Welcome to La Cave, a natural wine bar that’s hard not to give in to.
It’s housed in the moody underground space beneath Rondo restaurant in the Hoxton Hotel (the one in Holborn, confusingly). And as you head down into the subterranean venue, the first thing you’ll see will be La Cave’s impressive bottle shop, stacked with modern grape hooch from all low intervention, natural, small-growers. And there is a lot. In fact, they claim to have “the largest selection of bubbly in the city”.
La Cave’s interior is a stripped-back affair of bare brick and unvarnished timber, with low-slung miners’ lamps that gives you the impression of sipping grape-hooch in the industrial zone of the Crystal Maze (in a good way, let’s be clear). It feels decidedly individual, carving out its own niche away from the template of Parisian-style wine bars.
The bottles hail from all over the world, filling the gaps between major producers like Italy, France and South Africa with regions that haven’t traditionally been so well-represented in the UK, like Georgia and Slovenia. That means you’ll get to sip the summery red Piroska from Austria’s Joiseph vineyard, started by three friends back in 2015, alongside rosé from our very own Tillingham in Kent. And on Orange (wine) Wednesdays, you can BOGOF with your skin contact vino.
On the food side of the equation, La Cave has a menu of snacks that are far more inventive than your usual wine bar fodder: there’s celeriac bread served with miso butter; smoked mackerel toast with pickled cucumber; crayfish rolls; short rib croquettes; and even a deep-fried peanut butter & jelly sandwich, should the occasion call.
It’s worth carving out space for.
NOTE: La Cave is open Tuesday to Saturday evenings. You can make a booking, and check out upcoming live music nights at their website right HERE.
La Cave | Underneath The Hoxton, 199-206 High Holborn, WC1V 7BD
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