The restaurant says that the decision to shrink its estate and double down its attention on its Islington restaurant instead of expanding comes as a result of “rising rates and operational costs”.
“We made this decision for the future of the business,” reads a post on the restaurant’s Instagram page.
“Two is not always better than one!”
Former Barnyard chef Matt Young launched Rök’s first site on Shoreditch’s Curtain Road in 2016 alongside Charles Bakker and Frida Lindmark. Comprising 40 covers, it served lunch, dinner, and late night drinks.
The Islington iteration opened in 2016, and the team also took a spot in Nuno Mendes’ The Kitchens in Spitalfields last October.
The restaurant had planned to launch a Soho site in mid-2018, and left the Kitchens in January of this year to focus on the central London opening.
Rök – which means ‘smoke’ in Swedish- uses techniques such as brining, pickling and smoking with British ingredients to create Scandinavian-inspired dishes. In 2016, Jay Rayner described an evening at Rök’s Shoreditch site as “one of the most pleasurable meals I’ve had in a long time”.