Located close to Cambridge Circus below Shaftesbury Avenue arts and performance venue Stone Nest, below Stone Nest will initially open Wednesday to Saturday from 6pm – 2am offering a short drinks list of low-intervention wines, cocktails, long drinks and beers.
Stone Nest will collaborate with guest curator Tic (of Young record label, whose acts include The XX, FKA Twigs, Ethan P. Flynn, Koreless and Sampha) on the bar’s music programme.
The venue will be the second joint launch for the two brothers, who launched Brunswick House in a crumbling Georgian mansion house in Vauxhall in their early twenties.
Frank is also the founder of Frank’s Cafe at Bold Tendencies in Peckham and proprietor of the Camberwell Arms while Jackson is chef patron of Notting Hill restaurant Orasa.
The Stone Nest building, a former Welsh chapel, was a spiritual home for almost a century, before playing out the hedonistic 80s and 90s as the Limelight nightclub.
Today, whilst the “work in progress” of building restoration continues, Stone Nest is throwing open the doors to bring life back to the building.
“As the London I grew up in is increasingly demolished, defaced and vandalised in the name of development, the opportunity to create a beautiful old fashioned dive bar in an extraordinary historic space in the heart of the west end is thrilling,” Frank says.
“My greatest ambition would be to establish some of the sense of joyous optimism and creative anarchy which typified the early days of Frank’s Cafe, by keeping the prices low, the offering simple and unimpeachable, and the space welcoming to everyone.”