Yvette Legge savours a Mediterranean feast with a side of neighbourhood charm at Marylebone restaurant, Lita. Below, discover her honest verdict.
Lita's Culinary Director, Kostas Papathanasiou, is renowned for his technical precision and ingredient-led menus where modern Mediterranean cooking reigns supreme. He boasts an impressive CV, with stints in some of the world's most acclaimed kitchens such as The Fat Duck, The Ledbury, The Social Company, and Restaurant Frantzén. He joined Lita as Culinary Director in November 2025, and under his leadership, Lita retained its Michelin star in the 2026 guide.
By the time the second glass is poured at Lita, the room has taken on that flattering, late-evening glow that makes everyone look richer, better rested and far more interesting than they probably are. Marylebone has no shortage of good-looking restaurants, but few with this sort of easy charm. Lita does not strain for effect. It simply gets on with being the place you want to stay.
The name helps set the tone. Lita is short for Abuelita – grandmother, softened and shortened in the way families do when affection gets there first. It is a clever fit for a restaurant that manages to feel warm and familiar while still looking very put together. There is hospitality here, not just service.
And sitting at the counter helps. You are close enough to watch the kitchen in full swing without feeling as though you have accidentally booked yourself onto a stage. From here, you catch the pace, the polish and the quiet choreography of a team that knows exactly what it is doing. No unnecessary shouting, no culinary psychodrama, just that rare and reassuring sense that dinner is in very competent hands.
The room itself gets the balance right. Blood-orange banquettes, deep green accents and a red travertine bar give it warmth and texture, but it never feels overdesigned. It feels like a proper neighbourhood restaurant with a bit more polish than usual. The sort of place that could easily become a local habit, if local habits were this well dressed.
That instinct has served Lita well. It opened in spring 2024 and earned its first Michelin star the following year, which tells you something about how quickly it found its footing. Plenty of restaurants spend years trying to work out who they are. Lita seems to have arrived with the answer already in hand.
In the kitchen, Culinary Director Kostas Papathanasiou brings the sort of pedigree that could easily tip into self-importance: The Fat Duck, The Ledbury, Jason Atherton’s group, Frantzén. Thankfully, the food never feels like it is showing off. The menu feels confident and straightforward, Mediterranean at heart but backed by serious skill.
Dinner began simply, and correctly, with Wildfarmed sourdough and cultured butter: simple on paper, but exactly the kind of thing that sets the tone properly. Then came grilled Orkney scallop with pumpkin and lobster sauce, sweet, soft and rich in all the right places, with a lobster sauce worth going quiet for.
The bucatini cacio e pepe with sourdough pangrattato and winter truffle could have been excessive in less careful hands, but here it was all balance: earthy, glossy, properly comforting, with the pangrattato adding just enough texture to stop the whole thing disappearing into pure indulgence. Beef short rib with kabu turnip, sprouting broccoli and Périgord truffle sauce makes its point straight away. Rich, but not heavy.
Then came the 1kg Lake District Farmers côte de boeuf to share, which is exactly the sort of dish that only works if the kitchen gets it right. This one did. It arrived with confidence, beautifully handled, full of flavour and entirely worth the mild moral collapse that tends to accompany ordering that much beef on a Thursday night.
Wine, meanwhile, was one of the evening’s real pleasures. The sommelier - delightful, funny, brilliantly pitched - guided the meal with pairings that moved from Chenin Blanc through to Pinot Noir, and did so with the kind of light touch that makes you trust someone almost immediately. There was knowledge, obviously, but more importantly there was charm. Nothing forced, nothing preachy, just wines that worked brilliantly with the food.
That is really what Lita does so well. The food is polished but not stiff. The service is slick without becoming robotic. The room has warmth without trying to sell you the idea of warmth. And from the counter, watching the kitchen while the dining room settles into the evening, you get the strongest sense of what makes the place work. It is not just that Lita looks good, though it does. It is that the whole thing moves as one.
By the time you step back onto Paddington Street, slightly reluctant to leave, Lita has done something more impressive than merely showing off. It has made a Thursday night feel faintly worth dressing up for - and one more glass feel like the only sensible decision.
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