Cabana

Cabana is one of the newest concepts to come to London. A Brazilian barbeque at heart, it’s the brain child of Jamie Barber, the man behind Hush, Villandry and Kitchen Italia, and Momo co-founder David Ponte. In the past year, they’ve secured two high-profile London sites: one in Westfield Stratford City, the other in the Renzo Piano-designed Central St. Giles development alongside Jamie Oliver’s flagship Union Jacks restaurant and burger chain Byron.

Central St. Giles is a combination of office developments, residential areas and retail outlets, centred around an open public piazza. Cabana occupies a 3,430 sq. ft. glass-fronted site, designed by

architects Michaelis Boyd to give an urban and equally authentic Brazilian feel: seating upholstered with recycled denim, bespoke Cabana prints plastering the walls, and brightly-coloured kites fixed in mid-air. But the food is the real focal point here. Trained front-of-house staff, or ‘Cabanistas’, circle the room serving barbequed skewers fresh from the open grill, and carving them at the table in front of the diners.

Developing a solution to suit a new concept is always challenging: as ideas and designs change, we have to be able to adapt our products to suit the requirements. Central St. Giles, however, was particularly so.

Low-level extracts, a barbeque grill open to the restaurant, and a back-of-house cook line to balance with the system meant that this project required a whole host of specialist equipment and bespoke canopies – within a ten week timeframe.

We installed Electrostatic Precipitators and Ultra-Violet filtration to eliminate all perceptible traces of grease, smoke and odour from the extract emissions before they are discharged through the louvers. But the piece de resistance, from our perspective, is the bespoke front-of-house canopy suspended from a seven metre high ceiling and exposed to the entire restaurant.