The Notting Hill restaurant that spent 20 months auditioning
Nakimushi, a Japanese restaurant spread across three floors of a listed Victorian townhouse in Notting Hill, opens on Monday, four months after the last of the two residencies it is built from closed.
Urchin and Robin's Ramen traded for roughly 20 months between them inside Supermarket of Dreams, the food shop owned by the restaurateur Chris D'Sylva, before either chef was handed a permanent site. Robin's Ramen ran there from October 2025 until May, according to the restaurant's own account of the two projects.
Nakimushi opens on Monday with two chefs, three floors and a lease. Both of the restaurants inside it were pop-ups first.
The residency has become the standard route into a permanent Asian restaurant in London. Duda Diner, the Malaysian pop-up run by Hakeem and Zura Ahmad, moves into The Pilgrm in Paddington on 17 September as the final part of the hotel's incubator kitchen series rather than taking premises of its own.
Barang went the other way in August. The Cambodian project, which trades in King's Cross, is no longer planning the permanent restaurant it had been reported to be preparing, Hot Dinners said on 24 August, citing multiple sources it did not name.
What Nakimushi has that most residencies do not is a landlord who is also the incubator. D'Sylva opened the Notting Hill Fish + Meat Shop in 2019 and Supermarket of Dreams in 2020, followed by Dorian, which holds a Michelin star, and the omakase counter Eel Sushi. Both pop-ups ran in his own room.
That makes the model harder to copy than it looks. A group that owns the retail space can carry a chef for a year at close to no rent and find out whether the food sells before anyone signs a lease. An operator paying market rent for the trial cannot run the same experiment.
Robin Kosuge trained in pastry at Kouzu in Belgravia and spent two years with Dominique Ansel in Tokyo before returning to London in 2019, the restaurant said. He joined the opening team at Dorian in 2022.
Kosuge takes the ground-floor ramen bar, an open kitchen with communal seating serving Tokyo-style bowls. The two the residency was known for are a lobster ramen with seafood paitan and komatsuna, and a chashu pork belly ramen built on Basque chicken broth with ajitama.
Yuji Shimokawa Kelly, who spent four years at the two-Michelin-starred Umu in Mayfair before joining Dorian, runs the 25-seat first-floor restaurant and bar. The menu there takes a broader run at hot Japanese cooking, red prawn and courgette gyoza with umeboshi, grilled Ibérico pork loin with red almond miso, alongside shochu highballs in full and low-alcohol versions.
The top floor holds neither. It is a preparation kitchen and a temperature-controlled larder, left visible to guests.
Nakimushi is at 7 Kensington Mall, W8, a few minutes' walk from Notting Hill Gate. Bookings from 7 September are open through SevenRooms, and the restaurant has not published prices. We have not eaten there.
Urchin, the restaurant now occupying the first floor, began as a ten-seat counter on Sifnos, in the Cyclades.
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Nakimushi, a Japanese restaurant spread across three floors of a listed Victorian townhouse in Notting Hill, opens on Monday, four months after the last of the two residencies it is built from closed.