Last week I went to The Little Yellow Door 🚪💛for their 'Wednesdays - Kitchen Supper and Cocktails.' 🍝🍹 I think I should get things straight first, as it is important. This is NOT someones actual flat, and they are not cooking you supper - it's being labelled as a 'pop up bar, based on a fictional flatshare' and unfortunately none of it really works. (I think I am about to write my first, not so nice post - I was really quite intrigued and excited to visit this place, and it was just quite a disappointment 😔)From the website lulling you into supposing you might get a homemade meal 🍝, whilst meeting other interesting people 👧👦👩 sitting around a kitchen table, to that fact that it looks like a poorly arranged squat inside 📻📚 , there was really nothing hugely appealing about The Little Yellow Door - apart from the fact it is right next to Notting Hill tube station, and the door is yellow 💛(at least they got that bit right).You put your name on the guest list 📝, you arrive 🚅, a bouncer 🎩 lets you pass through, up the stairs you go 🚶and your in 💃. It's one room, with a bar at one end and the 'tree house' 🌳at the other - this is a sort of built in cubby hole and is fairly entertaining, for a while. It's decorated as though someone has let loose their slightly arty 14 year old 👦🎨 - not necessarily a bad thing - I enjoyed the tree with blossom painted across one wall 🌸🌳. The 'kitchen supper and cocktail' for £15 was a 'house cocktail', some chicken wings 🐥 and a sort of chicken slider. We were hungry and we ate 🍔and we drank 🍹, but trying to get another drink was an absolute nightmare. Until later on in the evening there seemed to be one waitress, and the poor girl was having to squeeze herself in and out of all the people - as it was full, with no where near enough places to sit.There were fun touches, the menu was on the back of a CD case 💽 (we were very confused to start with) and some of the drinks came in jam jars 🍹 with the labels still on (kooky... or just lazy?) - even in our house we manage to take the label off before reusing the jam jar.But perhaps I am being a bit unfair 😏.I had a romantic vision of a supper club, sitting around a table being served some home cooked food amongst friends and strangers. And I don't think I would have minded that it wasn't actually in someones flat, if this had been the case.And as a bar, it was a nice change - it had a fun 'living as a student vibe' 🎨🍷📚, with everything a bit makeshift and rough around the edges. And maybe I'm just the wrong age - as a student it might just be a really cool venue, if your a bit older you can reminisce about when you were once young and drank wine straight from the bottle 🍷, and then go home and be thankful your living room doesn't look like that anymore (although you do, very very occasionally, still drink wine from the bottle, because you know, glasses are a faff to wash 🍷🍷). And maybe I have just been to too many 'trying to be different bars', but I think maybe we all have now, and it's important to get it really really right, Pop Brixton for instance, has some super spaces.It just didn't work that well for me 😔 - there was no queue to get in, so that was nice, and it is very easy to get to and find. But if you want to go to a bar that looks like someones living room go to Passing Clouds on Kingsland Road. I don't know if it's still there, but if you find your way upstairs in this place, it is marvellous - they've done it properly, you could quite easily be in someones eclectic house (maybe you are, I had had a couple of drinks when I discovered this super space).I'm not saying don't go - if you want a weekday outing that's a bit different, it definitely is, but I'm not sure I would go there for the experience, drinks or food alone, and perhaps it needs to work a bit better on it's package as a whole 😃.Thank you for having me!Alice xxx
