Rita's, the food and drinks project built over a decade of residencies, pop-ups, a cookbook and one of London's more devoted cult followings, will open its first permanent restaurant in Shoreditch in July 2026. The site — on Curtain Road, in a former print workshop — will be the first time founders Missy Flynn and Gabriel Pryce have operated from a space they can fully call their own.
The announcement ends years of nomadic existence for a project that has, despite never having a fixed address, exerted a disproportionate influence on how London thinks about casual cooking and hospitality culture. Rita's has operated out of three different residency kitchens over the past seven years, each time generating queues that belied the apparent informality of the format.
The space
The Curtain Road site occupies approximately 2,800 sq ft across a ground floor dining room and a basement bar. The ground floor will seat 55 covers arranged around an open kitchen, with the menu following the Rita's register that Flynn and Pryce have refined over years — cooking that draws freely on American diner culture, Italian informality and the kind of seasonal British produce obsession that runs through the best of London's independent restaurants.
The basement bar, which will operate independently of the restaurant's service hours, is designed as a destination in its own right — a tightly focused cocktail list, a short snacks menu and a deliberately relaxed atmosphere that reflects Flynn's long interest in bars as spaces for a different kind of hospitality than the restaurant floor.
What Rita's is
For anyone unfamiliar with the project: Rita's is not easy to summarise. It is a restaurant in the same way that certain restaurants transcend their category — a specific sensibility expressed through food, drink, music and the way a room feels when the right people are looking after it. The food has always been technically accomplished without ever making technique the point. The hospitality has always been warm without crossing into performance.
Flynn and Pryce have been among the more influential figures in London's independent restaurant culture for years, not just through Rita's but through their writing, their presence at events and their influence on the generation of young cooks and front-of-house staff who have worked alongside them.
Opening details
Rita's Shoreditch will open for dinner from Tuesday to Sunday from 1 July 2026, with lunch service added from September. The basement bar will open Thursday to Saturday from 6pm. Reservations will be available via the Rita's website; a proportion of covers will be held for walk-ins each service.