Popular pizza and Italian food pop-up Forza Win has secured a
permanent restaurant site. Dispensa will open in a former cash and carry in Peckham on 4 July, serving spiede (Italian skewered meat) and spritz to drink.
It’s the latest project from founder Bash Redford (pictured right), and follows in the footsteps of rooftop pizzas in the City, a winter fondue
fest, and communal meat grill CUTS last summer, which Redford ran alongside farmers-turned-butchers Ginger Pig.
Dispensa will be open evenings from Thursday to Sunday as well as for weekend brunches throughout July and August.
The restaurant will have 70 covers and customers will all be sat around a communal table. A single starter of fresh orecchiette pasta with lovage pesto will be followed by skewers of vegetables,
pork and chicken served in big buckets, and large bowls of salad to share. Desserts have not yet been finalised but will be ‘something creamy and cold’, Redford tells us. Every course will come
with the option of a free top up, which should please the hungry.
Natural wine and an array of spritz will be served to accompany the food, alongside a Birra Moretti beer vending machine.
Tickets must be bought in advance for evening sittings at Dispensa, with all food and one spritz included in the £25 price. They are available to buy here.
Brunches do not need to be booked, and will feature unlimited Bloody Marys and whole sides of bacon cooked on a wood fire.
Beyond August, the plan is for Dispensa to open for just one weekend of each month on a pop-up basis. Redford explains, ‘there are
loads of ideas we have wanted to do for a while, but which don’t warrant an extended pop-up, so this is our chance to try them out’. Ideas for future dinners include a Milanese theme, and cooking a
whole 25 kilo ‘baron of beef’ for 12.5 hours. Redford tells us that all the future pop-ups will ‘be based around Forza Win’s four key principles: Italian cooking, British seasonal produce, a wood
fire, and using just a few ingredients’.
When events are not running, Dispensa will be available for private hire, and Forza Win will continue to run pop-ups in other locations across London. Later this year, Redford will also launch his
first Forza Win event outside London, on the roof of the former Granada television studios in Manchester.
Published 25 June 2014.