15 Beauchamp Place,
Knightsbridge,
London,
SW3 1NQ
0871 971 7457
The ViewLondon Review
One rather suspects that Nozomi’s target clientele don’t go online for their entertainment listings. They probably just float from penthouse suite to launch night to celebrity bash to yacht party, week after week, until the end of their pampered lives, barely breaking a sweat, never a hair out of place. This is Knightsbridge, after all, and it’s positively swimming in money, both old and new.
Beauchamp Place, for those of you who happen not to shop there daily, is a particularly chi-chi little street, rammed with designer boutiques and specialist what-not retailers. It’s populated by the International Rich – and their leisured offspring, who, one suspects, are the intended market for canny owner Marios George’s latest venture, Nozomi.
Taking the place of Floriana’s, a longstanding Beauchamp Place landmark, it’s certainly a far cry from Wandsworth’s legendary Club UK, one of George’s earliest purchases. Cavernous, pitch-black rooms filled with sweaty ravers are out, and in their place we have white leather, black marble and orchids. Nozomi is an astonishingly beautiful venue.
Yet George obviously hasn’t quite left his hardcore club-owning days behind, as the pair of top-of-the-range CD mixers and ceiling-recessed Bose speakers hint at an ambition to transform the bar into a slightly less restrained space than its décor would have you believe, once the sushi plates are cleared away. The stated intention is to create a “lifestyle experience” – that’s a restaurant and DJ bar to you and me – thereby maximising the potential to extract money from the clientele, who, presumably, will see no reason to leave.
It’s hard to imagine Nozomi not doing extremely well. Beauchamp Place has got to be one of London’s most exclusive streets, and Marios George showed with Attica that he knows what he’s doing when it comes to the A-list. The cuisine – modern Japanese – is right “on-trend”, and the place looks like a million dollars. Just don’t go turning up in your tracksuit bottoms and baby tee and expecting to breeze straight in. Unless you’re Paris Hilton, of course.
Nozomi has been reviewed by 15 users