Noche Cubana – a flawed triumph.

A flawed triumph, a glittering disaster…the UK launch of Slow Music was certainly a night to remember,  a magnificent shipwreck of an event which went down giggling with all handsbrandishing empty rum bottles.

The idea was a serious attempt to bring Slow succour to a musical rare breed, the supper club band, by combining a particularly distinctive practitioner with food, drink and surroundings of outstanding compatibility. The nine-piece Cuban band Son del Tropico, in London to play the Barbican, was hi-jacked on its free night and bussed down the M4 to join a specially created Cuban menu by Chris Wicks of Bells Diner and a couple of Bristol’s best cocktail barmen in the promising interior of a nightclub which, in spite of its unpromising name, consisted of a tolerably preserved 1930s cinema. Ticket sales started sluggishly, and Chris planned at first for 50 meals, later increasing this to 90.

Then three hundred and fifty people turned up and all hell broke loose. Chris heroically turned out 120 dishes of delights such as Creole pork with okra, black beans and rice and plantain and parsley tortilla, but could have shifted three times that. The bar, besieged, ran dry. The band was too loud, but the assembled convivialists just pulled back the tables and danced.  A handful of people complained, very reasonably, that this was not the soigne affair they’d been led to expect, but far more simply revelled in it. The Telegraph’s food writer left enthusing wildly, and next day the Real Food Lover blog concluded “great music and dancing may be the missing ingredient to Slow Food”.

So we will persist. The Escargophone production staff are even now considering themes for the next Slow Music Night: a cucumber sandwich and the tea dance workshop is current favourite, with death metal and balti a close second.