Floating food... London's dining scene takes to the water
Ahoy there! Messing about near water on a sunny day is certainly one of life’s great pleasures but when there is food involved it is even more fun. Isn’t it lucky, then, that a small army of London feeders are floating down London’s rivers serving everything from vodka and beer to goat curry, tacos and sandwiches?
It began last month when the Seychelles-inspired Vinn Goute held its first pop-up dinner on a west London barge. As the sun set over Kew Bridge, people from other boats popped over to join the guests, who shared plates of smoked fish salad, red snapper, goat or octopus curry and lentil fricassee.
“It was brilliant,” laughs Vinn Goute’s co-founder Kristofer Adelaide, who is planning another outing. “The weather was great … We came up against the common problems such as there not being enough electricity — and we didn’t know whether it was going to rain. But we brought a 10m gazebo and had a musician. We tried to time it with high tide — otherwise we’d have been in the trees!”
Soon afterwards, news trickled onto Twitter that a “Mojito and good times boat” called Wu Cruise had launched in east London. Run by Kerri Maisey, owner and founder of Dalston’s Ridley Road Market Bar, there is a Friday-to-Sunday bar menu of cocktails, Red Stripe and Butler’s gin — whose founder also owns a boat here — while sharing food includes Picco Salumi’s cured meats on E5 Bakehouse bread with tacos taking over next month.
“Really, the bar gets a bit slow during the summer as lots of people are going to festivals and drinking outside — and I wanted a summer project,” explains Maisey, who has taken out a one-year lease on the boat which moves locations weekly. This weekend it will travel to Broadway Market and then to Camden and Islington.
Not far away is Lorraine Fox, who two days ago took up residence in her “organic cruising café” known as the Sandwich Barge — currently moored near Angel — which she has been running for the past five years. Here you can eat homemade sandwiches, salads and puddings.
Then last week creative London foodsters Bompas & Parr constructed an installation called a “floating pineapple island” on the pond in front of Kew Gardens’ palm house. The challenge is to find the secret banana grotto beneath the pineapple.
Rumour has it that a yacht sponsored by John Walker & Sons will be arriving in London later this summer to celebrate the company’s new triple malt. But if it’s vodka you want, William Borrell, creator of Vestal Vodka, decided recently that he wanted to educate his bar managers about “field-to-bottle”. Thus he installed his bar manager on board a Polish-made boat that Borrell used to live on and between Wednesday and Sunday you can try out the “Disco Volante” sipping on crafted cocktails. “Londoners rarely get to glimpse their city from the Canal — and it is magical,” he says.
