Jago, a relaxed restaurant with Southern European, Middle Eastern and Ashkenazi influences, will open at Second Home, 68-80 Hanbury Street in Shoreditch, in mid-November.
A first venture for Head Chef, Louis Solley (formerly Head Chef of Ottolenghi, Notting Hill), Hugo Thurston (formerly General Manager of Morito) and successful entrepreneur Vinny Burke, Jago takes its name from the colloquial title given to an area stretching from Shoreditch High Street to Spitalfields in the 1860s.
At this time the area was a notorious slum full of thieves, prostitutes and gin palaces, made popular in its namesake novel by Arthur Morrison, A Child of the Jago.
Hugo and Vinny have been friends for 20 years and met their co-owner Louis merely days after finding the perfect opportunity for a solo venture. The three immediately bonded over a round of Gibson cocktails and the discovery that they shared a vision to create a relaxed and informal restaurant – of course with excellent food and drinks – but decidedly unselfconscious and conducive to great times.
Speaking of the opening, Hugo comments, “This is the chance for us to create the restaurant we have always wanted to go to but which has never existed. To be part of the creative Shoreditch community is a privilege and we want to be that place where, when you’re in the area, you say – ‘oh let’s go there.”
The menus reflect the expertise and training of the co-owners, with Southern European and Middle Eastern influences at the fore, but Louis also brings his East-London Jewish roots to bear on an individual style of food that emphasises pleasure, generosity, and bright, bold flavours. Louis states, “We’re quite simply drawing on our skills and our passions to make food we’re delighted to eat and proud to serve.”
Despite the revolution that London’s coffee culture has undergone in the last ten years, there are still only a handful or restaurants taking the same seasonal approach to coffee that they do to food and wine. AGM Jonathan Robson will bring all his knowledge and expertise to bear on the Jago coffee offering, working with local roasters such as Workshop to bring in fresh crop beans from Ethiopia, Costa Rica and Kenya on both espresso and filter.
Jago takes pride of place at the front of Second Home, London’s newest creative hub; a network of innovative and cutting edge businesses curated by founders Rohan Silva and Sam Aldenton. Designed by award winning Spanish architects Selgas Cano, the dining tables are situated in an eye-catching ‘greenhouse bubble’ that extends beyond the facade of the building, with flowering trees planted on the street, draping their branches over the glass.
The tear-drop shaped bar, clad in pewter, will offer a distinctive drinking-dining experience with a unique spectrum of views. Guests can take in the theatre of service, gaze through the conservatory out onto the urban scenes of Hanbury Street, or up through the central arc of the restaurant to the highest point of Second Home’s architecture. Curving mezzanine floors around the restaurant’s outer arc serve to create more intimate lower-ceilinged areas underneath the resident companies’ studios.
