Impala - Soho, London
Our Rating: ★★★ (worth a detour) | ££££ (£110pp) - A North African-inspired grill that genuinely lives up to the hype (How we rate restaurants)
Ever since Impala was announced late last year, our feeds have been full of it. It’s been one of the most hyped openings of 2026, and that comes with its own pressure — when you finally walk through the door, you can’t help but turn up with expectations sky-high.
The good news? It absolutely lives up to them.
We headed down for lunch on a Tuesday, which is normally the kind of slot where you can gauge how a restaurant runs without the weekend buzz to carry it. Within five minutes of sitting down, that question was answered. The room was full, the energy was unmistakable, and it had the confidence of somewhere that already feels like a loved Soho fixture.
Details
Website: impalasoho.com
Instagram: @impala.soho
Email: bookings@impalasoho.com
Nearest Tube: Tottenham Court Road
Opening Hours: Lunch 12:00 – 15:00 | Dinner 17:00 – 22:30 (Sundays coming soon)
Booking: Tables of 1–6, up to 28 days in advance via the website
Walk-ins: Counter seats by the kitchen are kept for walk-ins — well worth a try if you can’t get a table
Bookings are extremely tough at the moment, so plan ahead. If you can swing a lunch slot, that’s where we’d aim. Slightly easier to book, and the room is just as good in the daytime.
Must orders: The bread, the bean dip, the duck and the tart.
Impala is the debut solo project from Chef Meedu Saad, the longtime head chef (and now executive chef) of Kiln, with Adam Smith leading the kitchen day-to-day as head chef. It’s the latest opening from the Super 8 Group, the team behind some of London’s most consistently brilliant restaurants — Kiln, Brat, Smoking Goat and Mountain — so the lineage alone is enough to get excited about.
Meedu was born in Egypt and raised in north London, and Impala is essentially a love letter to both. The name comes from the cherry red 1964 Chevrolet Impala he and his cousins drove around Egypt during summer holidays as teenagers, and the menu pulls from those memories — the community ovens of Ismailia, clams cooked over open fires on the Red Sea, the spit-roasted sheep of Cypriot kebab houses on Green Lanes. Five years in the making, this is a deeply personal project, and you can taste it.
The space itself sits in a 1960s concrete block at the top end of Dean Street, designed by Super 8 co-founder Ben Chapman with longtime collaborator Dan Preston. If you’ve been to Mountain, the resemblance is obvious — concrete pillars, polished wood, soft lighting and a beautiful bar at the front. The entire kitchen is open, with a big charcoal grill and a wood-fired oven taking centre stage. You can sit at a table and still watch the whole team working, ducks glistening over the embers, bread being slid in and out of the oven. It’s mesmerising.
Vinyls were spinning through the bespoke speaker system the whole time we were there, giving it this relaxed, slightly party-like atmosphere inviting us to settle in for a long lunch and end up staying through to the late afternoon. The bar at the front looked great too; we’d happily go back just for a drink.
The service was a real highlight. The menu is extensive and, much like Mountain or Brat, can feel a bit intimidating on first read — lots of unfamiliar ingredients, dishes you’ll need explaining. But our waiter walked us through every single section, gave us proper guidance on how to order, and then mapped out exactly how the dishes would be sent in groups across the meal. He stuck to that plan from start to finish. So many sharing-plates restaurants just lob food at the table in whatever order it comes out of the pass — here, it was choreographed properly.
Cocktails and wine were excellent and, honestly, very reasonably priced for somewhere in this league. The wine list (curated by Penny Vine and Martina Larnach of Mountain) is split into fun categories like "Great to Drink under £65" and "Trailblazers and Appellation Rulebreakers".
What we ate
The menu is North African-inspired with strong Egyptian roots and threads of eastern Mediterranean and Cypriot cooking running through it. A reflection of Meedu’s Egyptian heritage and north London upbringing. Most dishes are spiced beautifully and built around the grill or the wood oven. Here’s what we ordered (9 dishes spread out over 4 courses):
Honey and olive oil bread – Possibly the best bit of bread we’ve had all year. Pillowy, fluffy, properly fresh, and the honey-and-olive-oil combination drizzled over the top is genius. Sweet, savoury, rich and comforting in equal measure. Don’t skip this!
Pounded white beans with wild herbs and bottarga – Insane. The beans were pounded to this incredibly smooth, almost whipped texture, the wild herbs gave it real punch, and on top sat shavings of bottarga (cured, salted, pressed fish roe — usually grey mullet or tuna — that brings a deep, savoury, briny hit, almost like a sea-cured parmesan). We hadn’t had it before, and it was a revelation.
Kibbeh of white crab and sun-dried wheat wrapped in shiso leaves – A single-bite course, but a perfect one. The shiso leaves smelled bright and minty, the crab inside was fresh and sweet, a perfect way to cleanse your palate and gear up for the rich stuff.
Raw seabass with peas, mashua root, garum and pink peppercorn – Our least favourite of the meal, if we’re being honest. The peas and garnish were fresh and clearly considered, but the dish fell a bit flat for us — it lacked the depth and definition of everything else on the table. We’ve had raw fish dishes recently at Oma that were more memorable, and this one didn’t quite land in the same way.
Spring salad with anthotyro cheese and pistachio – A really lovely, fresh side. Anthotyro is a soft, mild Greek whey cheese — a bit like ricotta but lighter — and it worked perfectly against the richer mains.
Bird’s tongue pasta with spiced oxtail – This is essentially their take on Cypriot kritharaki (similar to orzo). Slow-braised oxtail, deeply spiced sauce, beautifully cooked pasta. Rich, comforting, full of flavour. The oxtail was meltingly tender
Duck roasted in molasses with fig sauce – The signature dish. And it absolutely deserves the chatter. The duck is dry-aged, stuffed with black lime and chillies from Aswan, and roasted slowly over the embers. The fat had rendered to perfection, the skin was lacquered and crisp, and the fig sauce was dense and rich without ever tipping into too-sweet territory.
Pilaf with wild herbs and barberries – The perfect partner to the duck. Aromatic, fragrant, with little tart pops of barberry to cut through the richness.
Date and pistachio tart – We shared this, and it was fantastic. The texture is bang-on — crisp pastry, a layer of salted date paste at the base, then thick custard, all topped with a generous pistachio crumb. Salty, sweet, creamy and crunchy in one bite. There’s only one dessert on the menu, but they’ve clearly nailed it, so they don’t need another.
To put it in perspective: the pounded bean dip and the bread were so good that we genuinely preferred them to the bread-and-dips combos we’ve had recently at Berenjak and Oma — and we love both of those places. That mashed bean is some of the best stuff we’ve eaten this year.
Overall thoughts
We turned up with the bar set very, very high — and Impala cleared it comfortably.
Everything is done to a genuinely high standard. The cooking is precise, the flavours are bold and rich without being overwhelming, and you can taste the years of thought and travel that have gone into the menu. The service is some of the best we’ve had in London this year — warm and knowledgeable. The room buzzes from the moment you walk in. And it’s the kind of place where every detail, from the vinyl to the lighting to the way the dishes are paced, feels like it’s been thought about.
Impala absolutely deserves the hype, and we’ll definitely be back.
Map
13–14 Dean Street, London W1D 3RS
