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Wine and ice-cream – two things that spark joy, though rarely simultaneously. But at The Dreamery, an otherworldly new wine bar and ice-cream parlour in leafy De Beauvoir Town, north London, they come together magically.
The pint-sized bar is the work of Alex Young and George de Vos, also the creators of Goodbye Horses, a convivial natural wine bar and restaurant on the same street that proved one of the underground hits of 2024. Around the same time, the pair also launched Day Trip, an artisan coffee shop in the same building. “Both George and I see creating hospitality venues as creating worlds in themselves,” says Young, who used to work in tech. “We wanted to create a little village, an ecosystem that has a feeling of escapism.”
Ice-cream and wine can be a tricky match from a purely technical point of view, as the sweetness of the former can make the latter taste flat. But whatever nuance is lost in the pairing is far outweighed by the spirit of fun it creates. “Our approach to pairing is rather anarchic,” admits Young.
There’s an improvisational feel to the whole enterprise – yet there are some significant names behind the scenes. Goodbye Horses was designed by the Swiss architect Leopold Banchini, who also has a permanent installation at the Centre Pompidou. The courtyard garden at Day Trip was created by garden designer Jihae Hwang, who has won several gold medals at the Chelsea Flower Show. Head of wine at Goodbye Horses is Nathalie Nelles, formerly of Noble Fine Liquor. De Vos himself was formerly GM of Brilliant Corners, a music venue and Japanese restaurant in Dalston.
The Dreamery is housed in an ex-grocer’s shop. There is no sign outside – just a steamed-up three-paned window filled with animated silhouettes against a wash of colourful lights. The front door looks just like any other on the Victorian terraced street; but then you notice the stoop, which is painted, slightly spookily, with rune-like suns, moons and birds. Inside, it has the bones of an espresso bar – there are stainless-steel counters and mirrored walls. But the eye is drawn to the ceiling, where a dazzling backlit mural by artist Lucy Stein fills the space with colour. In the corner, a 1980s-style boombox plays whimsical Studio Ghibli scores.
Goodbye Horses chef Jack Coggins makes all the ice-creams, which are chalked up in marker pen on the wall: on my visit they included fig leaf, prune & oolong tea, gingerbread and pear and verjus sorbet (£4 per scoop). There’s no printed drinks list, which will irritate some, but there’s a small, regularly changing selection of easy-drinking, “glou-glou” wines: sparkling rosé moscato; crunchy, red-berry beaujolais served cool; Alsatian riesling and one or two dessert wines (from £7.50 a glass). The emphasis is on natural and low-intervention producers.
I squeeze in at the bar and order a post-prandial scoop of coffee and butterscotch, and a glass of tawny passito moscato by Cascina Cerutti, which is caramelised and nutty; my friend has the fig-leaf ice-cream and a glass of lychee-scented riesling. Both wines have a degree of natural sweetness and so the end result is actually lovely.
The ice-cream comes in a stemmed steel gelato cup, like you might see in a cartoon. The wine glasses are printed with a crescent moon eating an ice-cream cone by Stein. Her folkloric illustrations are also a centrepiece of the more naturalistic Goodbye Horses across the street; they run the full length of the 10m bar and weave their way down the gauzy curtains. “There’s a sort of childlike quality to Lucy’s work,” says Young, “like you’re seeing things with fresh eyes.”
One influence for The Dreamery was the Paris bar Folderol, a fashionable glacerie-bar-à-vin in the 11th arrondissement. Young also tips his hat to GlouGlou in Amsterdam, “which has a big by-the-glass selection and is fun and easy-going in a way that wine bars often aren’t”. “The real guiding principle for all our bars is that we just want people to have a really nice time,” he says. “And I don’t think there’s anything more fun and joyous than eating ice-cream and drinking wine.”