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Forza Win, the warehouse Italian restaurant in Peckham founded out of a supper club by Bash Redford, is closing. It announced on Instagram that the closure is planned to be a relocation, with the team looking for a new site.
Forza Win started life as a fledgling supper club on top of the Truman Brewery, with Redford in partnership with Thom and James Elliott of Pizza Pilgrims. It lasted two weeks before being shut down over planning legislation. It didn’t stop it, with the operation moving to Oval Space in Bethnal Green before settling, with Redford, at The Culpeper on Commercial Street — then The Princess Alice.
In Peckham, it acquired a reputation for excellent pasta, unfussy, occasionally witty Italian dishes made with care, and the Custardo, a combination of custard and espresso that started as a joke, proved to be pretty tasty, and ended up a cult favourite menu item.
Upon the opening of sibling Forza Wine, Redford told Eater that its development had allowed him to focus on the parts of the restaurant world that he truly cared about:
The supper club business washed its own face, it had incredible brand presence — it became an outlet for me in the sense that at the Culpeper I had to wear one hat — but at Forza I could say, “here’s some fucking natural wine it’s well nice try that” — and that’s the hat I believe in, while the former was not somewhere I really feel that comfortable. I find some parts of the industry really vacuous: the hospitality part, being in the restaurant you’ve created and making sure you know every single part of it, every single person working, I love.
Forza sort of grew parallel to the other stuff I was doing, and that other stuff allowed me to do this raw and real reflection of what I wanted to do in the food world, people round a table and getting people to enjoy something that would otherwise cost them too much to enjoy. That had a limited shelf life, and required an almost incredible amount of generosity — buying the same ingredients, from the same suppliers, building relationships and brand on the back of doing that.
More soon on the restaurant’s future.