Kang’s Note: Oliver Thring of Thring for your supper! opted to articulate a charming bashing of The Light, a nightclub, bar and restaurant (in that order) trying to do too much and ultimately failing to do any single one properly. I love a good rant ( who doesn’t right? ) especially when one is done with such flair. Take it away, Ollie! – Kang.
The Light [1/5]
Restaurants invariably disappoint when attached to other things. The Disneyland diner. The burger van at the dogs. Balconies at the Royal Opera House. Of course, the trump card of such places, their snide and snickering victory, is that the trapped customers have nowhere else to go. Out, then, come the elephant foot kebabs or the patties of pulverised gristle, the preheated, lazily oleaginous mess of it all, with an apathetic shrug that seems to say, ‘What are you going to do about it?’
The Light, housed in a renovated electric light station for G.E.R., is a nightclub, bar and restaurant (the proper order, I fear) squatting at the border between the glassy City and the scruffiness of alt.Shoreditch. We’re here on some recession-wrought deal that one of our party found on the Internet. The place tries to do many things, and does most of them extremely badly. Downstairs, the oversized bar and restaurant have Hoxtonish exposed brickwork and high, uncomfortable stools, while the ‘Lounge’ disco above, the website somewhat mundanely informs us, contains a video projector that is ‘DVD, PAL, S-VIDEO Compatible’.
Nightclubs and restaurants are like oil and water. At Boundary, Terence Conran’s new opening not far from here, you eat in the basement and drink on the roof. Here, the bar and club thump sweatily beside and around the empty restaurant, with only a thin door keeping out the drunken hordes. Eating at The Light, you feel like the sailors in Das Boot, capsuled while the world clangs around you like some collapsing factory, aware that at any moment you might be struck by a torpedo or a sozzled secretary, which are much the same thing.
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