Fourth branch of veggie-led restaurant Bubala opens in Covent Garden
Marc Summers takes on his most ambitious project yet - and it's fab!
In just seven years, and notwithstanding a pandemic in the middle, Marc Summers has established four branches of everyone’s favourite veggie restaurant Bubala, with the newest one opening its doors in Covent Garden on Monday 19 October.
Building on the success of Spitalfields, Soho and King’s Cross locations, Bubala Covent Garden will bring the restaurant’s stunning vegetable-led cooking to London’s theatre district.
It’s been a good couple of years for Marc and his team. Bubala was winner of CODE Hospitality’s Happiest Places to Work in 2025 and earlier this year was named in The Times’ Best Places to Work 2026. It also received OpenTable’s Restaurateurs’ Choice Impact Award 2026, recognising its commitment to hospitality, community and workplace culture. Marc published his debut cookbook Bubala last year
The new restaurant, on Garrick Street, is in a Grade II-listed building. It has space for 60 covers at ground floor level with a further 32 in an additional downstairs dining room, and 30 outside overlooking Floral Street. Interiors have been designed to balance the character of the original 1860 building with the warmth and informality Bubala has become known for.
All the Bubala favourites including halloumi with chamomile and fennel honey, crispy confit latkes with toum, and charred oyster mushroom skewers are here as well as seasonal specials such as slow-roasted beetroot and feta pastilla, which is very much a winter comforter.
Marc, 36, is very aware of the pressures facing both diners and the hospitality industry and has reduced the much-loved ‘Bubala Knows Best’ set menu, by almost 20 percent to £39 across all sites. The aim is to keep the full Bubala experience accessible without compromising on generosity or quality.
Marc, who grew up in Chigwell, lives in north London with his wife and their two young boys. He started working in restaurants while he was living in Australia in his 20s. When he came back to London he did a cookery diploma and started working at Berber and Q in East London and then The Palomar in Soho.
Next came a series of pop ups all over London before taking a permanent unit on Commercial Street in Spitalfields, near where Marc’s grandma grew up.
When Marc was working at Josh Katz’s meat-focused grill house Berber and Q, he noticed that customers were really excited by the vegetable dishes. “Their faces would light up when you talked about the cauliflower shawarma.”
He didn’t want to open “just another Middle Eastern restaurant” and it dawned on him that vegetable dishes were taking centre stage at these restaurants but no-one was doing a veggie-only one.
Covent Garden is the biggest opening so far, “but we want it to feel just as warm and personal as the first site did,” says Marc. “We were especially drawn to the site because parts of it reminded us of Spitalfields when we first opened Bubala. Once we saw the inside we knew we had to have it.”