A new restaurant is coming to Putney High Street, taking over the former Bill’s site, and promising sushi, ramen and possibly karaoke.
Ealing-based Japanese restaurant Ta Ke Sushi has applied for permission to put up illuminated signs at 146-148 Putney High Street, indicating its arrival and providing welcome relief for residents who have walked past the empty unit for years since Bill’s closed in 2023.
Ta Ke Sushi has traded for years on Uxbridge Road in Ealing, where restaurant guide Hardens describes it as a good-value Japanese local “favoured by Japanese expats”. Reviews point to a strong following among west London’s Japanese and Hong Kong communities, and the move would be one of the biggest additions to Putney restaurants in years.
No opening date for the Putney site has been announced, and it is not yet confirmed whether karaoke will be part of the offer.
Nothing at street level identifies the new tenant yet. The hoarding across the shopfront is painted with murals of riverside scenes and carries no brand name.
The arrival resolves a question left open in December, when we reported that Bill’s was quietly reassigning the lease to an unnamed restaurant chain, days after we briefly thought the chain was returning itself. Bill’s traded at the site for around a decade until 2023, when it closed as part of a national cull of underperforming branches.
“This is not going to reopen as Bill’s,” Nicola Grant, chief executive of town centre business group Positively Putney, said at the time. “They have been looking to reassign the lease and have nearly completed a number of times over the last year.”
Ta Ke Sushi Ltd director Jiqing Xie made the signage application, giving the Putney address as the company’s own. The planning file does not state the legal arrangement between Bill’s and the new operator, such as whether the lease has been transferred or sublet.
Consent for the signs is sought until 31 January 2032. The application was formally accepted by the council on 19 June, after an earlier submission was rejected for missing a required drawing.
The main sign reads “Ta Ke たけ SUSHI” beside a green bamboo emblem, in gold on black, while a second board more than five metres wide is written entirely in Japanese characters. A third image submitted with the application shows a sign reading “KTV”, the East Asian term for private karaoke rooms, though nothing in the paperwork confirms the offering. The unit was one of the anchors of the empty shops clustering at both ends of the high street that we mapped in December.
What happens next
A decision on the signs is due by mid-August under the council’s standard eight-week target. We will update this story once an opening date and a karaoke answer are known.
After a summer in which one long-empty unit’s fate was a metal box, the other big dark frontage is set to get tables, a kitchen and five and a half years of signage consent. Days after Casa Manolo hung up its knife, the high street’s ledger gets an entry in the other column.
