Themed bars and restaurants don’t have to be naff. While we’ve seen more fake cherry blossom this season than we can shake a samurai sword at, our appetite for highly stylised interiors hasn’t waned.
From a blitz-themed bar to a restaurant disguised as a pharmacy, by way of a 70s trattoria and 30s Taiwanese dining room, here are some of our favourite bars and eateries transporting guests elsewhere through their interiors.
Earlier this year, Victor Lugger and Tigrane Seydoux – aka the team behind Parisian culinary hot spots La Felicitá and Pink Mamma of the Big Mamma restaurant group – launched their first UK venture: Gloria. Behind the butter yellow, vine-shrouded facade, the Shoreditch restaurant is kitted out like 70s-style Capri and glammed up with pinstripe upholstery, marble table tops and plush, pink velour seating. Head here for an extravagant, 70s-themed romp, where the Italian food served is nothing short of 21st-century excellence.
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The traditional blue and white tiles that line the walls of Portugese restaurant Bar Douro in London Bridge look like they’ve been peeled straight off the walls of Porto’s São Bento train station. The Instagram-worthy tiles stand in stark contrast to the more minimalist design found throughout the rest of the dining room. Alone, they're enough to have diners feeling like they’ve landed in Portugal’s second city – and that’s before the exquisite sharing plates and bottles of native wine have arrived.
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With its wooden panelling, tea-dispensing kiosk and large ceiling fans, stepping into XU feelings like stepping back in time, specifically to the Taiwanese capital of Taipei circa 1930. Meanwhile, the restaurant’s marble counters, all-round plush interiors and lilting background music create a luxe, calming atmosphere.Take a seat at the candy pink bar and over order on dim sum and cocktails. All items on the menu at XU deliver on contemporary London’s high standards.
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Prada might be known for its handbags, shoes and perfumes, but the luxury Italian fashion house is also the proud owner of a painfully Instagrammable café in Milan: Marchesi 1824. This spring, a branch of the café opens on Mayfair’s Mount Street, meaning Londoners can enjoy its Wes Anderson-esque mint interiors, superior coffees and sugar-coated treats without hopping on a plane.
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If you’re feeling a little fragile, we prescribe a trip to Damien Hirst’s apothecary-inspired, Lambeth-based restaurant Pharmacy 2 (a follow on from Hirst’s Notting Hill restaurant Pharmacy, which closed its doors in the early noughties). Everything here is drug store themed, from the waiters clad in surgical gowns to the rows of medication lining the walls and the pill-shaped bar stools. Hopefully the setting will have a placebo effect on your ailment, leaving you feeling right as rain in no time.
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Seventies decor gets a tiki makeover at Nine Lives, a basement cocktail bar in London Bridge. The bar is decked out with lattice walls, wicker furniture and woven lampshades. Add to this the low lighting as well as littering of palms, and a trip to Nine Lives feels like going for evening cocktails while holidaying on a tropical island.
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Immersive, 40s-themed cocktail bar Cahoots whisks its punters off the streets of present-day London (Soho’s Kingly Court, to be precise) and into an air-raid shelter of the Second World War. Step onto the wooden escalator and descend to the bar below – a green-and-white tiled underground station kitted out with sandbags, bunting and faux propaganda posters that leads through to a tube-style train carriage. Don’t worry though, Cahoots isn't triggering of your post-work commute. The carriage is filled with jazz and other merrymakers, and here you can sip on cocktails into the wee hours.
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