It takes a lot of bottle to open a wine bar.
But when you’ve been running a successful online shop & subscription service for a good couple of years, you can be pretty confident in making the move to bricks and mortar. And thus Oranj was born, as Jasper Delamothe took his business from lockdown saviour to a real-life natural wine bar in Shoreditch.
He’s set up shop in a 2,000 sq ft warehouse behind Brick Lane – where you can swirl, sniff, sip and nod knowingly to anything from a globetrotting array of orange wines, low ABV juras, whites from Catalonia and ultimately just a well thought-out curation of wines made with a low-intervention ethos. There’s even a selection of Lambic beers and a few cocktails (like a smoked tea old-fashioned and a chilli margarita) to please the non-wine folk. And of course, the place doubles as a bottleshop (there’s even a membership scheme for tastings & events) for you to buy their wine, too.
As it turns out, Delamothe is not merely a natural wine whizz but also a natural designer, having styled bars in the past. So he’s used his keen eye for attractive drinking spaces to create this very attractive drinking space, which involves a lot of materials common in the wine ageing process like walnut, aluminium and concrete, all intermingled in a postmodern melange of industrial chic. In all, it sort of feels like a pub, but for bleeding-edge wine, a place where you can finally say ‘I’ll have a glass of the skin-contact Macabeo, please, Mary’.
Aside from the wine element, Oranj hosts regular kitchen residencies with some of the city’s top chefs (and quite a few from around the globe, too). Here from 3rd – 28th September 2024 is a double act from a globe-trotting chef and a first-class sommelier. The former is Noé Viviès – born in Brittany, and with a background in Michelin starred restaurants in Japan and Hong Kong, as well as pop-ups of his own in Japan and Mexico. As you can imagine, his cooking is an absolute riot of flavour combinations, and on the menu here will be dishes like chicken karaage with cardamom sauce; clams with mezcal and tosazu (dashi vinegar) beurre blanc; and for dessert, a chocolate ganache with mushrooms & an olive crumble.
The other half is Lucy Rosedale, who’s been based in Paris as a sommelier for the past six years, and is hopping across the channel to create suggested wine pairings for the food menu. She’s got a particular interest in French, Catalan, Italian and Austrian wines, as well as an alchemist’s hunger for sussing out non-alcoholic alternatives like infusions and ferments.
Which might sound radical for a wine bar… but that’s the way this Oranj rolls.
NOTE: Oranj is open Tuesday to Saturday. You can find out more, and book a table, on the Oranj website.
Oranj | 14 Bacon Street, E1 6LF
A non-interventionist when it comes to vino? Then it’s only natural that you’ll want to have a look at London’s best natural wine bars