Tony Conigliaro on first restaurant Gazelle, overpriced cocktails and being 'a flavourist'

It's nearly 10 years since Tony Conigliaro opened 69 Colebrooke Row — a tiny bar on a backstreet in Islington that became world-famous for its wildly creative cocktails.

His influence on the drinks world has been felt ever since — in projects like Soho coffee-and-negronis pitstop Bar Termini, the award-winning bar at Zetter Townhouse, his Hackney biker café Jim’s Café and Untitled, a gallery-cum-drinking den in Dalston where cocktails that taste of snow and cut grass are served at a five-metre slab of polished concrete.

Next week Conigliaro will change things once more when he debuts Gazelle, his Mayfair bar and restaurant with ex-El Bulli chef Rob Roy Cameron. Squirreled away above a posh shoe shop on Albemarle Street, just a stone’s throw from The Ritz, Gazelle will be Conigliaro’s first foray into fine dining. And his first taste of doing business in Mayfair.

“I think Mayfair has suffered from a bit of a reputation for being overpriced, sleazy and masculine,” he says, “but I liked the challenge of creating somewhere my friends in art and fashion could go, where you got excellent service, but which is fun, relaxed and maybe a bit more female-friendly.”

Conigliaro was offered the site by Tropheum, the property developer behind a recent influx of new businesses on Albemarle Street including Self Portrait, Boodles and Indian Accent.

“They already had the site but they gave me free reign with the concept, otherwise I wouldn’t have done it,” says Conigliaro.

Gazelle’s 60-cover restaurant on the first floor will eventually open for breakfast, lunch and dinner, and interior designer Shaun Clarkson has filled the place with colour and natural light, which pours in from three tall windows overlooking the street.

A large spiral staircase at the back then leads up to a more moody, midnight-blue bar full of decadent silks and velvets. “We wanted it to feel like a transition from day to night,” says Conigliaro.

The restaurant menu reads, at first glance, as very Mayfair — it’s littered with oysters and wagyu beef and caviar. But Conigliaro and Cameron — who met through chef Albert Adrià (brother of El Bulli’s Ferran) — have reinterpreted these ingredients in a way that’s modern-luxe rather than lavish.

“I come from a very technical background and I’ve worked in restaurants where you put down the food in front of the guest and they look at you and say: ‘What do I do now?’” says Cameron, who also created the bar menu for Untitled (which impressed the Standard’s Fay Maschler).

“That’s not what we want to do here. We’ve kept the dishes light, with clean, simple and sometimes bold flavours which showcase ingredients in new ways. No unnecessary frills.”

The bill of mix-and-match sharing plates includes a sweet-and-sour ceviche of charcoal-cured halibut, blood orange and pickled elderflower, and juniper-smoked wagyu beef scattered with salted plum dust.

When it comes to drinks, champagne is the star of the show. A carefully chosen list of prestige cuvées and cult growers is complimented by six twists on the champagne cocktail with home-made ingredients.

“I was always interested in what people were doing in the food world, trying to bridge that gap,” says Conigliaro, who has a track record of collaborating with chefs including Heston Blumenthal and Bruno Loubet.

“Am I a bartender, a mixologist, a chef? I guess I’m more of a flavourist."

Prices at Gazelle start at £12 for a cocktail and range from £7-£25 for a main — not bad for Mayfair.

“If you charge £20 for a cocktail the kind of person who would probably enjoy it is not going to come,” says Conigliaro.

A few years ago a restaurant like Gazelle might have seemed a bit of a step too far in the more traditional environs of Mayfair. But with newcomers such as Ollie Dabbous’s Hide and Experimental Cocktail Club’s Chess Club now bringing a new buzz to the area, its timing could be just right.

“Our philosophy has always been to look at a neighbourhood and ask ourselves: ‘What does it need?’,” says Conligliaro. “We want to do a different thing every time.”

48 Albermarle Street, W1S 4DH, gazelle-mayfair.com