West London is about to get a dining room on a genuinely grand scale. Juno, which its operators bill as the biggest Italian restaurant anywhere in the UK, opens inside Olympia’s National Hall on Friday 16 October, and the first week’s menu runs from hand-made pasta and blistered Neapolitan pizzas to a help-yourself gelato offer that costs a fiver.
The launch is the latest move from Incipio Group, and the concept is clearly built for long days and even longer evenings. From midday it is meant to work as a relaxed, drop-in dining room. As the day wears on, though, the room changes gear: a house Italian band and resident DJs take over, the aperitivo starts flowing, and dinner is expected to roll into late-night drinks rather than wind down.
What is on the menu at Juno?
The kitchen is set up to cover the full Italian day. Things begin with aperitivo and small plates, move through fresh pasta made in-house, and finish with classic secondi and desserts rather than cutting corners at any stage.
Early standouts include paccheri folded through tomato and mozzarella, a crab linguine finished with chilli and vine-ripened cherry tomatoes, and a slow-cooked osso buco alla Milanese served the traditional way, with saffron risotto and gremolata. Around the edges of the room, a dedicated Pizza Napoletana counter lets diners watch dough being shaped and pizzas cooked to order, which should keep the theatre going even for tables nowhere near the kitchen pass.
Dessert is treated as a headline act rather than an afterthought. Alongside a classic tiramisu and a sharp lemon delizia, there is a gelato tower anchoring the sweet menu, plus a stage and DJ booth built into the room so live music is part of the furniture, not a special occasion.
A different reason to visit every day of the week
Rather than leaving the weekly diary to chance, Juno has programmed it. Tuesdays belong to Nonna’s Lasagne, where every guest gets a second portion packed up to take home, complete with reheating instructions and a note from Nonna herself. Weekday afternoons bring Gelato Maximus, a £5 bottomless gelato session running from 3pm to 5pm with 15 toppings to work through.
Early evenings are covered by Aperitivo Hour between 4pm and 6pm, pairing Italian classics with cicchetti, the small snacks Venetian bars have turned into an art form. Saturdays are given over to La Grande Festa, a long sharing lunch built around Aperol Spritzes, limoncello and the live band, while Sundays slow down for La Famiglia: sharing plates, roast porchetta and a free children’s meal with every adult ordering from the main menu.
Why Olympia, and why now?
For anyone who has followed the search for a Juno Italian restaurant West London can genuinely call its own, the address matters. Olympia has been drawing crowds to this part of the capital since the nineteenth century, and its halls still pull in exhibition-goers, gig crowds and day-trippers in huge numbers. A restaurant of this size, opening daily from 12pm until 11pm, is designed to feed all of them, as well as giving Hammersmith and Kensington residents a new local that works just as well for a Tuesday lunch as a Saturday night out.
Juno also lands in the middle of a crowded autumn for London openings. Across the capital, operators are betting on big, experience-led rooms, from the secret speakeasy bar hidden beneath a Mayfair bagel shop to much-loved locals investing heavily in a comeback, like the West Hampstead pub that has shut for a six-figure refit ahead of its relaunch. Food-led openings are running at every scale too, with Gail’s confirming the opening date for its new Brixton bakery this month.
Nearest stations are Kensington (Olympia), on the Overground and District line, with West Kensington and Barons Court both a short walk away, so the first rush on Friday 16 October is unlikely to be short of arrivals. If the opening week is anything to go by, the biggest challenge will not be filling the National Hall. It will be choosing between the second helping of lasagne and the bottomless gelato.
