Meat & Wine Co., Mayfair - United Kingdom

The Meat & Wine Co, Mayfair. Interiors - United Kingdom

The Meat & Wine Co offers a sophisticated steakhouse with Afro-centric roots in the heart of Mayfair.

Location 17 Curzon Street, Mayfair, London W1J 5HR

Size 345sqm

Completion May 2022

Client Seagrass Boutique Hospitality Group

Meat & Wine Mayfair takes the African spirit of travel, migration, discovery, and storytelling to London.

The English have long had a fascination and love for Africa with its undisturbed views of natural majesty. Queen Elizabeth, famously found out in 1952 that she would become Great Britain’s ruler whilst on vacation in a hut built in the forest around Mount Kenya. Her private safari warden scribbled this amazing tale in the lodge’s guestbook.

The English have always seen Africa as a place with strange magic where they could live out dreams, feel free and escape everyday life. The Danish writer romanticised Africa in 1937 “the Cicada sing in endless song in the long grass, smells run along the earth and falling stars run over the sky…”

Now, finally, Africa is coming to London with the Meat & Wine debut in Mayfair. Meat & Wine takes its inspiration from the various African cultures, the traditional architecture and pattern making, as well as the romance and nostalgia of Africa.

The patron is greeted at the front door with a vertical wall art installation designed by Calvin Janse Van Vuuren, depicting the journey between Africa and Britain with a monochrome relief of people, animals, and well known geographical and architectural references. The journey storyline highlights the traditional great migration of animals twice a year across the African plains, the sharing of stories between people, as well as a modern take on the new migration of trade between the two continents.

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In South Africa there is a word, Ubuntu. a word that Mandela loved and that captured his greatest gift, his recognition that we are all bound together in ways that are invisible to the eye, a oneness that we achieve ourselves by sharing with others and caring for those around us.

This giving and sharing is something that we try very hard to capture in each store. The menu and food offering talks to this idea of sharing by the way the menu is designed and the spaces within the restaurant echoes this in the careful layouts of various intimate, private, and more public spaces. To this end, each store has their own interpretation of a “BOMA”. In this case the entire restaurant’s ground floor and basement is expressed as two separate ‘BOMAS’ with a beautiful bespoke knotted and hand-woven rope tapestries designed by Roberto Zambri.

The word Boma is used by many languages in Africa and is a term used to describe an enclosure for safety of people and livestock. It’s also a place for storytelling and the coming together of people.