Heard of the Columbo Group? They’re the new Antic in
town. Heard of neither Antic or The Columbo Group? Oh, sorry. Well,
maybe you’d be forgiven for having not. Antic are that big company that
own all those young cool bars in our area that many people seem to
mistake for being independents: Dogstar, Effra Social, Gremio De Brixton and Eckovision.
The Columbo Group, meanwhile? They’re the new boy in
our neighbourhood. We’re intrigued by their arrival. We’d been
re-thinking our long running romance with Antic for a while now,
and now this young, flashy new boy has arrived in town. We somehow got
chatting to them on the N109 home last month, and we must admit they did
catch our eye a little bit…
Long story short, we somehow gave The Columbo Group
our phone number as we got off the bus that night, and before long they
were eagerly chirpsing us, with the successful launch of Phonox nightclub
last month. Now, with Blues Kitchen, we’re at the ‘exchanging graphic
Snapchats’ stage of our relationship. The first two branches of The
Blues Kitchen are in Camden and Shoreditch.
A suspicious eye might spot a pattern with these previous partners:
this is clearly an organisation interested in our area for our ‘coolness
capital’. You sense that if we blurted something wildly unhipster out
on the third date – something like how we wished Ritzy cinema would
hurry up and fully convert to a Cineworld – then The Columbo Group would
be off running down the road and hopping into bed with Tooting before
we’d even had a chance to suggest going shopping for matching knitwear.
If this all feels a little more corporate than your
ideal vision of Brixton, then you may have to force a smile for some
time yet: alongside the Blues Kitchen and Phonox, we also had the
opening of the Brazilian chain Cabana last month, and next weekend it’s the opening of Caribbean chain Turtle Bay
(with a whopping £800,000 investment in the branch). Seemingly, we’ve
hit a new era of corporate investment in Brixton. Is it because rents
are now too high for independents? Is the most a local business can hope
for now a six month stint in Pop Brixton?
Best to put all that out of our minds right now, as
we’ve got a romantic dinner date with The Columbo Group to get to. And
we have to admit, Blues Kitchen know how to treat a neighbourhood like
us to a good date. For starters, they make a great first impression.
They’ve put money and thought into doing up the former (independent
venue) Electric Social.
Meat cuts, barbecuing and marinating across the board
are excellent. You can gnaw away at, say, the pork spare ribs for what
feels like an eternity. If the beef brisket isn’t quite as good as the
astonishing 10/10 effort from street food favourite Smokestak, it does
just about manage to be better than the locally available brisket from
Miss P’s BBQ at Pop Brixton.
Hard shakes will instantly win over anybody with a
sweet enough tooth to stomach them. Anybody ruling out meat will find
their options unsurprisingly thin on the ground. An underthought out
vegetarian platter would be entirely lacking in imagination if it wasn’t
for the solitary – yet excellent – parmesan and artichoke dip at its
centre. The creole bean burger is huge and has clearly had far more care
directed towards its inception. And here’s a strong bonus: as standard
they’ll offer to pack up your leftovers for you to takeaway.
Visiting during the soft launch
period, it was unclear how the live music prospect would fare in
comparison. Blues Kitchen Camden has been responsible for some great
live music in the past, even on weeknights, but every time we attempted
to listen to the live music on our visit it proved itself too
immediately ignorable to maintain any attention.
There are arguably bigger problems: the bill includes
the standard 12.5% service charge. Taking our money, we told them we’d
like to pay £27 each. Against this specific request, they kept all of
our change. Due to a last minute round of cocktails we weren’t given a
final receipt – being told that the till had already been shut down for
the night – and that we’d have to email requesting one. A week later,
there’s no sign yet of it showing up.
All of which we hope are teething problems, because
based on the food here, and the clubbing at Phonox, we’ve kind of got
the hots for The Colombo Group right now. We’re forgiving it some of its
flaws for the moment, because of how dependably it pulls off the stuff
we’re really looking for in a partner. We’re happy to keep seeing where
this one goes…
