Endo Kazutoshi came back from a fire with ten seats

Photo: BENJAMIN MCMAHON

Endo Kazutoshi returned to a permanent kitchen on 1 October, opening a ten-seat omakase counter in a Chelsea townhouse a year after a fire closed Endo at the Rotunda.

Bookings opened at 9am on 7 September. The counter is already full to the end of October, The Infatuation reported this week, and no price for the menu has been published anywhere.

The room he lost sat inside a London landmark, at the top of the Television Centre helter-skelter. The one he has taken is at 8-9 Blacklands Terrace, a Chelsea side street, in the townhouse The Five Fields left when it closed in February 2025.

A year after the Rotunda burned, London's most sought-after sushi chef has reopened in a Chelsea townhouse. The counter is older than most of the restaurants around it.

Scarcity is now the product, and so is the absence of choice. There is no menu: Endo decides each night. Dairy has been removed and the cooking leans on dashi, with wild-caught fish from British waters alongside rice, nori, wasabi and soy made for him by specialist producers in Japan, the restaurant said when it announced the opening. The nori comes from Hayashiya at Toyosu market in Tokyo, according to The Caterer.

Upstairs is Moga, a listening bar named after the modern women of Japan's Taishō era, with tea-based cocktails made with Postcard Teas and records played through custom Taguchi speakers. Until December it is open only to people who have eaten downstairs.

The counter itself is 200 years old, hinoki, and was brought from Kyoto. Endo is a third-generation sushi chef and the room is modelled on the Tokyo counters of the 1920s and 1930s, the period in which his grandfather opened his own restaurant in Yokohama.

What has not come back is the Rotunda. It remains closed with no reopening date, and the five-month residency at Annabel's that carried the team through the first half of this year has ended.

Endo told Time Out that the past year's scars "have made me return more deeply to my roots". He described the Chelsea project to the trade title Restaurant as the next chapter of his journey.

ENDO is at 8-9 Blacklands Terrace, SW3 2SP, a few minutes from Sloane Square. Bookings go through the restaurant's own site, where a waiting list is currently the only route in. We have not eaten there.

Moga's ceiling is built from masu, the wooden boxes sake is drunk from. Anyone without a dinner reservation can see it from December.

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