In Park Street, a restaurant inspired by DC comics

All the strange restaurant concepts I’ve seen in London, Park Street It can be said to be the boldest.In its five bars and Restaurant, Currently under construction on the lower three floors of Brewer Street in Soho, restaurant owner James Bulmer plans to combine high-end catering with Batman’s Gotham City.

The indirect inspiration for four of the five spaces came from Batman figure. The fifth is the 20-seater private restaurant of the Monarch Theater, offering a 195-pound, 11-course tasting menu, providing a multi-sensory immersive experience, indirect references to the heroes and villains in the wider DC (Detective Comics) universe.but Superman, The Joker, Wonder Woman, Bruce Wayne, his other self, and everyone else has never been named or seen. They are completely absent, Batman.

“The subtlety of how we do this is the challenge,” said Bullmer, an energetic and likable 40-year-old who ran his own public relations firm before working for Disney. Heston Blumenthal In the fat duck. His father Derek is now a business partner and has been running the Michelin Guide for decades. “Superfans must feel special because they notice things that others haven’t noticed,” he continued, “but we also have to meet people from Mayfair’s private equity firm. They don’t care about DC Universe, but want to be world-class. Great food, beautiful design, and telling stories through interesting food and drinks.” In other words-Batman and Burger are not.

There is a “no role-playing” rule: if you dress up as the Flash, you can’t get in. “You should feel like walking into a movie scene,” Bulmer said-in this scene, you, food, and drinking are the stars, not the tired waitress dressed up as a waitress. Harley Quinn.

So a comic book nerd and standard cartoonist like me, Christian Adams, probably knew that Bruce Wayne’s parents were shot outside the Gotham Monarch Theater, which prompted him to be vigilant with the theme of bats.Or, Pennyworth’s bar is named after Wayne’s butler Alfred, and the other The Iceberg Lounge is named after a casino opened by a super villain Penguin When he tried to go straight.

The other rooms are more inclined. The Rogue’s Gallery tells about Catwoman’s career as a thief, and contains six fakes of famous paintings that were stolen—in real life, this is—but never recovered. There should be another one, but “incredibly, the seventh was discovered last month, Picasso”. Interestingly, Bulmer refused to reveal the name of the forger. The Old Gotham Lounge in the middle of the night looks “like grandma the clown’s living room”, but there are also some things in the entire Park Row that impress the high-rollers: a cantilevered whiskey pouring arm; an ultrasonic suspension of gold and tonic molecules; when you When walking down the stairs from the street, the film scores; there is also a “fog light door” that takes you into the magnificent space.

Park Row occupies the ballroom of Regent Palace, once the largest hotel in London.In the nineties, this huge room was Marco Pierre White The doomed flagship, the Titanic. Its secondary protection paneling and huge glass lamps are offset by beautiful new floors, benches and counters, and a small stage for live performances. Here are more roundabout references about the DC world-you have to be a real nerd to realize that the golden screen around the stage is inspired by DC’s 2016 movie “Suicide Squad.”

At the same time, Monarch is a free-standing box near the kitchen, chrome-plated, the inner wall and ceiling are composed of screens, and the center part is a table filled with heat sensors, magnets and ejectors to emit steam. “I need to be able to control the sensory environment, the content on the screen, the sound, the smell, and the content on the plate,” Bullmer said.

“Although it is similar to Sublimotion in Ibiza, there is nothing like it in the UK,” he added, as a tribute to Paco Roncero’s radical 12-seat, 20-course restaurant, which is reportedly the world The most expensive restaurant on the list.

In Monarch, the narrator will guide a group of up to 20 people on a sensory and gastronomic journey through the “history of heroism”. The themes include fear, hope, love, truth and greed. These themes are reflected in the executive chef Karl O’Dell’s 11 courses. There is a medallion composed of scallops, oysters, caviar and white chocolate, covered with gold leaf; black-on-black beef slices with truffle potatoes; toadstool made from mushroom parfait; an edible pearl.

The drama of the food is largely due to Fat Duck’s molecular gastronomy and “a-ha” transformation. Bulmer recruited one of his frequent collaborators with Heston Blumenthal, the magician Chris Cork. Si, use skills to study this experience.

At the same time, O’Dell had previously worked for Michelin-starred Texture, while other senior employees were recruited from Savoy, Annabel’s, and Ivy to show that this is a serious food industry, not a fancy theme park. Bulmer wouldn’t say how much it cost to set up Park Row, but the Monarch table alone cost more than £100,000.

Bulmer is a “big fan of DC, Marvel, and Roald Dahl.” When he ran the consumer goods retail and licensing sales department in 2013/14, he first proposed the idea of ​​a comic-inspired restaurant to Disney, which owns Marvel. “But Bob Eagle at the top didn’t agree with me, so I took this path [to DC],” Bullmer said. He brought executives from DC’s parent company Warner Bros. to Fat Duck, where he served as CEO from 2017-18.

This is the first time Warner has conducted such authorization business. If it succeeds, it will open up the possibility of dining concepts around the world, not only based on other DC roles, but also based on other attributes in WB’s vast past catalog. But Bullmer said that the ultimate goal of his company, Wonderland, is to “enable people to access their screens and take out their favorite foods and drinks from movies or TV.”

Wow, wait a minute. First, the British public must be persuaded to enjoy entertainment and dinner at the same time, especially when they just stand out from what you know, they will buy it at a high price. Bulmer believes that since he first had this idea, secret cinemas and other immersive cinemas have made rapid progress; Blumenthal and others have combined food and storytelling; and in a few months After the lockdown, people desperately needed novelties and expected more value for money than the “£25 burger and fries”. Maybe he is right. The nearby Windmill Theatre is planning a similar event, combining cabaret performances, food and drinks; and Brasserie Zedel has a cabaret performance space. If Bulmer manages to sell Gotham-themed meals to DC superfans and Mayfair hedge funds, I believe a concept can fly.

Although he is a fan of Batman in most of his incarnations (early comics, the transformation of the Dark Knight, from Adam West to Michael Keaton to Christian Bell-Ben Affleck’s screen outing , But not that much) I am not sure if he fits the restaurant concept. But Park Row is a dark and cool space, obviously a free-floating spiral staircase, allowing you to easily enter the lair of fashion evil.

Having different areas in the classic room makes it feel a bit like Ned. Monarch’s food and technical magic are both impressive (although we didn’t get the full experience on our early visit), and the black beef was outstanding. Subtly evoke themes and themes from the DC story without explicitly mentioning the characters. Personally, when it comes to dinners and performances, I prefer them one after another rather than at the same time. But I would be happy to have a cocktail or go to Pennyworth’s or Iceberg Lounge for a non-immersive meal. Imagine, no matter how short, I am Bruce Wayne. Nick Curtis

If there is one thing shameless manga lovers like me like, it is Easter eggs. These small but sometimes important narrative references are hidden in the main story. The point of Easter eggs is that only die-hard fans can gain relevance.

Park Row provides us with these, and its huge underground space actually has no “story”-only Easter eggs. No Batman, no Penguin, no Harley Quinn. Instead, comic books and many movies are everywhere. From the name of the place (the street where Bruce Wayne became Batman), to the painting of the blue boy (Hello, Jack Nicholson’s clown), to the beaded curtain stage of the Suicide Squad (“You Do you want me? I am all yours”…)

There is nothing shameful about the nerd who is intoxicated in your heart here; it is DC Comics‘Fan heaven. Christian Adams