Things to look forward to in 2023 part two
Ten restaurants and ten exhibitions to get excited about
Welcome to the first LiB of 2023. As promised, the first issue of the year is a follow up to the last issue of 2022, as it’s the second part of our pick of the restaurants, exhibitions and shows to look forward to over the next 12 months.
Here’s part one in case it got lost in the festive mix:
Today you’re getting a list of ten restaurants and ten exhibitions to get excited about. If you think we’ve missed anything out then please let us know in the comments.
P.S. this is a long one so, if you're reading this in Gmail, it might get cut off. You can read the full version here.
10 restaurants to look forward to
You haven’t got long to wait for the first restaurant on the list. Sichuan Fry will be opening this Thursday on Westgate Street in Hackney. From the same team behind the wonderful Dumpling Shack, Sichuan Fry is all about those spicy fried chicken sandwiches that were previously tested out in their Spitalfields Market location (sometimes causing queues of up to two hours long).
The new place was due to open in October, but problems with the electricity supply meant they had to delay it to this week. Get down there on day one and you can get 50% off your spicy butty.
Rambutan is the other, much-anticipated and slightly-delayed London opening that should finally arrive in 2023. Cynthia Shanmugalingam’s homage to Sri Lankan Tamil cooking was due to open its doors in Borough market in October (following a short stint serving ice cream over the summer), but the date got pushed back until February ‘23.
If the success of the eponymous cookbook is anything to go by, then people won’t mind waiting a few more weeks for the promised “diaspora dream,” that we’re told will feature dishes like crispy hopper pancakes, fried vadai doughnuts and black coconut pineapple curry.
Alberto Landgraf is the chef behind the two-Michelin-starred Oteque restaurant in Rio de Janeiro, (recently ranked number 47 in the list of the World’s 50 Best Restaurants) and sometime in the next couple of months he’s bringing his talents to the West End with Bossa, a “modern Brazilian” restaurant on Vere street (just off Oxfords Street and right under the Brazilian consulate).
All we know about Bossa so far is that it won’t be a replica of Oteque, but expect it to have picked up a star or two by this time next year.
Thai recipes made with British ingredients. That’s the elevator pitch for Anglo Thai, the new restaurant by John and Desiree Chantarasak that’s expected to open on Eastcastle Street sometime this summer. It’s a concept that’s been well tested for a number of years, via pop ups in places like Cornerstone and lockdown meal kits that introduced us to the delights of Northern Thai hot dogs.
There’ll likely be a few supper clubs and soft opening events before the proper opening in the summer, so keep an eye on their Instagram account for updates.
No matter what you think about the Big Mamma group, you can’t deny they’ve had a pretty big impact on the way London eats over the past few years. On the back of the phenomenal success of Gloria, Circolo Popolare and Ave Mario, the Italian-obsessed French duo of Tigrane Seydoux and Victor Lugger are bringing their OTT trattoria concept to Kensington High Street sometime this month.
Jacuzzi will be a four-storey “antique villa” housed in a former bank, that will include “a Sicilian mezzanine with retractable roof and glitterball disco toilets in the basement” so you can play out your White Lotus fantasies while loading up on caviar pizetta, lobster risotto and truffle pasta that’s “served in a 4kg wheel of pecorino”.
There’s no website yet, but keep an eye on the BM Instagram for updates.
You might remember that, in September of last year, the restaurant group Taqueria threatened Michelle Salazar de la Rocha and Sam Napier of Netil Market’s Sonora Taqueria, with legal action over their use of the word ‘taqueria’. The pair beat that ridiculous move (backed up by an online petition, which received 13,000 signatures) and have since gone on to announce that their first permanent restaurant will be opening in Stoke Newington sometime this year.
After a Kickstarter campaign raised almost £75,000 for the renovation of the site, work has begun on Sonora Taqueira, which they are promising will be “the BEST taquería in the city”.
Not a restaurant exactly, but still very much looked forward to, is the opening of Eric’s bakery on Upland Road in East Dulwich. The anticipation comes from the fact that the talent behind Eric’s isn’t actually a dude called Eric; it’s the brilliant Helen Evans, who was last found at Flor Bakery in Spa Terminus, which was widely recognised as one of the best bakeries in London until it closed a couple of months ago.
After crowdfunding fifteen grand to buy equipment and furniture, Evans and her team are now busy getting the space ready for a March opening, when they’ll be offering “sourdough breads and breakfast pastries, alongside topped focacce, doughnuts, other sweet and savoury treats and coffee.”
Tomos Parry, the head chef and co owner of Brat, is opening his second central London location in “early 2023” and it’s going to be in that big old building on Beak Street, where Byron used to be.
A year ago Eater was reporting that the new place would be “similar” to Brat, but that it would have a different name. Since then though, most reports we’ve read have referred to the new site as ‘Brat Soho’. Honestly, we don’t care what its called, as long as they’re installing a big wood-fired grill to put chunks of meat and whole fish on.
No updates yet on Brat’s Instagram, but there should be some news soon (the original plan was to open the place in 2022, but Parry is famous for his perfectionism).
Socca is billed as a French-Mediterranean bistro that “pays homage to the coastal towns and flavours of the French Riviera”. Opening ‘soon’ on South Audley Street, the restaurant has Claude Bosi (formerly of Bibendum) in the kitchen serving a menu based around “family-style, traditional, home-cooked dishes made for sharing;” and he’s backed by the restaurateur Samyukta Nair Nair, who has apparently installed a load of leather banquettes and timber paneling.
It’s not exactly new or innovative, but if you can sit in there for hours, eating oysters and cheese and drinking good red wine, then who needs innovation?
Staying in the West End, Kapara isn’t so much a restaurant as it is a ‘dining experience’ with Bala Baya’s chef Eran Tibi landing in the enormous Ilona Rose House on Charing Cross Road and installing a huge terrace for 50, a “Tel-Aviv-inspired all-day/night dining room that seats 70,” a stage for live music and “subterranean private dining”.
The Instagram account leans very heavily into the debauchery and the ‘endless pleasure’ angle of the place, but the food should be pretty good too, seeing as chef Tibi learned his craft in the kitchens of Le Cordon Bleu and Ottolenghi.
Kapara is due to open in ‘early 2023’ and you can sign up to their newsletter for ‘launch party secrets’.
10 exhibitions to look forward to
Alright, on to the arty stuff; and let’s start with the big names. First up: Hockney.
At the end of this month David Hockney comes to The Lightroom, the ‘revolutionary’ art space in King’s Cross (made possible by Sir Len Blavatnik - more on him here) with Bigger & Closer (not smaller & further away). We’re always a little sceptical of these exhibitions that use projection mapping to ‘immerse’ you in the work of an artist (and the reviews would seem to back up that scepticism), but if anyone can do this right, it’s Hockney.
The 85-year-old has been playing with new technologies and media for decades now, and while this show is more a retrospective (“a personal journey through sixty years of his art”) it does give you a chance to see work like ‘Wagner Drive’ which you wouldn’t be able to experience short of getting a flight to Santa Monica. Plus, there’s a specially composed score by Nico Muhly.
We’ve done delayed restaurants, now let’s deal with delayed big-name art exhibitions.
Marina Abramović’s first major UK exhibition was supposed to open at the Royal Academy in September 2020. It was postponed to late 2021 due to Covid, and then rescheduled again to September of this year. That level of caution is to be expected where the Serbian performance artist is concerned, because there’s always a level of participation in what Abramović does. And while this huge retrospective will include photographs, videos, objects and installations, there will also be a number of “re-performances” featuring “younger performers” in the place of the artist herself (although Abramović will be there to take part in the talks and events surrounding the exhibition).
If they decide to ‘re-perform’ 1974’s Rhythm O (loaded gun and all) then this should make for a hell of a show.
Another big name exhibition opens in London in April… But this time at the Design Museum. With Ai Weiwei: Making Sense the Design Museum is promising “some of the artist’s most important works displayed alongside collections of objects that have never been seen and new commissions made for the exhibition,” which will place the artist’s fascination with Chinese artefacts, “in dialogue with the more recent history of demolition and urban development in China”.
The show opens in April and runs until July and is followed up by an exhibition celebrating the contemporary sari and then one charting the history of the skateboard.
It’s hard to keep track of how many times the major Philip Guston retrospective has been rescheduled. The exhibition was due to start in 2020, debuting at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., and then going to Boston and Houston, before finishing at the Tate Modern.
But before it got under way, the decision was made to delay the tour until 2024 in order to “reformulate the show so that it better reflects the urgencies of the moment”. The main sticking point was, of course, Guston’s famous images of hooded Ku Klux Klan figures; but not everyone agreed that the delay was a good idea, and the row eventually led to the suspension and resignation of Tate Modern curator Mark Godfrey in 2021.
This October, a few months earlier than planned (or three years later - depending on your point of view), Philip Guston finally arrives at Tate Modern, with a description that goes to great pains to point out that the artist’s “comic-like figures” were sometimes dressed “in white hoods representing evil and the everyday perpetrators of racism” and that Guston was “a complex artist who took inspiration from the nightmarish world around him to create new and surprising imagery”.
Alice Neel may not be as well known as people like Hockney and Abramović, but the exhibition of her work at the Barbican, which opens next month, should definitely be worth catching, as her influence on younger artists only continues to grow.
Alice Neel: Hot Off The Griddle will feature 70 of the artist’s incredibly raw but beautiful figurative portraits, alongside archival photography and film. If you’ve never seen Neel’s appearance on the Johnny Carson show in 1984 (the year that she died) it’s worth taking ten minutes to watch, not just for how she takes the piss out of Carson, but also for her candour when she speaks about how she likes to paint people who have been “damaged and mutilated” by New York City.
The last of the single name exhibitions comes from the British artist, Mike Nelson who is getting his first major survey at the Hayward next month.
Mike Nelson: Extinction Beckons is structured around a series of “fictive worlds that eerily echo our own,” all constructed using the scavenged material that Nelson is known for.
If there’s one other thing Nelson is known for it’s totally transforming exhibition spaces with huge, labyrinthian installations; so expect the Hayward to be unrecognisable come the end of February when this one opens.
There are two major exhibitions focusing on the role of women in different artistic movements coming to London this year, so we’ll take them in chronological order.
Next month Action, Gesture, Paint: Women Artists and Global Abstraction 1940–70 comes to the Whitechapel Gallery, cementing director Iwona Blazwic’s reputation as a champion of women artists.
Action, Gesture, Paint promises to not only explore the Abstract Expressionist movement beyond the usual white male suspects, but also challenge the notion that the movement began in the US, with works from artists like Mozambican-Italian Bertina Lopes and South Korean Wook-kyung Choi being displayed alongside more recognisable names like Lee Krasner and Helen Frankenthaler.
Then, later in the year, Women in Revolt! opens at Tate Britain, with a look at art by over 100 women who were working in the UK from 1970 to 1990.
Taking its title (exclamation point and all) from the 1971 Warhol film, this show aims to “celebrate the work and lived experiences of women who, frequently working outside mainstream art institutions, were largely left out of the artistic narratives of the time”.
Because it doesn’t start until November, there are few details on which artists will feature exactly, but expect Tate Britain to push the boat out for this one, seeing as their ‘Sixty years’ room (which was “dedicated to the work of women artists working in Britain from 1960 to the present day”) got pretty panned by the press when it opened in 2019.
Beyond The Streets at the Saatchi Gallery looks set to be one of the most popular exhibitions of the first half of 2023. Billed as “the most comprehensive street art and graffiti exhibition to open in the UK” this show feature art, ephemera, photography, immersive installations, fashion “and surprises” from over 150 artists in a bid to explore the world and influence of graffiti, from its street art origins, through hip hop, social activism, fashion and high art.
The exhibition has already shown in LA and New York where it picked up good reviews for its scale and scope (and the fact that it housed a functioning tattoo parlour on some days).
If you visited In the Black Fantastic at the Hayward gallery last year (one of 2022’s best exhibitions by a mile) then, on your way in, you would have seen the piece called Chain Reaction by Missouri-born sculptor Nick Cave (not that one) .
In March, the Royal Academy is showcasing more Black Artists from the American South with their show Souls Grown Deep like the Rivers, which will draw together 65 works including pieces of sculpture, paintings, drawings and quilts, from 34 artists.
The exhibition has been created in conjunction with the Souls Grown Deep Foundation of Atlanta, and opens on 17 March.