some of our recent reviews:

Time Out Pub & Bar Guide 2003/04
“How do they do it? trailblazer, the laid-back, lived-in basement bar that helped hoxton earn its Hip Square Mile title, is now practically and emporium, Still central to the operation though is the three roomed basement bar filled with low level tables, Chesterfields and sofas, ambiemnt ’70s style lights, and ever busy, but helpful and efficient staff manning the bar. DJs liven up proceedings in the latter part of the week. Click the heels of your ruby slippers and repeat, there’s no place like…”

Sunday Times, AA Gill
Home is a good name for a restaurant. I’m surprised it hasn’t been used before. All the connotations are comforting: home cooking; home from home; home is the hunter; home is where you go to and they have to take you in; Alec Douglas.

I would recommend the new Home, a restaurant in a basement in what’s called Shoreditch on the map and Boho by those who live there. It’s a comfy, open-plan, fair, free and frank exchange area with small dining room attached. But there’s a proviso, a warning. How confident are you? Really, on a scale of one to 10? For instance, could you take your shirt off in Tesco? Could you audition for Opportunity Knocks in the reading room of the British Museum? Could you ask Tara Palmer-Tomkinson out for a date? Because frankly, walking down the stairs calls upon reserves of self-worth that few of us can muster. I was terrified.

Square Meal 2003/04
This super-hip hangout can look like aretro furniture showroom out of hours, but come meal times Home packs out with an eclectic blend of adventurous City suits and a mature affluent Shoreditch crowd. The clean design of big windows, white brickwork and covetable modern art complements the gems of 20th-century seating, and there’s also much to admire on the plate. Roast chicken breast with pernod butter, rib-eye with slow-baked tomato and chilli oil, a calves’ liver with yoghurt and coriander might be among the inventive comfort food updates on the great menu which changes frequently. Eager service adds to the sense of grown-up fun, and if you want to hang around head down to the groovy basement bar.

Evening Standard, Fay Maschler
They call dinner supper here, just to emphasise that, for Shoreditch dwellers stranded in their chilly lofts, here is an oasis of comfort and care within a converted Victorian warehouse. There is also a covetable collection of furniture including Charles Eames chairs that customers might aspire to own. Bread and pasta are homemade and slow cooking is espoused in dishes such as braised lamb with homemade gnocchi, rosemary gravy and orange zest, and Chinese-style pork belly casserole with steamed rice and spring onions. Prices are reasonable, with the most expensive main course being char-grilled rib-eye steak with chips, watercress and aioli at £15. Home started life as a bar with a DJ, so noise is expected as part of the environment and the lounge bar lives on as a place to retreat for a late-night drink. How about Home Coming, a mix of Krupnik honey vodka with Tia Lusso?

Time Out
Part of a new breed of bar: a home-from-home, with battered sofas and minimum architectural fuss, though this Home, since opening in 1997, has got considerably more cramped. A growing number of local trendsters enjoy the laid-back, almost catatonic atmosphere, and are not fazed by equally relaxed staff who fumble to keep it together at taxing times. The range of drinks is not extensive, but people come here for the vibe. The bar consists of three interlocking rooms, one of which serves modish European dishes to the (largely ungrateful) masses.

The London Bar Guide
A high quality, seriously funky bar, Home has evolved from a basement junk-shop of a place with dusty age-old sofas and an unfinished, hardly started design theme, to the slick smooth entity it is now. Still with a heterogeneous selection of old office furniture, but expensive leather sofas, beautiful people and excellent drinks now served by staff who can mix, Home has really grown up. The basement room is partitioned by walls which have large holes cut out of them keeping the space open and airy. There is lots of good bar food available and a large upstairs floor dedicated to the restaurant.

Time Out
One of the first bars to emerge from the revolution that transformed Shoreditch into the hippiest area of the capital, home’s legendary basement bar is still dark, buzzing, well-worn, beloved by art students and after-work drinkers alike. Upstairs, however, it has commandeered extra space and opened a bright, open-plan bar-restaurant area, which is deservedly popular with fashionable well-to-do thirty-somethings. There’s arrange of wines and a mix of cocktail classics and ‘Home specials’ such as Tulip: brandy, apricot, cherry and lemon (£5.25). The food (hake encrusted with pistachio, for instance) is superb, great value, and served with finesse.

Time Out
This legendary Hoxton haunt was the pioneer of shabby, living-room chic, mixing up post- and pre-war furniture, even the odd granny sideboard (see their edgy suburban look imitated in any fashion campaign you care to look at). On weekday nights, expect after-work drinkers winding down, on weekends it heaves with hip Hoxtonians. And there’s now a sleek ground-floor dining area, dishing up eclectic nosh.

London Bar Guide
Home is part of the Shoreditch bar scene, within staggering distance of Cantaloupe and The Great Eastern Dining rooms. Through the glass front the bargoer is tempted by the superb restaurant to the right but access to the bar is via the stairs to the left. The reward is a sea of sofas: one hundred cows’ worth. Their hide now props up grazing packs of afterwork hyenas and creatives too good for the pub but eager for its nicotine-infused dynamic.
One’s impression is of a student’s dream hangout (if parents are minted). Or possibly Cuba, the aesthetic of which smoulders in the cigar-hued leather seating. When the decks are not occupied the music menu consists of Brazilian drum and bass, jazzy house, blaxploitation funk – soft brown sounds emitted at a conversation-friendly volume.

Evening Standard, 15 March 2000, Fay Sweet
“Right from the start I promised never to have a single uncomfortable, hard wooden chair or stool,” says Neil Gregory co-owner and designer of the busy lounge and bar Home, just off Old Street, which has recently also opened a restaurant.

The place got its name from Gregory returning to London after travels in Australia and America. “Home is synonymous with comfort and that’s what I wanted to offer. I love sitting around and the people who come here do, too. The atmosphere is very relaxed.”

Gregory claims that the Home bar, which opened a couple of years ago, was the first true lounge bar in London. Furnished with dozens of big leather sofas and armchairs, this is laid-back luxury on a grand scale. Cocooned in a Chesterfield, you can forget about the harsh realities of life. On the floor above, the restaurant again features soft seating, but there’s also an amazing collection of 20th century classic dining tables from the likes of Heal’s and tubular steel-and-leather chairs by design heroes such as Charles and Ray Eames.

Taking a break on an immaculate 1970s cream leather sofa in his new restaurant, Gregory refuses to reveal the source of all this style. “People ask me all the time when they’ve seen something they’d like for their flat, but because everything is second hand there’s only a limited supply. I’m saying nothing.”