Last Updated on October 6, 2026 by Halal Food Guy
I went back through every restaurant I’ve reviewed over the last ten years and checked whether each one is still open. Of the 482, 222 have shut their doors, and the numbers reveal some clear winners and losers on London’s halal food scene.
Over the past few weeks I’ve done something I’ve never done before: I went back through everything. Every blog post, every Instagram review and every score I’ve written since 2016, 482 restaurants in total, and I checked each one on Google Maps to see if it was still open.
I expected a few closures. I didn’t expect half.
222 of the 482 restaurants I have reviewed have closed. That’s 46%, almost half.
That’s 222 restaurants that someone poured their savings into, 222 kitchens and 222 teams of staff. Some of them I’d forgotten about, and some of them I still think about.
Here’s what the numbers show.
1. The early boom years were brutal
Group the restaurants by the year I last reviewed them and the pattern is hard to miss.
- Of the 149 places I reviewed from 2016 to 2018, 123 have closed. That’s 83%.
- Of the 62 places I reviewed in 2017, only seven are still trading.
- For places I reviewed from 2022 to 2025, the figure drops to 17%: 20 closures out of 120.
Some of that is simply time: give any group of restaurants eight years and plenty of them will close. But 2016 to 2018 was also when the halal scene in London exploded. It felt like a new place opened every week, often with a big launch, a queue out the door and a lot of hype. Many of them didn’t last long after the queue went.
The 2020 group stands out too: 24 of the 34 places I reviewed that year have gone. Many restaurants opened just before the pandemic, or made it through lockdowns on takeaway alone, and never fully recovered.
2. Burgers boomed, then bust
No cuisine has been hit harder than burgers. I’ve reviewed 65 burger spots over the years, and 37 of them have closed, 57%. Fried chicken and peri-peri places aren’t far behind at 56%.
Remember when every week there was a new brioche bun, a new smashed patty and a new “secret sauce”? There were simply too many places selling the same thing to the same people. When the hype moved on, many of them didn’t survive it.
At the other end of the chart, Turkish restaurants have held on best: only 24% have closed. Steak (32%), Indian and Pakistani (34%) and Middle Eastern (40%) have also done better than average. These are places families return to week after week, not somewhere you visit once for a photo.
3. Great food doesn’t guarantee survival
It would be nice to think only the bad restaurants close. They don’t.
The closed restaurants I scored averaged 7.0 out of 10. The ones still open average 7.1. There’s almost no difference. More than 20 of the restaurants that closed scored 8 or more.
Some of the best meals I’ve ever eaten came from places that no longer exist. The Frog E1 in Spitalfields (9.3) is still one of my favourite restaurant experiences. CHIK’N in Soho, Hankies and Hotstone all scored 9.
Good food brings customers back, but it can’t always pay the rent, the energy bills, the business rates and the rising cost of ingredients. Over the past few years restaurants have also had to deal with lockdowns, staff shortages and a cost of living crisis that has turned eating out from a habit into a treat for a lot of people.
4. Soho has the most closures
Where I know the neighbourhood, Soho has lost the most restaurants I’ve reviewed, with 13, followed by Ilford with 6, then Covent Garden, Leicester Square, Camden, Fitzrovia and Brick Lane.
Central London rents are high and the West End never stops changing as leases end and landlords look for the next big name. But Ilford shows it isn’t only a central London problem.
5. The survivors
It isn’t all bad news. Of those 149 places from 2016 to 2018, 26 are still going strong. They include Gökyüzü, Lokkum, Laz, Five Lads, Etles, Vijay’s Chawalla, and fine-dining names like Jamavar and Gymkhana.
What do they have in common? Most of them have a loyal local following, a clear identity and a menu people come back for, rather than one viral dish.
What this means for you
If there’s a halal restaurant you love, support it. Book a table, bring your family, leave a Google review, tell your friends. Independent restaurants don’t have the marketing budgets of big chains, and word of mouth is often all they have.
And if you’ve been meaning to try somewhere, don’t leave it for “one day”. Going by these numbers, it might not be there in a few years.
Which closure hurt you the most? Let me know in the comments.
How I worked this out: I checked every restaurant I have reviewed since 2016 against Google Maps in September 2026, along with my own notes. A restaurant counts as closed if Google lists it as permanently closed or I know it has shut down. The year is the most recent time I reviewed or visited a place, not the year it closed. Cuisine figures only count restaurants with a known cuisine, and some fall into more than one group (a steak and burger place counts in both). Places I have eaten at but never properly reviewed aren’t included.
