Dining in Seven Dials continues its upward trajectory, as the people behind long-time Soho favourite Bocca di Lupo follow in Marcus Wareing and Russell Norman’s footsteps to open a restaurant there. Jacob Kenedy and Victor Hugo, of the lauded tapas-style Italian, will launch their second London outpost, Vico, in late-August right next door to Norman’s Ape & Bird gastropub on Shaftesbury Avenue.
The new venture will take over the site of a former Pizza Hut, a massive 4,000 square foot site – quite a change from their much smaller Archer Street original which is “always jammed”. It sounds as though this larger operation, spread over two floors, will – rather in the style of Wareing’s Tredwell’s – be a slightly cheaper, more casual version of the duo’s Bocca di Lupo offering. The food will offer accessible and affordable Italian street food, alongside award-winning Gelupo gelato.
The offering at what the pair are calling a ‘piazza-eria’ (a restaurant with the convivial atmosphere of an Italian piazza) will be inexpensive and intensely casual – cutlery is frowned upon. Everything is made for eating while walking down the street – pizza by the slice, a myriad of polpette and arancini, fried tidbits of Mediterranean seafood, tranches of torte salate etc.
There will be, for the most part, no menu – chefs will be cooking at whim what the markets, farms, hunters and fishermen deliver. To drink there will be only house wine by the carafe (125, 250 & 500ml sizes) alongside spritz, beer and soft drinks.
At the front of the building a large Gelupo counter will serve gelato and a selection of cakes and fried desserts, alongside Gelupo’s speciality coffees (zabaione, nocciola, affogato). Gelupo Cambridge Circus will open to the public from 3 August.
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