What comes to mind when you fill it with impressions of Brick Lane? Chances are Italy and its culture doesn’t get a look in amongst blurry memories of late night bagels and early morning scenesters clogging up one of London’s preeminent districts of, depending on your persuasion, multicultural integration or urban tat. Like much of any city, the area speaks too many confused languages for anyone to make sense of it, but that shows no signs of troubling the hoardes of international bright young things congregating there like moths to a flame.
Then ask a man – almost any, given we’re pretty much as transparent as the next – what he’s fond of in life. Apart from his mother, beer will crop up high on most lists, so when Peroni oddly chose to attempt to replicate the debonair nature of Italy in an area sorely lacking such qualities in the shape of The House of Peroni, then it appears that the male dream has come true, for what man could resist a house full of his second favourite thing in life? For services to drinking this city serves us well with pubs, objects as inseperable from our culture as grand piazzas are from Italy’s, but naturally Peroni have set their sights a little higher than pitching up with an improved version of The Dog and Duck stocking nowt but their own lubricant.
So it is then that this is a concept offering in the shape of a pop-up. As soon as one pop-up dismantles another will, sure enough, immediately be along with an even more far-fetched notion of why their fortnight long presence will be the latest industry game changer. Attempting to distill the Italian way of life and particularly its reliance upon the piazza is an idea that easily fills a press release but not the space set aside to achieving it. Which is a shame, as the effort cannot be faulted, but despite the help of Sicilian chef Accursio Craparo, one of the few from that particular area to be awarded a Michelin star, and mixologist Simone Caporale, assistant head bartender at the Langham hotel’s Artesian bar, the gourmet dishes served at the private dining experience did not quite match our expectations of such names. Experimental though was the presentation of the food and the Peroni-based infusion drinks that accompanied the whole and which provided pleasure, a wonderful reason to chat to your table neighbour and justification to the brand.
Paul Stewart and NoéMie Schwaller