‘Culinary Pirate’ to Launch London’s First-ever Gruel Pop-up, ‘Gruel Dudes’
A seven day ‘pop-up’ restaurant serving pimped-up, Victorian-formula gruel is to open at the very beginning of April at a disused factory space in Hackney, East London.
Gruel Dudes is the brainchild of an experiential collective of so-called ‘culinary pirates’, headed by newcomer Denton Fisk, and will feature a menu of basic gruel, made using a mix of hot water, oats and millet sourced from nearby Dalston, ‘pimped up’ with a variety of toppings including chia seeds, kale shavings, quinoa, local honey and foraged berries.
Individual bowls will start at £2.99, with toppings priced between £1 and £2.50.
Diners will also be able to choose from a small range of ethical coffee and tea, alongside an extensive flight of paired craft beer and wine, handpicked by Fisk himself.
On the new venture, Fisk opined: “Now feels like the right time to reimagine gruel for the 21st century. We’ve remembered how to brew our own beer again, we remembered that a beard can be a personal statement and not just a mark of laziness, but we forgot about gruel. It’s lucky that I remembered that we’d forgotten about it, otherwise this would never have happened.”
The 110 square metre factory space, just off Tredegar Road in trendy Hackney Wick, will be open from 9am-7pm for seven days from 1st to 7th April. The strictly-no-bookings site has capacity for 45 diners, including a bar area, and will include a vintage clothing store, tattooist, flea market and a resident DJ.
Fisk concluded: “We’re on a mission to ‘make gruel cool’ and after this, it surely will be. If it proves a success, then who knows, we could roll it out far and wide to places like Stoke Newington and Dalston and maybe next time make it 14 days. I really want to do something interesting with acorns, so who knows, the possibilities are endless!”
Tweet Denton Fisk at: @coolgruel