YOPO Zaytoun Review: The Restaurant The Mandrake Was Waiting For

We’ve spoken before about how luxury hospitality has become strangely apologetic – about how the higher the room rate climbs, the more determined many hotels seem to be to offend absolutely nobody. Every rough edge is sanded smooth, every eccentricity is carefully diluted. Entire interiors are assembled from the same internationally approved palette of marble, brass and reassuringly expensive neutrals. The Mandrake, thank whatever gods watch over London, has never suffered from this particular affliction. 

Hidden behind an unassuming façade on Newman Street and moments from the churn of Oxford Street, the Fitzrovia hotel has spent years cultivating something far rarer and more important than luxury: a point of view and a tangible point of differentiation. 

Generous, stylish and more than a little naughty

Founder and art collector Rami Fustok has created a property that seems entirely comfortable with the possibility that some people simply won't get it. There is the lush, hanging greenery of the Jurema Terrace and the ethnobotanical cocktails of the Waeska Bar. There is enough contemporary art to occupy an afternoon and enough candlelight to occupy an evening. There is also, as it happens, a resident dominatrix.

That last detail tends to hog the headlines. It rather misses the point – what makes The Mandrake interesting is not that it is unconventional, as plenty of places work tirelessly to be unconventional. What makes it unusual is that it commits to its identity with ferocious conviction, and in a hospitality industry increasingly preoccupied with broad appeal, The Mandrake remains refreshingly uninterested in consensus.

This does, however, present a clear challenge: hotel guests need to eat, and The Mandrake needs a restaurant that both lives up to the mythology and ensures the dedication to sensory pleasure remains whether cuffed to a bedpost or sat with a knife and fork in hand. 

For a long time, the hotel's culinary offering felt slightly detached from the wider story. It was perfectly competent, certainly, but not entirely inseparable from its surroundings. YOPO Zaytoun – launched in the sweltering summer of 2026 – changes that, and does so with a gleeful understanding of the brief and fistfuls of za’atar and olive oil. Needless to say, I was hooked. 

Cometh The Hour, Cometh The Chef

Under Head Chef Viktor Yordanov (formerly of Notting Hill's much-lauded Mazi), the restaurant has pivoted decisively towards the Eastern Mediterranean. The move feels less like a repositioning exercise and more like a long-overdue moment of clarity, with its finger bang on the pulse of what the public are craving. We are, after all, several decades into the great Ottolenghification of British dining.

What do you mean, your hotel bar doesn’t have its own taxidermy chimera?

Despite the culinary compass now pointing somewhere between Beirut and Benghazi, the dining room remains unmistakably Mandrake. There are exposed concrete walls, bespoke equestrian leather detailing by London designer Leo Prothmann and a soundtrack that seems to hover somewhere between soundtrack and séance. Somehow, it all comes together to create an atmosphere that is dark without becoming gloomy, theatrical without descending into self-parody, and sexy without feeling like it's trying too hard to please. 

The team has scored a blinder, truly. There’s a real danger with concept-driven hotels; the restaurant often feels like an operational necessity awkwardly inhabiting somebody else's fantasy. You have dinner because you happen to be there, but at The Mandrake and after a cocktail downstairs and a wander through the property's candlelit corridors, YOPO Zaytoun feels like the natural continuation of the evening. The restaurant finally speaks the same language as the building around it, and does so with a silver-tongued fluency that’s, frankly, quite arousing. 

Bread, Dips and a Minor Personal Obsession

Hummus, baba ganoush and THAT taramasalata

Enough pre-ambling flirtation. The orchestra has been tuned, the curtain has risen and it’s time to strap in and enjoy the show. We begin – as sensible people tend to – with Champagne, and then the first dishes make their way to the table. They come in a trio of Levantine-adjacent dips and arrive with warm flatbreads tossed in za’atar and a superb Cypriot Manahi olive oil. The hummus was impeccably silky, the baba ganoush deeply charred and studded with bright pomegranate seeds that cut through the smoke. Both were excellent – the problem was they happened to be sharing the table with a taramasalata for the ages. 

I’m often reminded of the fact that, as a man and as a restaurant critic, I have a habit of getting rather fixated on singular ingredients. There are some restaurants I’ve been to dozens of times, only to order the same thing over and over again. This isn’t some hint of a trendy neurodivergent streak; it’s a real gesture of devotion. I fall head-over-heels in love with singular dishes on a regular basis, and the taramasalata at YOPO Zaytoun just joined my ever-growing harem of paramours. 

Whipped to an almost impossible lightness, it combines the deep savoury character of smoked roe with enough citrus to keep everything bright and balanced. The salmon caviar scattered across the top feels neither decorative nor excessive – it simply belongs there, each pearl popping against the roof of the mouth and flooding the tongue with rich, oily and briny decadence. It was lush. 

I suspect every critic has his or her own tell for judging a dish such as this. Mine is the speed at which bread mysteriously disappears. By that metric, the taramasalata was a runaway success – I was in serious danger of carb-and-fish-egg overindulgence before the meal had really begun. 

Confident Cookery and Admirable Restraint

Someone stopped bringing more flatbread to the table, for which I’m genuinely grateful. Arriving in its place was a crudo course, consisting of a neat scallop carpaccio (served beautifully in the half-shell) bright with lime and handled with admirable confidence. I remain quietly unconvinced that every thinly sliced ingredient in contemporary gastronomy requires the title of "carpaccio", but invoking my inner art history pedant felt like a losing battle in the circumstances.

An array of mischevious delights

The lobster ceviche was equally impressive, allowing the sweetness of the shellfish to remain front and centre rather than burying it beneath a mountain of acidity. Simple, clean and refreshing, it was a great choice for a sultry summer’s evening and a sterling reminder that crustaceans need not be drenched in butter and garlic to feel like a genuine treat. 

The best cooking often reveals itself through what a chef chooses not to do, and what united both dishes was a notable lack of fuss. Modern fine dining can sometimes resemble an arms race of ideas, with chefs piling technique upon technique in pursuit of complexity. Here, the kitchen seems entirely comfortable allowing excellent ingredients to shoulder most of the workload themselves – and with shellfish of this quality on show, it would be a shame to overcomplicate matters. There is confidence in that approach and – perhaps more importantly – there is generosity.

There is real precision on display at YOPO Zaytoun, but the food never feels clinical. Beneath the polish, Yordanov's Balkan roots show in the best possible way. There is an ancestral impulse at work in the kitchen: to feed people properly. Not merely to impress them, but to send them home happier and substantially fuller than when they arrived.

Fire, Smoke and Unexpected Surprises

Cornish lobster with orzo

As the table gradually disappeared beneath an expanding collection of small plates, salads and various olive oils, the larger dishes arrived. My companion for the evening had ordered the poussin, which arrived blistered, blackened and coal-scarred after making friends with licks of open fire. The meat beneath remained impressively succulent, and it was accompanied by a bowl of genuinely delicious glazed baby carrots perched on an airy cheese purée. It would be easy to dismiss this as a fairly simple dish, but it’s one which restaurants rarely manage to nail – whole chickens are, I always think, best prepared in domestic kitchens in which the cook isn’t up against the clock. 

I’ll point out that the bowl of side salad doing the rounds on the table at this point of the evening wasn’t particularly inspiring – a collection of leaves dressed in a slightly unremarkable vinaigrette – but that’s genuinely about as critical as I can get, which alone speaks volumes. 

Ribeye worth travelling for

My own main course of Cornish lobster tail arrived in all its crimson glory, sat prettily atop a vivid orange bed of orzo enriched with tomato and mascarpone and sharpened by flashes of fresh chilli. Rich but not heavy, indulgent but never cumbersome, it’s up there with my dishes of the year. By this stage, further bread was ordered under the transparent pretence of helping finish the sauce. Belts were loosened, and happily so. 

Then came the curveball. YOPO Zaytoun is not currently discussed as a great London steak restaurant. If the city were a fair place, that would change very quickly. The ribeye, served alongside sweet Roscoff onions, was an absolute stunner. Cooked to a flawless medium-rare, it possessed exactly the sort of texture that genuinely great British beef should have: tender, certainly, but retaining enough character and structure to remind you that you're eating an animal rather than an abstraction.

For reasons I have never entirely understood, many premium steakhouses have become obsessed with producing meat so soft it practically dissolves on contact. It’s an American import, I guess, but while the result can be impressive, it’s rarely interesting. This was interesting, and more importantly, it was bloody delicious.

Basking in the Afterglow

I'm writing this review just 48 hours after those final slicks of jus were scraped from the bowl, and what has lingered isn't the lobster, the poussin or even the genuinely outstanding steak and taramasalata. It was the impression that the right restaurant and the right hotel have finally found one another.

Make no mistake, The Mandrake has always known exactly what it wants to be: dark, seductive, slightly mischievous and wholly unconcerned with universal approval. Under Viktor Yordanov, YOPO Zaytoun has launched a dining room that’s finally caught up with that particular vision. In a city increasingly populated by expensive places that look different but feel remarkably similar, that is a far more compelling achievement than any single dish could ever be. 

Let it be known: The Mandrake not only provides copious vibes while wearing its kink crown rakishly askew, but also has a reasonably-priced restaurant worth crossing town for. As a full package, it simply makes the argument a whole lot easier to swallow.