New Malden Food Hygiene: 4 of Borough's 5 Zero Ratings

Four of the five zero food hygiene ratings in the Kingston borough are in New Malden. The fifth is in Kingston town centre. Nowhere else in the borough has one.

That is from the Food Standards Agency’s live register, read in full on 5 September 2026. It lists 1,441 establishments under Kingston Council’s food safety team, of which 1,269 currently carry a numeric rating. Most of the borough does well. 926 of those, 73%, hold the top rating of 5.

The 46 that are rated below 3 are not spread evenly.

The gap between New Malden and Surbiton

A rating of 2 means “some improvement is necessary”, 1 means “major improvement is necessary” and 0 means “urgent improvement is necessary”, in the FSA’s own words. Anything from 3 upwards is “generally satisfactory” or better.

New Malden has half as many rated premises as Kingston upon Thames and the same number rated below 3. Against Surbiton, which has 77 more rated premises, it has more than four times as many.

The obvious objection is that towns hold different kinds of business, and a corner shop is inspected against different risks from a nursery kitchen. So we ran it again on restaurants, cafés and takeaways alone, which is the category most people mean when they ask about hygiene ratings. The gap got wider.

• New Malden: 10 of 101 rated below 3, or 9.9%
• Kingston upon Thames: 9 of 253, or 3.6%
• Chessington: 1 of 55, or 1.8%
• Surbiton: 0 of 132

Not one restaurant, café or takeaway in Surbiton currently holds a rating below 3. In New Malden roughly one in ten does.

The five zeros

An “urgent improvement is necessary” rating is rare. The register carries five in the borough. Each is listed with the date of the inspection that produced it.

Two things follow from those dates.

The register records a new rating pending for Kang Nam, which means a re-inspection has been carried out or requested and the published rating is due to change. None of the other four carries that flag.

And the Tree Stone Butchers rating is exactly a year old today. A food hygiene rating stands until the next inspection, so an old rating tells you what an inspector found on one day, not what a kitchen is like now. Businesses rated below 5 can ask for a free re-inspection once they have made improvements, and in England the council should carry it out within six months of the request if it is made early, or within three months if it is made later. None of that has produced a new published rating at four of these five addresses.

Kingston Wire has not approached these businesses for comment. Under the scheme each has a right of reply, which the council publishes alongside the rating, and a right to appeal in writing within 21 days of being told its rating. No reply is currently published against any of the five.

What the inspectors published in August

August was a good month by the register’s own standard. Twenty-eight ratings were published for borough premises:

• 22 rated 5, very good
• 4 rated 4, good
• 1 rated 3, generally satisfactory: Kingston News, 58 Fife Road, Kingston, on 4 August
• 1 rated 2, some improvement necessary: New Malden Fish Bar, 159 South Lane, New Malden, on 6 August

Sixteen of the 28 were at Kingston upon Thames addresses. The fives include The Canbury Arms on Canbury Park Road, the Travelodge on Wheatfield Way, Bill’s on Riverside Walk, the catering at Kingston Hospital run by Mitie, and the holiday club kitchen at Castle Hill Primary School in Chessington.

What it means for you

Every business that serves food in the borough is inspected by Kingston Council’s food safety team, and every rating is public and free to check.

• Look it up before you order. The register is searchable by name or postcode at ratings.food.gov.uk. It is the same database this article was built from.
• Check the date, not just the number. A 5 from 2019 and a 5 from last month are shown identically. The date sits on the business’s page.
• A sticker in the window is voluntary in England. Unlike Wales and Northern Ireland, English businesses do not have to display their rating, so an absent sticker is not itself a bad sign. Ask, or look it up.
• 102 borough premises are awaiting their first inspection, and 70 are exempt, which usually means very low risk such as a newsagent selling only wrapped goods. Neither group carries a number.
• Report a problem with food or premises to the council’s food safety team at food.safety@kingston.gov.uk, the address the FSA holds for the authority.

If you want to see how the borough’s kitchens sit alongside everything else happening locally, our Kingston planning news page tracks what is being built and where, and the Kingston Wire business directory lists what is trading in New Malden now.

Sources

• Food Standards Agency ratings API, local authority 108 (Kingston-Upon-Thames), the authority record giving 1,441 establishments and the food safety team’s contact address.
• The full establishment list for authority 108, read from the same API on 5 September 2026, for every rating, rating date, address, business type and pending-rating flag quoted here. All counts and percentages in this article were calculated from that download.
• Food Hygiene Rating Scheme guidance for businesses for what each rating means, the 21 day right of appeal, the right of reply and the re-inspection timescales.
• Food hygiene ratings search for the public-facing register readers can check themselves.

Ratings change. A rating published here reflects the register on 5 September 2026 and may have been superseded by a later inspection.