A diary entry on The Waterhouse Project’s closure and its reopening weeks later as Waterhouse in Hackney, London’s brutal restaurant closure year, and what it means when an ending turns out not to be one
I cried a genuinely embarrassing amount when The Waterhouse Project closed back in June, the kind of small, tasting-menu restaurant I’d built an actual emotional relationship with over three years of quietly obsessive returns, and I want to be honest that I wrote something close to an elegy for it in my own notes before I ever found out, weeks later, that the closure wasn’t quite the ending I’d assumed it was.
What I Actually Believed Was Happening In June
London’s had a genuinely brutal run of restaurant closures this year, the kind of list that keeps growing every time I check it, Mriya, Sambal Shiok, Flat Earth, restaurant after restaurant citing the same structural cost pressures, rising VAT, rising National Insurance contributions, staffing costs, energy bills that simply don’t pencil out anymore for small independent operations. When The Waterhouse Project’s closure came through, I filed it mentally under that same grim, familiar category without a second thought.
What Actually Turned Out To Be True Instead
Gabriel Waterhouse and Patricia Wakaimba, the couple behind the original restaurant, were quietly relocating rather than closing for good, moving the whole operation to a considerably larger space in Hackney, a restored Victorian warehouse with room for both the original tasting menu concept and an entirely new wine bar opening alongside it. I found this out almost by accident, scrolling a restaurant newsletter I nearly deleted unread.
The Specific, Slightly Ridiculous Relief I Felt Reading That News
I actually laughed out loud, alone in my kitchen, the particular relief of discovering a grief you’d fully processed turned out to be premature. I’d genuinely mourned this place. I’d told friends about its closure with the specific finality you reserve for something actually gone. Discovering it wasn’t gone at all required a genuinely strange emotional recalibration I hadn’t expected to need this year.
What I Actually Found Walking Into The New Space This Week
Considerably larger than the original, obviously, with an open kitchen and a proper garden supplying herbs and flowers for the dishes, a scale of ambition the original cramped space could never have physically accommodated. My first instinct, honestly, was a small flicker of proprietary sadness, mourning the intimacy of the old twenty-four-seat room even while sitting inside its genuinely exciting expansion.
Whether The Actual Food Justified This More Ambitious New Chapter
Completely, and I want to be specific about why. The tasting menu retained exactly the seasonal, Northumbrian-leaning identity that made the original restaurant special, Lindisfarne oysters, hand-dived scallops, hogget prepared with the same careful restraint I remembered, but executed now with a confidence and polish the old, more constrained kitchen genuinely couldn’t have delivered at the same consistent level.
What This Specific Story Reveals About A Genuinely Difficult Year For London Hospitality
Most of the closures I’ve watched this year haven’t had this kind of second act, they’ve simply ended, chefs moving on to other projects or leaving the industry altogether, spaces sitting empty or converting into something else entirely. Waterhouse’s actual survival, disguised for weeks as another entry on the closure list, feels like a genuinely rare, hopeful exception in a year that’s otherwise offered painfully few of them.
The New Wine Bar I’m Already Planning To Return For
Opening separately in early September, apparently, which gives me a genuine excuse to book again before autumn even properly arrives, something I wouldn’t have imagined doing back in June when I thought I’d already had my last meal at this specific restaurant’s original incarnation.
What I’ve Actually Learned From Getting This Wrong The First Time
To sit with restaurant news a little longer before filing it into my mental list of permanent losses, given how genuinely blurry the line between closure and relocation has apparently become in an industry this financially strained, where even a beloved restaurant’s ending sometimes turns out to be a beginning wearing a closure notice’s clothes. I’m glad, properly glad, to have been wrong about this one.
The Conversation With Gabriel Waterhouse Himself That Actually Explained The Confusion
I got talking to him briefly near the end of the meal, and he explained, with a kind of tired but genuine patience, that the original closure announcement had been deliberately vague, partly for practical lease reasons that weren’t fully resolved at the time, partly because he genuinely hadn’t wanted to promise a reopening he couldn’t yet guarantee would actually happen. He’d watched enough colleagues announce ambitious relaunches that never materialised, and he didn’t want to add his own name to that particular, painful pattern if the Hackney deal had fallen through at the last minute.
Why I Think This Caution Is Actually The Right Read Of This Whole Difficult Year
Given how many other closures on this year’s list genuinely were final, no quiet relocation waiting in the wings, I understand now why he chose ambiguity over false hope. Announcing a confident reopening and then having to walk it back would have done considerably more damage to loyal regulars like me than the temporary grief I actually experienced believing, wrongly, that the restaurant was simply gone.
What I’m Actually Doing With This Whole Experience Going Forward
Booking the new wine bar the moment reservations open in September, obviously, but also holding a slightly more measured, patient posture toward the next closure announcement that crosses my feed, resisting the urge to immediately write the elegy before I actually know which category of ending I’m looking at.