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“A divine Italian mansion where the naughtiest fantasies come to life.” This is how London’s most extra restaurant group is describing its extremely over-the-top forthcoming project in Kensington. Big Mamma group of Gloria, Ave Mario, and Circolo Popolare fame/infamy will open Jacuzzi, a four-floor, 4000 square feet, 170-seater “palazzo” with a menu of excessively deployed luxury ingredients, in January next year. It will be the French-owned kitsch “Italian” restaurant group’s fourth London site.
Its opening will come at a time when restaurants and hospitality businesses are closing left, right, and centre, with an industry in the thick of an energy crisis, a cost-of-living crisis, and the aftershocks of crises Brexit and COVID-19. But here we are. Big Mamma’s answer to those precarious economic times:
On the menu will be the finest Culatello di Zibello PDO from Onesto Ghirardi, and delicate pizzette topped with seasonal bests: truffle, caviar, bottarga. Our cheese wheel pasta has had a Renaissance, to a colossal truffle pasta for two with fresh black truffle, truffle cream and parmigiano foam, in a 4kg wheel of pecorino. The palazzo to piatti doesn’t stop there, introducing our first-ever shareable chocolate fondue, made with half a kilo of the best Valrhona chocolate.
And as if by divine intervention, the “basement vault of this 19th century bank” has been converted into what the owners are calling a “disco toilet.”
“Enter the glitter ball to a cove of mirrors to get you feeling like Michelangelo’s David — just peachy,” Big Mamma instructs.
Mamma, ahem, mia!