Roofnic creator Ashley Dawes launches Notch pop up roof top bar at Marriott Park Lane
Ashley Dawes, the talent behind Roofnic, is set to launch Notch on the rooftop of London's Marriott Park Lane hotel.
The new pop-up rooftop bar offers Japanese street food, pop cans of homemade cocktails in a space inspired by the millennial hotspots of Williamsburg and Berlin.
Accessed via a separate entrance off Oxford Street and designed as a sky-high industrial playground, Notch features an eclectic mix of reclaimed school tables, scaffolding and swings alongside a vibrant bar and open kitchen named Fudo Shack.
Notch follows in the wake of Dawes' hugely popular Roofnic pop-up bar, launched last year on the same roofspace, with an ambience inspired by British summer music festivals such as Latitude and Bestival.
Roofnic was developed by Dawes whilst still the restaurant and bar manager at London Marriott Park Lane, under Marriott's incubation programme Canvas project. The programme aims to transform and monetise unused spaces within hotels, challenging Marriott employees and local entrepreneurs to create distinctive and engaging restaurant and bar experiences, supported by experienced operational teams at Marriott.
The creator of each winning concept is offered a minimal budget of around £35,000 per project, to build and develop the restaurant or bar at chosen hotel locations.
Positioned as incubator labs, these restaurants sit outside Marriott's standard restaurant protocols in order to fully experiment with the design. Each project aims to transform perceptions of hotel restaurants and resonate with the younger millennial generation.
Following the success of Roofnic in 2015, which attracted queues around the block and turned over £500,000 revenue in just three months, Dawes set up DenLDN, a bar and restaurant consultancy, using the experience gained from taking part in the project as a springboard to launch his own business. Roofnic was one of four successful Canvas projects, three of which were launched with Marriott employees and one, in Hungary, with a local entrepreneur. Marriott now plans to expand Canvas to more sites across Europe this year.
Jeremy Dodson, F&B vice president at Marriott International Europe, said: "Innovation is high on the agenda for Marriott as we strive to connect with new audiences. We have already learnt so much from these initial pilots and I am so proud that Ashley has returned to Marriott to bring his Notch concept to life.
"By combining the creativity and passion of entrepreneurs with the scope and resources available in our hotels, we can create some truly extraordinary restaurant and bar experiences. Our goal is to empower fresh-thinking, passionate F&B professionals to test out their ideas using dead space within our hotel, inspiring those who visit our hotels but also challenging us to constantly re-think and innovate our F&B offering."
The other three pilot Canvas venues are St Pancras MI+ME, an urban cheese and charcuterie bar at St Pancras Renaissance hotel, London, launched by Andrew Nadin, F&B director at Renaissance St Pancras; #Hashtag Coffee Shop Berlin, situated in Marriott's Courtyard Berlin hotel and the Marionett Craft Beer House in Budapest, masterminded by a local entrepreneur, Imre Toth, following a community competition.
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