Matthew Slotover

You've got to do a restaurant.

And he said, well, you do it.

We'd always wanted to do a restaurant.

Before we did Freeze, in fact, at university, Amanda and I, we used to go to Paris and see the amazing restaurants there, and London food was not great in 1987.

We'd thought about doing a restaurant together before doing Freeze.

And so it had always been in the back of our minds, but luckily we didn't do it because I think the art world served us very well and I'm not sure.

I think restaurants are tough.

But we had this space and we thought, all right, we'll do it.

We'll open a restaurant.

Let's, you know, we're not so busy anymore.

And so we opened in 21 and we made every mistake you could possibly make.

And, you know, it was a horror story for BuildUp.

We did it during COVID and we didn't know what we were doing and we hired all the wrong people.

But anyway, now it's really good.

And one of the first things we did when we opened was someone said, well, you know, Vicente Tadoli has this citrus farm.

And I'd heard about it.

So Vicente used to be director of Tate Modern for seven years.

And we knew him from Tate.

And he's currently director of Hang a Big Hocker in Milan, which is like double the size of Tate Modern.

It's an amazing space if you ever go to Milan.