The fine-dining group behind some of the West End and the City’s most glamorous destinations is opening its first venue in east London.
D&D London, whose restaurants include Quaglino’s, Bluebird Café and Le Pont de la Tour, is scheduled to launch a huge restaurant, cafe and rooftop bar in a three-storey wooden building the International Quarter London at the entrance to the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park.
The flying saucer-style structure, known as the Pavilion, will have 17,000sq ft of space and will be constructed almost entirely from sustainable timber. It was designed by Shoreditch-based architects Acme.
Des Gunewardena, chairman and chief executive of D&D London, said Stratford was becoming an increasingly important cultural destination as a future home to offshoots of Sadler’s Wells Theatre and the V&A Museum.
He said: “When I first had a call about Stratford, I thought, ‘That’s great, Olympics and all that... but should we open in Stratford?’ But it is becoming a really interesting place. It’s very close to the City so if you work in the City it is not a bad place to live.
“But it is Stratford, not Mayfair or Chelsea, and we want the restaurant and cafe to be full, so they will operate at a price level that means they will certainly not be uber high-end and expensive.
“It is not going to be Olympic themed but the Olympics put Stratford on the map and I quite like the idea of being somewhere that was originally part of the Olympics.”
