What Should a Restaurant Press Release Include for a New Opening?
Aug 15th 2026
A press release for a restaurant opening needs eight things: the name and the exact address, the opening date, who is behind it and what they did before, what the food actually is, the format and cover count, the price range, one usable quote, and a set of images an editor can publish without asking you for anything else. Everything after that is decoration, and most of it gets cut.
Most templates online give you a shape and no judgement about what goes inside it. A London opening gets written up because someone at Hot Dinners, The Caterer, Propel, Square Meal or a section desk read an email on their phone and thought it was interesting. The document has to survive that reading. Our PR team sends these most weeks. This is the version that gets opened.
The subject line does more work than the release
An editor scans a subject line at speed, usually on a phone, usually while writing something else. It needs to contain the name, what it is, where it is, and when. “Exciting new concept coming to East London” tells them nothing. “Marla, Levantine charcoal grill, opens on Kingsland Road 14 October” tells them everything, and they can decide in a second whether it is for them.
The first line of the body then repeats the same information in a full sentence, because a lot of listings desks will lift that sentence more or less intact. Write it assuming it gets published as-is. A listings desk clearing forty openings a month will take the easiest available sentence. Make sure it is yours.
What actually goes in, in order
Name, address, postcode and date. The full address, including the postcode. Listings are built on postcodes, and an editor who has to look yours up is an editor doing your job for you.
Who is behind it. Founder or chef, and what they did before. This is the single most useful line in the document, because it is how an editor works out whether the opening is a story or an entry. A first solo restaurant from someone who ran a good kitchen elsewhere is a story. A third site from an established group is a story of a different shape, and worth saying plainly.
What the food is. In specifics. “Whole turbot over charcoal, flatbreads baked to order, a short list of Lebanese and Greek wine” is a restaurant. “Elevated modern British small plates with a seasonal focus” is four hundred restaurants.
Format and size. Covers, whether there is a bar, whether it takes bookings or walks in, service hours. Trade titles need this. Consumer titles use it to work out who the piece is for.
Price. Starters, mains, the average spend per head. Leaving this out is read as an attempt to hide it, and every editor asks anyway.
One quote worth printing. More on this below.
The practical block. Opening hours, booking link, website, social handles, and a named press contact with a mobile number.
Images. High resolution, already shot, sent as a link that does not expire in seven days.
The quote is where most releases die
A founder quote that says the team is thrilled to bring their passion to the local community is a quote about nothing. It will be deleted, and the deletion costs you the one place in the document where a human is allowed to speak.
A usable quote does one of two things. It explains a decision, or it says something slightly against interest. “We took the site because the extraction was already in and we could not have afforded to put it in ourselves” is a real sentence a founder might say, and a journalist will print it because it is true and nobody else says it. Aim for that register. If the quote could be attributed to any other opening in London that week, rewrite it.
An annotated example
The release below is invented. Marla does not exist. The shape is the one we use on real launches.
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Marla, a Levantine charcoal grill, opens on Kingsland Road on Tuesday 14 October 2026
The headline carries name, category, street and date. An editor who reads nothing else can still file it correctly.
Marla opens at 219 Kingsland Road, London E2 8AA on Tuesday 14 October. It is the first solo restaurant from chef Dalia Haddad, who spent six years at Ashen in Shoreditch and two years cooking in Beirut. Forty covers, an open charcoal hearth, and a menu built around whole fish and vegetables cooked over embers.
One sentence, publishable unedited. Name, address, date, who, what, size. This is the paragraph that ends up in the monthly openings roundups.
The menu is short and changes with what the fish market has. Whole bream, turbot and red mullet are cooked over oak and served whole for the table. Vegetables get the same treatment: hispi cabbage burnt at the edges with tahini and green chilli, leeks in a burnt butter and lemon. Flatbreads are baked to order in a wood oven set into the pass. Starters £6 to £11, mains £16 to £34 for a whole fish to share, average spend around £45 a head with a glass of wine.
Specific, priced, and legible to a reader deciding whether to book. Prices go in the body. A footnote at the end of a release does not get read.
The forty-cover room is on two levels, with ten seats at the hearth counter. Half the tables are held for walk-ins. Marla is open Tuesday to Saturday, 5.30pm to 11pm, with lunch from Thursday.
The operational block. Trade titles need it, and “half the tables held for walk-ins” is the kind of detail that gets a restaurant into a “where to eat without booking” piece six months later.
“I wanted a hearth and forty seats and nothing else to hide behind,” says Haddad. “Everything comes off one fire, which means when it goes wrong there is nowhere to put it.”
A quote that describes a decision and admits a risk. It is printable because a person is talking.
Four hundred words. That is the length. A restaurant opening release that runs to two pages is a release with a founder’s biography in it that nobody asked for.
The things that go wrong
The adjective pile. Vibrant, elevated, authentic, curated, unique. Every one of these is a word used in place of a fact. If the release still works with the restaurant’s name swapped out, you have written a mood board.
The 400MB WeTransfer that expires on Friday. Editors file at odd hours and come back to things weeks later. Use a permanent link. Include both landscape and portrait crops, food and interiors, one usable shot of the founder, and credit the photographer in the file names.
The embargo nobody agreed to. An embargo only exists once a journalist has agreed to it. Printing the word at the top of a document does nothing on its own. Marking a release “embargoed until 6am” and sending it cold to sixty people is a good way to have it broken and a worse way to introduce yourself. Agree embargoes individually, with the titles that matter.
Sending it to everyone at once. The exclusive is still the strongest card you have. One title gets the story first, everyone else gets it the morning it goes live. Sending the same email to a bcc list of 200 is how a release ends up in nobody’s paper.
When to send it
Around twelve weeks out is the point at which a runway becomes possible. Monthly print and glossy titles are working that far ahead, and a review needs the restaurant to be open and steady, which is another six weeks after that.
The sequencing we run on launches is roughly this. Twelve weeks out, quiet conversations with two or three titles about an exclusive. Eight weeks, the release goes to trade. Four weeks, listings and openings roundups. Two weeks, preview dinners for critics and the creators who are actually going to eat there. Opening week, the consumer push. Then the awkward gap in week three, when the coverage has run and the bookings have not caught up, which is the week most operators panic and the week the plan needs to already exist.
Does a press release still matter if people ask AI where to eat
More than it did. MeMo’s research into AI discovery found that 84% of citations in AI answers come from earned media and third-party mentions, against 0.3% from paid ads. Brands are around six and a half times more likely to be cited through an external source than through their own website.
In practice a model never reads your release. It reads the listings entry, the trade write-up and the roundup that came out of it. A well-written release seeds a dozen pages carrying the same facts, and consistency across those pages is what makes a model confident enough to name you. A vague release produces vague coverage, and vague coverage does not survive being cross-referenced.
The release now has a second audience it did not have five years ago, and that audience is unusually literal. Say the neighbourhood, the cuisine, the price range and the format in plain words, because those are the terms people are typing into ChatGPT when they ask where to eat.
Frequently asked questions
What should a restaurant press release include for a new opening?
The name and full address, the opening date, who is behind it and their background, a specific description of the food, the format and cover count, the price range, one printable quote, and high-resolution images on a link that does not expire. Around 400 words.
How long should a restaurant press release be?
One page, 350 to 450 words. Anything longer has been written to please the founder.
When should I send a restaurant opening press release?
Trade around eight weeks out, listings and consumer titles around four. Exclusive conversations start earlier, about twelve weeks before you open.
Who should I send a restaurant press release to?
Trade first, so The Caterer, Propel, Restaurant and Big Hospitality. Then the London listings and openings roundups, so Hot Dinners, Square Meal, Time Out, The Infatuation. Then the section desks and critics, individually and by name. Twenty considered emails will do more than two hundred.
What images should I send with a restaurant press release?
Six to ten shots, high resolution, both landscape and portrait. Interiors, two or three dishes, one of the founder or chef. Photographer credited in the file names. Send a permanent link, because seven-day transfers expire before the piece runs.
Should the press release include prices?
Yes. Starters and mains, and an average spend per head. Every editor asks, and omitting it reads as evasion.
Do I need a PR agency to write it?
To write it, no. Plenty of operators write a good release. What an agency is actually for is knowing which three people to send it to, and having those three people open it.
Where MeMo fits
MeMo runs PR and influencer, social media and digital marketing for hospitality brands from London and the UAE. We have run launches including Taverna Ermou, Senza Fondo in Hoxton and the Roti King collaboration with Morley’s, where the press moment, the creator content and the paid all landed in the same week.
If you are opening in the next six months and want the runway planned properly, get in touch. If you would sooner write it yourself, the template above is yours. The writing is the easy half.