If you want a seat at Endo this autumn, the restaurant has already told you no. I checked endo-chelsea.com on 16 October. November and December are full, the book is not opening past that, and a cancellation, if one turns up, goes to the waitlist. Ten seats, at 8-9 Blacklands Terrace. Most opening stories ask you to want a table. This one tells you the table is gone, which is the more useful of the two.
What opened on 1 October, The Caterer reported, is a kitchen that spent the previous year without a permanent room. It sits in the townhouse Five Fields left in February 2025, after twelve years, and that restaurant's Michelin star closed with it. Kazutoshi's own star belonged to Endo at the Rotunda, in the 2020 Guide for Great Britain and Ireland. On 6 September 2025 a fire in the Helios building, the old Television Centre out at White City, brought about a hundred firefighters. Everyone got out, and the Rotunda still has not reopened. He cooked a five-month residency at Annabel's in Mayfair and was done by July. Chelsea is where that year ends up.
"Like kintsugi, the scars of last year have become part of my history; they have made me return more deeply to my roots."
Endo Kazutoshi, on the year after the fire, as carried by The Spirits Business on 9 October 2026.
He told Broadsheet he thinks of himself as the middleman. The idea, he says, survived the move, and he does not want Chelsea introduced as a new opening, or as a break from the Rotunda. I would trust him on the cooking and keep the buildings apart anyway. One of them burned. This one is a townhouse a few minutes from Sloane Square, with a counter of 200-year-old hinoki shipped from Kyoto, in a room Javier Villar Ruiz designed after years with Kengo Kuma. The Rotunda had its own hinoki counter after a 2024 refit, also cut to ten seats. Nobody has said this is the same wood. If you are the sort of person who would ask a chef whether the tree traveled, ask. I would.
The book that closed in six minutes
A week after opening, Broadsheet reported that November and December had gone in six minutes, Wednesday to Saturday, sittings at 5:45 and 8:45. I would keep those hours in pencil. The restaurant's own homepage still does not print them, and it does not print a price. The Intelligent put the meal at £305 on the day the doors opened. That number belongs to The Intelligent. Wait until the waitlist writes back before you tell anyone what the night costs.
Read the refusals before you join, because a cancellation is too scarce to spend on a table the kitchen has already declined. They will not adapt the meal for a coeliac, a vegan, or a vegetarian, or for a guest who does not eat tuna, rice, or soy, and they will not seat a child under sixteen. What they will cook, he told Broadsheet, is wild fish from the British Isles, from a Cornish fisherman he already talks about as family, and rice seasoned three ways: one vinegar from his master, one from his grandfather, one of his own. The opening bite he still calls a business card is chopped fatty tuna and sushi rice in a winter nori from Toyosu, the kind that snaps. Broadsheet printed the rest of the sequence. The decision sits in front of all that. Do you want to wait for a counter that has published its rules this plainly?
Sloane Square is a few minutes on foot, and the photograph at the top of this page is the one the restaurant chose to lead with, credited to Benjamin McMahon: two people in a small blue boat on a grey inlet. They published the water. It suits a chef whose opening interviews were about a Cornish fisherman, and the hinoki will still be a surprise when you sit down. If you would rather write to a person than fill in a form, the address is reservations@endo-chelsea.com. If you need a Japanese counter you can actually hold this month, One Bryant Park is still taking names in Midtown.
December is Moga
The ceiling is why I would still bother with the upstairs if the counter never writes back. Moga is a listening bar named for the moga, the modern girls of early twentieth-century Japan who took up Western clothes and a room of their own. More than three thousand masu, the square cedar cups sake is drunk from, hang over a stone bar. The records play through custom Taguchi speakers, and Ken Sakamoto, of Comme des Garçons, helped Kazutoshi choose them. The drinks are built around tea, with the bartender Jun Ichikawa and Postcard Teas, the London merchants. There is a den for two, in case ten seats downstairs already felt like a crowd.
You only see that ceiling, for now, if you are already eating downstairs. From December the bar is supposed to take bookings of its own, and they have not named the day. I would watch for that date more closely than for a spare seat at the hinoki. It is the only door on this address still scheduled to open. A counter seat, if the list comes through, includes the bar. Once they name a day for Moga, that booking is how everyone else gets through the door, without having won a six-minute race in October.
Join the waitlist and then forget it, unless the building is what you actually want, in which case ask in late November whether Moga's book is live. The Rotunda is still shut, and nobody has put a date on it. Chelsea is the room you can plan.
