Luso
Mendes's old Charlotte Street room reopened in September 2025 under Leandro Carreira, and the clams à bulhão pato are the reason to book.12
Why go
Nuno Mendes moved on to his restaurants in Lisbon and Porto, and his former staff relaunched 30 Charlotte Street as Luso on 15 September 2025, keeping the building and changing the cooking.1 Leandro Carreira, the chef behind The Sea, The Sea, writes the menu as consultant executive chef, with Kimberly Hernandez running the kitchen across 90 covers.3 The cooking moved from Mendes's experiments to the Iberian Atlantic coast and rural Portugal, which the Observer's Mina Holland summed up as less pork-fat custard, more piri piri chicken
.2 The wine runs Douro, Dão and Alentejo, with some sea-aged bottles.3 The huge ground-floor counter survived the switchover.1
Order this / avoid
- Order: amêijoas à bulhão pato. Holland: they
really deliver
, with adeeply comforting liquor, shellfish's answer to Jewish penicillin
.2 - Order: the salt-baked wild sea bass, which she says
may well be the best seabass she will ever eat in London
.2 - Order: the leitão, roasted in the oven, and the toucinho do céu to finish.3
- Avoid: the brill crudo with apple and red pepper vinaigrette, the one plate Holland found
lacks chemistry
.2 - Avoid: the downstairs room. Holland's tip is to sit in the
serene
upstairs dining room, since she spent her meal looking at a flashing dishwasher light.2
What locals & experts say
- Mina Holland, The Observer, October 2025: she had eaten Lisboeta three years earlier and called it
a novel meal without the need for a sequel
. Luso passed the opposite test: "It's the holy grail for any restaurant, to be the Toy Story of eateries: to do something so well that people go back for more, many times, and find something new to love on each visit."2 - Harden's has no survey feedback yet:
not enough people have commented yet
. The one diner comment on file is less warm:Up and down; some great dishes, some less so.
3
Good to know
- This is not Lisboeta. Same address, same operator, different chef and different menu since 15 September 2025. If you saved the room for Mendes's cooking, that is not what this kitchen cooks now.1
- Where to sit: upstairs, or at the long ground-floor counter.21
- Size: 90 covers.3
- Hours and prices are not published in anything reachable here.
Verdict
should-visit — Nuno Mendes left this building in 2025 and his former staff reopened it on 15 September as Luso, with Leandro Carreira of The Sea, The Sea writing the menu, and the shift is one Mina Holland caught in five words for the Observer: 'less pork-fat custard, more piri piri chicken'. The cooking now runs the Iberian Atlantic coast and rural Portugal across 90 covers, and the two dishes she vouches for are the clams à bulhão pato, whose liquor she calls 'shellfish's answer to Jewish penicillin', and a salt-baked seabass she thinks may be the best she will eat in London. She also failed one dish, a brill crudo that 'lacks chemistry', and told readers to sit upstairs rather than in the corridor-like room below. The reason it sits here rather than higher is that it is under a year old, Harden's has no survey feedback yet, and the one recorded diner comment is 'up and down'.