Luxury Restaurant, Drink & Travel Trends for 2025

RESTAURANTS - BEN MCCORMACK

Posh pubs

No one would have predicted that 2024’s hottest restaurant would be a pub. But The Devonshire already has competition for the title of London’s smartest watering hole.  At the recently opened Blue Stoops in Kensington, chef Lorcan Spiteri (son of legendary front-of-house Jon Spiteri and Rochelle Canteen co-founder Melanie Arnold) has joined forces with Burton-onTrent brewing royalty Jamie Allsopp to revive heritage cask ales served alongside British comfort food. Next year will see two new ventures from the poshest publicans in the business, Phil Winser and James Gummer of The Bull at Charlbury, who are relaunching both The Fat Badger in Notting Hill and The Coach in Clerkenwell with menus featuring seasonal produce grown on their Cotswolds farm. Who needs a GAIL’s to gentrify a neighbourhood?

Big-name comebacks

Gordon Ramsay, Richard Caring, Jeremy King: look at the names behind next year’s biggest restaurant openings and one might be forgiven for thinking it’s 2005, not 2025. First out of the starting blocks is Ramsay, who will open five new restaurants (including the UK’s highest) atop 22 Bishopsgate in the City in February. More intriguing is the reheated rivalry between King and Caring. King is set to re-open Simpson’s in the Strand, the historic dining room famous for roast beef and the ‘Ten Deadly Sins’ breakfast, in June.  Later in the year, Caring will reincarnate Le Caprice, King’s first restaurant success, which Caring closed in 2020. Set in the Chancery Rosewood hotel, it will be open all day. Let the battle of the breakfasts commence!

Etiquette rules

With William Hanson’s new book, Just Good Manners, likely to be this year’s most courteously correct stocking filler, the subject of restaurant etiquette is once more on the table. Few topics are sure to divide diners as the acceptability of taking photos of one’s food for Instagram, though the tide of opinion may be decisively turning. At the recently refurbished Endo at the Rotunda, mobile phone use is very much frowned upon, despite the sushi and sashimi served on vintage crockery being among the prettiest plates in the capital. It’s a similar story at Louis, an Italian-American newcomer in Manchester, also set to open in London next year. “We just want people to enjoy their food instead of filming it,” says co-founder Drew Jones.

DRINK - NINA CAPLAN

Chardonnay returns

Remember ABC – Anything But Chardonnay, the reaction to the wine that Bridget Jones swilled with such gusto? Well, you can forget it again, because those rich, fat wines, pulsating with vanilla, are as out of date as Bridget’s diary. The best winemakers avoid much new oak (responsible for the vanilla flavours) and their Chardonnays are lean and elegant. Coming from Australia, South Africa, New Zealand or even England (English still wines are a trend in themselves), these are delicate, tangy wines with a hint of citrus. Vanilla fans will simply have to buy an ice cream.

All about mezcal

Once lovers of cocktails and premium spirits realised that tequila could be so much more than a margherita base, it was only a matter of time before the excitement radiated out to include other great mezcals. All tequila is mezcal, but the former must be made from at least 51 per cent Blue Weber agave (the best are 100 per cent) while the latter can use other kinds of agave, so not all mezcal is tequila. This means there are all kinds of strange and delicious agave-based spirits to explore. It’s mezcal madness.

New grape varieties

While it has been a long time since anyone seriously thought the so-called international varieties – Cabernet Sauvignon, Chardonnay, Sauvignon Blanc – were the only ones worth drinking, the trickle of Indigenous grapes is about to become a flood of intriguing names. At Waitrose, the Loved and Found range (including Pais from Chile) has proved so popular they have just added five more options including Piedirosso (Italy) and Piquepoul Noir (France). Meanwhile, Ayala Champagne has just released Collection No.16, a style that is usually Chardonnay only: this one is 50 per cent Arbane, Petit Meslier and Pinot Blanc.

TRAVEL - RICK JORDAN

Zero waste

Up until now, zero-waste cuisine has been more lip service than actual bite – apart from pioneers such as London’s ‘no bin’ restaurant Silo, which just opened a Fermentation Factory to make miso from spent beer grains. But in 2025, it will go more mainstream. Mandarin Oriental will use AI to reduce waste, Hilton’s Taste of Zero Waste menus are being rolled out globally, and independent openings are harnessing the ethos to get sustainably creative: from Oslo’s new Ugly Duckling bar, which upcycles fruit waste, to Eriro hotel in the Austrian Tyrol – accessed only by cable car, it sources ingredients from local mountain farms.

Flying boats

While airships went out with a bang, flying boats – those golden-age pin-ups, skimming down to Maui with Bogart and Bacall – went out with a whimper. But they’re about to take to the skies (and waters) again. In June, a one-off 757 private charter, Tracing the Transatlantic, celebrates the iconic Pan Am Clippers of the 1930s, taking passengers from NYC to the Flying Boat Museum in Ireland’s Foynes. Tickets are $60,000, but more affordable flights onboard a new generation of flying boats are on the horizon, with electric sea gliders soon to connect Dubai with Abu Dhabi, Australia’s Amphibian Aerospace Industries’ reviving the classic Albatross, and Singapore’s AirFish-8 – which resembles a sci-fi dragonfly – aiming to revolutionise island hopping.

Cultural Inclusion

Community engagement used to be little more than being handed a floral lei in Hawaii or sitting down to a staged tea ceremony in Kyoto, but now locals are becoming more actively involved – and often setting the agenda themselves. Case in point: First Nations tourism in Canada and Australia, with British Columbia’s Lund Resort offering an insight into Tla’amin culture, and Indigenous curators heading new art tours at the Queensland Art Gallery. Leave the dreamcatcher in the souvenir shop.