Leonie Cooper
Leonie Cooper is Time Out London’s Food and Drink Editor, covering restaurant reviews and food news across the city with a focus on how Londoners actually eat, from neighbourhood stalwarts to major destination openings. Her work joins critical assessment with fast-moving reporting, tracking both the everyday rhythms and headline moments of the capital’s dining scene.
London Restaurant Reviews
Cooper’s core output is detailed restaurant criticism that ranges across London’s geography and price points, giving equal attention to casual dining and high-end rooms. She reviews venues as varied as Malaysian casual dining spot Mambow in Clapton, modern Filipino sharing plates at Donia in Soho and classic slap-up dinners at Claridge’s Restaurant in Mayfair, mapping how different cuisines and formats fit into the city’s food culture. Her reviews sit within Time Out’s London restaurant reviews strand, where she contributes assessments of new and established places and helps refresh the wider view of “London’s best restaurants.”
Across this work she treats borough and neighbourhood as part of the story, moving between areas like Hackney, Soho, Mayfair and Clapton to show how particular streets and districts evolve as dining destinations. The emphasis is on clarity and usefulness: reviews are positioned within curated guides, making it easy for readers to understand what kind of experience a restaurant offers and how it compares to others in its category.
Food News and High-Profile Openings
Alongside criticism, Cooper writes food news pieces that track significant shifts in London dining, from ambitious new projects to global brands arriving in the city. Her coverage includes stories on chef Masayoshi Takayama’s planned London restaurant, expanding the influence of his New York sushi institution Masa to the UK and highlighting what that means for high-end Japanese dining in London. She also reports on accolades and rankings, such as a five-star London restaurant being named the best in the world, using those moments to explore how international recognition intersects with the local scene.
Her news beat extends to distinctive formats and locations, including a brand new rooftop food market built on top of a major west London landmark, where the architecture and setting are integral to how the venue operates. In these pieces, she treats openings as part of a broader urban story: how unused or unusual spaces become places to eat, and how new operators position themselves within London’s crowded hospitality landscape. The tone is brisk and informative, with clear attention to what is new, why it matters and what kind of audience each opening is likely to attract.
Citywide Guides and Lists
Cooper contributes to and helps shape citywide lists and guides that organise London’s restaurants into clear, practical categories.
Her work feeds into Time Out’s “London restaurant reviews” hub and major round-ups of London’s best restaurants, where venues are selected and ordered to reflect both quality and the way people actually plan meals out in the city. These guides often draw on her ongoing review work, ensuring that new openings and under-the-radar spots are surfaced alongside long-standing favourites.
In guide format, she writes in concise capsules that foreground the core appeal of each restaurant: what it serves, what kind of evening it offers and why it stands out on a crowded list. The perspective is editorial rather than purely descriptive, with clear judgements about which places warrant inclusion and how different styles of dining - from tasting menus to casual sharing plates - fit into a balanced citywide selection.
Broader Cultural and Media Background
Before taking on her current role, Cooper built a long career as an editor, writer and broadcast journalist, working across a wide range of print and online publications.
She has written for national newspapers and magazines including The Guardian, The Independent, the Evening Standard, Condé Nast Traveller, NME and the BBC, among others, giving her a broad grounding in music, film and culture as well as food. This background informs her approach to dining coverage, treating restaurants as part of a wider cultural landscape rather than in isolation.
Her public profiles underline this mix of experience, presenting her as a specialist in food and drink who also understands how stories play across different media formats. That combination of restaurant expertise, news sense and cultural context shapes a body of work that is notably more editorial and city-focused than that of a generic entertainment reporter.
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