New Restaurants in Bucharest to Know in 2026
Bucharest's best new tables share one instinct: take Romanian cooking — borș, lovage, polenta, the flavours of a grandmother's kitchen — and rebuild it with technique learned in the world's best rooms. The result, across 2025, is a run of confident openings led by chefs who left the marquee kitchens of Europe to cook something of their own, at home.
What follows are the openings worth a table, grouped by the kind of evening they suit. Each was verified as open at the time of writing.
Romanian cooking, rebuilt
The flagship is éto – cuisine of now (Str. Viitorului 32, opened summer 2025), where chef Sorin Stoica — who cooked at Copenhagen's Noma and the two-Michelin-star Jordnær — opened his own restaurant inside a restored 1912 Neoromanian villa. It runs à la carte alongside a narrative tasting menu; the current one, "HORA," traces the cuisines of Romania's minorities. It's the most serious fine-dining debut the city has seen in years, and it grew out of Stoica's earlier pop-up dinners rather than a marketing plan.
In Floreasca, Cambun (Str. Constantin Aricescu 42, opened October 2025) is the solo debut of Andrei Chelaru, once named a "Great Chef of Tomorrow" by Gault & Millau Romania — modern urban Romanian cooking built strictly on local ingredients, with borș reductions and lovage worked through fermentation into a concise, balanced menu. And out east in Vitan, STRĂBUN (Calea Dudești 101A, opened July 2025) works a warmer register — "food like in the old days, but better," seasonal comfort cooking across several rooms, from the team that rebranded out of BEAUTYFOOD.
Bistro and bottle
Two rooms for a looser evening. Must Bistro (Str. Biserica Amzei 29, near Piața Romană, opened mid-summer 2025) is chef Cătălin Bejenariu's own place after a run at Kané — international comfort cooking and contemporary mixology inside a near-century-old building with its Art Deco masonry kept intact.
A few minutes away, DeSoi Cișmigiu (Bd. Regina Elisabeta 38, opened October 2025) takes the homegrown DeSoi brand into the ground floor of Hotel Cișmigiu, in the old Gambrinus brewery: a hybrid of bistro, grocery and wine shop, with a communal table, a "wine library" of some four hundred labels, and a brunch-to-dinner menu from head chef Mugur Rusnac, trained in two-Michelin-star kitchens abroad.
A sharing room in a storied house
For a table with an occasion attached, BUN Restaurant (Str. C.A. Rosetti 37, opened October 2025) sits inside the restored Casa Sabina Brătianu near Piața Romană, with interiors by architect Corvin Cristian. The cooking is Mediterranean and international small plates built for sharing — clear, comfortable flavours that stop short of nostalgia — plus a weekend prosecco brunch. It's the polished, design-led addition to a fast-filling central cluster.
How to keep up
A list like this is accurate the week it's written and slowly drifts after. The point of Better Taste is that the Bucharest catalogue is curated and kept current, so you carry the whole edit in your pocket rather than bookmarking a post — filter it by restaurant or wine bar, and save the rooms you mean to get to.
Start with the openings above, then browse the full Bucharest catalogue.