Adam Byatt Opens Rosina: A Michelin Chef’s Italian Debut in Wandsworth
The chef behind Clapham’s Michelin-starred Trinity turns to the food he cooks at home. Rosina, named after his daughter, opens on Wandsworth Common on 29 June, and it is his first venture into Italian cooking in a thirty-year career.
Some restaurants announce themselves with noise. Rosina arrives the way the best neighbourhood places always do, quietly, on a corner you already know, run by someone who has spent decades earning the right to be there. When it opens its doors on 29 June, it will mark a genuine first: after a career built on British and French cooking, Adam Byatt is finally cooking Italian.
Byatt is not a name that needs much introduction in south London. He has owned and run Trinity in Clapham for over twenty years, a restaurant that holds a Michelin star, three AA rosettes and a place in The Times’ Top 100, and welcomes some fifty thousand diners a year. Rosina is his sixth restaurant and, tellingly, his first new neighbourhood project in more than a decade. Named after his young daughter, Rosie, it is the most personal thing he has done in years.
A corner with history, on a street that knows good food
Rosina takes over the site of the former Brinkley’s Kitchen at 35 Bellevue Road, on the corner of Trinity Road, looking out over Wandsworth Common. It is a knowing address. This is the same stretch that is home to Chez Bruce, one of the capital’s most quietly revered French restaurants, which means Rosina arrives on a street that already takes its dining seriously.
The space itself follows the template Byatt has refined over twenty years, generous but unshowy. There is a large dining room seating fifty, a stand-alone bar, a terrace for a further twenty-five, and a private dining room with its own private terrace. Several of his longstanding front and back of house team are moving across from his other restaurants, which is the surest sign of all that Rosina is built to feel like one of his, warm, polished, and entirely without ceremony.
The food: Italy, through an English chef’s hands
This is the part that makes Rosina interesting. Byatt has spent his professional life in British and French kitchens, beginning at Claridge’s at sixteen, but Italian food is what he has always cooked at home for his family. As he put it in announcing the restaurant, you may know him as an English chef who cooks French gastronomy, but in all honesty it is Italian food and Mediterranean flavours that he reaches for, and Rosina is all about that.
The menu reads like a love letter to the country, built on the best produce from Italy and the UK and delivered with the lightness of touch that defines his cooking. Expect to begin with DOP prosciutto or culatello with melon, burrata with pesto, swordfish and tuna crudo with lemon and chilli, or fried Taleggio wrapped in chard leaves with a tomato fondue. The pasta section is where the heart of it lies: tortellini in brodo, strozzapreti cacio e pepe, conchiglie with veal and bone marrow ragù, and linguine with lobster, chilli, mint and basil.
From there it opens out to the kind of generous, produce-led main courses made for sharing, a grass-fed Fiorentina with cime di rapa, a 1.5kg wild seabass baked whole in salt with fennel and orange, brill cooked on the bone with capers and spinach, or rabbit Milanese with tomato fondue. Sides lean into the season, fava beans with peas, fried mortadella and pecorino, brassicas from Sicily, scarpetta bread and olive oil. Dessert arrives from the trolley, alongside Pina’s tiramisu, an almond and grapefruit cake, and gelato in chocolate, pistachio, coffee and Rosina’s own.
There are also two set sharing menus that capture the mood neatly: a Tuscany menu served indoors, built around agnolotti and a Florentine T-bone cooked over coals, and an Amalfi menu for the terrace, with prawns over coals and capon on the barbecue with ‘nduja butter. The wine list, as you would expect, leans generously Italian.
A restaurant to use all week
What Byatt is reaching for is not occasion dining but the opposite. Rosina, in his words, is a space to use all week, a Wednesday on a whim, an intimate Friday date night, a family gathering at the weekend. It is open seven days a week, serving lunch from midday to 2.30pm and dinner from 5.30pm to 10pm.
His ambition for it is disarmingly simple. He wants people to feel better leaving than they did arriving, and to appreciate, even without noticing them all, the thousand small things he and his team have created to make them feel good. After twenty years of doing exactly that in Clapham, there is every reason to believe Wandsworth is about to gain a restaurant it will quietly come to rely on.
The essentials
Rosina opens on 29 June 2026 at 35 Bellevue Road, Wandsworth, London SW17 7EF.
Open seven days a week, lunch midday to 2.30pm and dinner 5.30pm to 10pm. Fifty covers inside, twenty-five on the terrace, plus a bar and a private dining room.
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