There’s a Natural Wine Bar Opening in Shoreditch but Please Don’t Close the Tab

An exciting natural wine bar will open in Shoreditch this November, before tapping one of the best pop-ups in the city to run its kitchen from 1 December.

Oranj, which started life as an online natural wine subscription and delivery service in 2020, will open its bar and gallery space at 14 Bacon Street. From 1 December, Tom Zahir Browne’s Decatur — which has garnered a stellar reputation for its shrimp boils, boudin, and myriad iterations of gumbo — will take over the kitchen for three weeks, with its exact offering still in development. It’s a natural progression for the subscription model, which has previously invited the likes of Rita’s Dining, P.Franco, and the Clove Club to collaborate on monthly boxes.

When chefs aren’t on the pans, there will be a short, mostly Iberian snack menu, strong on croquetas and charcuterie and offering a tortilla.

The bar is run by Jasper Delamothe, a restaurant and bar construction specialist, who had initially planned to debut Oranj in 2020, before the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. Having quickly pivoted to delivery, like so many of the city’s best places to drink wine, he is now bringing what he’s labelled “a pub for wine drinkers” to Shoreditch.

The label is perhaps a nod to the evaporating po-facedness around natural wine, whose maturation in the city has been accelerated by the likes of Veraison, in Camberwell; Hector’s, in De Beauvoir; and Cadet, on Newington Green.

Oranj will run a soft launch from 3 November until 15 November, formally opening on 17 November.