Big-Ticket Holborn Restaurant Gezellig Will Close After Eight Months

Gezellig, the big-ticket Holborn restaurant that promised wine drinking luxury and fine, broadly European food will close after eight months of trading this Friday 31 January, according to Drinks Business.

Co-founder Wieteke Teppema broke the news in a now-deleted Instagram post:

We have our last service on Friday. It’s been a heart-breaking decision and we only decided at the end of last week. The overheads were too high and we couldn’t reach the turnover we needed to make it viable. I’m gutted, but we will go out with a bang, so please do pop in if you are in the area this week.

Gezellig started life as a pop-up, with the collaboration between Teppema, chef Graham Long, and wine professional James Comyn winning acclaim for its residency at Marylebone’s Carousel in May 2017. The menu balanced polished drinking food — suckling pig sausage rolls; comté toasties — with equally polished, pan-European plates: hand-cut strozzapreti, a calling card of backer Rebecca Mascarenhas’ Elystan Street and Church Road; navarin of lamb; warm Porthilly oysters.

Evening Standard Magazine critic Jimi Famurewa warmed to both the “high-ceilinged, banquette-lined 50-cover room painted a cooling sage, strewn with drained wine bottles and already in possession of a clubby, lived-in air,” and the “happy pile-up of culinary ideas and influences” that typified the cooking, concluding that it was a place of “gently grown-up magic.” Even one critic’s swallow does not make a summer, and Teppema’s reasoning suggests that Gezellig could not sustain the footfall to make the sums add up.