 11.30pm and accessible via a dedicated lift.

It will be the second London restaurant for Taiwanese chain Din Tai Fung, which first brought its soup dumplings to the capital in 2019. A site was long reported to be opening at the Centre Point development, but it failed to get off the ground, and the downstairs food hall is being relaunched by JKS Restaurants.

Now Din Tai Fung is opening a 140-cover restaurant with a ‘show kitchen’ in Selfridges on 22 January 2022.

Pizza Pilgrims’ restaurant will open on 9 December and is described as the group’s ‘first major step’ towards creating a more sustainable business.

Diners will enter the 108-cover restaurant through a three-metre hydroponic basil tunnel, while pizza dough will be made using regenerative UK wheat.

Tablecloths have been replaced with vegan Pinatex, a leather alternative made from pineapples, tabletops have been created from plastic waste, while a giant mural of the bay of Naples has been created from 2000 recycled glass water bottles.

The team hopes to learn from the project to make the 16 restaurants across London and Oxford more eco-friendly.

James Elliot, co-founder of Pizza Pilgrims, said: “We wanted to have a complete review of every part of our pizzerias and see what we could do better but without losing creativity and fun. It’s important to stress that this is only the beginning. We want to use our Selfridges pizzeria as a hub for innovation so that we can implement changes in all our other pizzerias."

Kenney’s Adesse is due to open on 1 December.