Hot 4 U team will open restaurant Papi next year

The team behind the delivery concept Hot 4 U will open a permanent restaurant, Papi, early next year. 

Hot 4 U, co-founded by chef Matthew Scott during the pandemic, turned heads as it developed into a pop-up restaurant, with dishes such as garum pom bears and a whisky bone marrow luge.

Now, Scott and Charlie Carr of Wingnut Wines will launch Papi in a site on Mentmore Terrace, Hackney, describing it as a ‘natural culmination of a journey’.

The ‘bold cooking’ of Hot 4 U, showcasing ‘high-grade cooking’, ‘regeneratively reared meat’, and ‘sustainable seafood’, will be combined with Carr’s selection of ‘under-represented natural wines’, press material said.

Papi will be split across two floors, with a 28-cover ground floor dining room featuring an open kitchen, and a cocktail bar beneath with room for 14 more. The latter will be available for karaoke, events, and private hire.

Scott, formerly of Cub, said the menu will be primarily made up of snacks, small plates, and sharing dishes.

‘I’m approaching the food at Papi as based on my days at Cub – a menu that is synergetic with the seasons with sustainability at its very core – but with a Hot 4 U face lift’, he said.

‘The relationships we share with our producers will define the dishes available but the tone in which this is delivered will have fun at the very forefront’. 

Carr, meanwhile, will continue to champion smaller producers through Wingnut Wines, which now has a bar at Netil Market nearby.

‘I want to create a wine programme that not only showcases underrepresented natural wine but one that is constantly changing and above all, is about the enjoyment of drinking wine,’ he said.

‘We’ll work with importers who focus on very small productions around Europe and beyond. One of the great pleasures of natural wine for me is that, like food, not everything is available year-round – bottles appear for a few weeks and then disappear until the next vintage’.

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