Welcome to our weekly digest of all that’s happening in London’s food and drink scene.
Inside this week: kebabs, breathable booze and high tables
Kebab fest
A festival dedicated to the humble kebab is coming to London. The rather wonderfully named Abra Kebabra will run in Dalston’s MC Motors on 1 August, bringing together the kebab offerings of five barbecue-centric restaurants: Berber & Q, Chick’n Sours, Lucky Chip, Mangal 1 and Smokehouse. It will run from 3-11pm, with live music all day and Turkish-inspired cocktails flowing from Dalston bar Ruby’s. Tickets cost £25 and include a kebab from each restaurant — yep, that’s five kebabs — and a cocktail. Tickets are available here.
Breathable booze
It’s been a little while since we’ve heard from jellymongers and culinary mavericks Bompas & Parr, but the pair are back with another madcap creation this month: breathable alcohol. Their Alcoholic Architecture event will launch on 31 July and run until early next year in a basement near Borough Market. It will include a ‘cocktail cloud’ composed of spirits and mixer (at a ratio of 1:3) and “made using powerful humidifiers to super-saturate the air”. The alcohol, we’re told, will be able to enter your bloodstream through your lungs and eyeballs meaning you needn’t even bother swallowing. Tickets (starting at £10), details and sciency explanations are available online.
Two hotels are Zetter than one
A second branch of Clerkenwell’s Zetter Townhouse hotel will arrive in Marylebone next month. Included will be a bar — Seymour' s Parlour, named after fictional character ‘wicked uncle Seymour’ — with cocktails created by 69 Colebrooke Row’s Tony Conigliaro and a menu of platters and light snacks from Grain Store chef Bruno Loubet. Meanwhile at the original location, pop-up Grain Store Unleashed will close at the end of the month to be replaced by a new, simplified all-day dining concept.
Top table
Taking high-rise dining to a new level, you’ll be able to tuck into a meal on a table suspended 25 metres above St Katherine Docks in September, as London In The Sky returns. The table, which can seat 22 strapped-in guests, will be hoisted into the air so that diners can take in the views around Tower Bridge as they eat meals from a series of top chefs including Tom Aikens, Ceviche’s Martin Morales and Duck & Waffle’s Dan Doherty. Bookings are available online from tomorrow (17 July) for dates between 17 and 30 September, but prices are fairly lofty themselves: they start at £50 for breakfasts and rise to £200 for dinners.
New openings
With the relaunch of plush Hyde Park Corner hotel The Lanesborough came a new French restaurant this week in the form of Céleste — let’s hope the atmosphere is more merry than Mary. Also new this week is truffle and burger spot Sackville’s in Mayfair, London’s second branch of ramen restaurant Ippudo in Canary Wharf, and the first wine bar from importers Humble Grape in Battersea.
Tomorrow marks the launch of Paradise Garage in Bethnal Green — the latest opening from the team behind Clapham’s The Dairy and The Manor – and a third branch of tapas restaurant Barrafina on Drury Lane.
Next week will see the opening of all-day pizza restaurant Pizza Buzz near Liverpool Street, a branch of Northern chain Red’s True Barbecue in Shoreditch and a branch of buzzy New York restaurant and nightlife spot Hotel Chantelle in Marylebone — it will be hoping to compete with nearby Chiltern Firehouse for celebrity clientèle.
We round-up London’s biggest food and drink news stories and the latest new and upcoming restaurant openings in this handy digest every Thursday afternoon. See our previous editions.
Also see:
The Best Food And Drink In London — recommendations of where to enjoy the capital’s top food and drink, categorised by cuisine, food type and more.
New Restaurant Reviews — our views on London’s latest openings.
More food and drink on Londonist.
