Auguste opens in Hackney with Abruzzese trattoria register

May 12. Auguste opened in London Fields, occupying the former site of a Hackney favorite. The teams behind Elm and Bambi funded the project without outside capital, a detail worth noting in a year where most restaurant openings arrive with investor decks attached.

The menu centers Abruzzo, the Italian region known for flame-grilled meat and mountainside trattoria discipline. The kitchen runs wood-fired, the menu skews toward arrosticini (lamb skewers), porchetta, and antipasti that arrive charred. The wine list pulls from small Abruzzese producers, the kind that show up on dealer lists but rarely on London menus.

The room reads theatrical in the Edward Hopper sense: high ceilings, warm lighting that pools at the tables, long sightlines. The design team kept the bones of the previous tenant but reset the palette toward ochre, terracotta, and darker wood. The bar runs the length of one wall, a proper stage for pre-dinner Negronis and post-dinner amaro. Seating capacity is around 50, small enough that the room feels full at 40.

Wallpaper* flagged the Hopper reference in its write-up, which is accurate but also the kind of reference that gets overused. Still, the sightlines hold. From the back booth, you can watch the kitchen flame-grill through a half-open pass, the kind of visual rhythm that makes a room feel alive without trying.

The move here is self-funding at a moment when most London openings are either backed by a group or waiting on a second round. Auguste's team skipped the pitch process entirely, which means the menu answers to the kitchen, not to a deck. That shows in the specificity: this is Abruzzese cooking, not "Italian" in the broad sense that dilutes most new trattorias.

The opening landed without the usual PR blitz. No soft launch, no influencer seeding, no pre-opening Instagram countdown. The door opened, the room filled, and the word spread through the kind of quiet channels that matter more than a feed post. That's the tell that Auguste knows its audience.