Wine importers Joe Haynes and Ben Butterworth partner with chef Tom Hurst to launch Farringdon restaurant

Located within a Grade II-listed building on Cloth Street, Cloth will have a bar area offering drinks and snacks from 12pm until close alongside a more formal restaurant that will be open for lunch and dinner. 

Hurst’s menus will ‘celebrate the best of British produce’ with example dishes including Cornish squid, black olive, preserved lemon and lardo; Somerset hogget, grilled cos lettuce, smoked tongue and anchovy; and rhubarb sorbet with blood orange caramel. 

He has a cooking CV that includes high-profile London restaurants Brawn, The Marksman, Levan, Salon and Larry’s. He was most recently head chef at Southbank restaurant Lasdun.

Haynes and Butterworth have spent a number of years supplying London’s top restaurants through their separate wine businesses. 

Around half the wine list at Cloth will be made up of bottles from Haynes’ Penzer Wines and Butterworth’s eponymous import and supply businesses. Butterworth specialises in grower champagnes and new-wave Bordeaux, but also represents winemakers from Alsace, Burgundy, Beaujolais, Loire and Luxembourg. 

Haynes portfolio leans more towards Germany, having worked in wine production and farming for several years and studied winemaking at Geisenheim.

The other 50% of the list will be made up of wines from friends in the industry with the shared ethos of championing small, independent, and sustainable producers, such as Emile Wines, The Winery, Fingal Rock, Carte Blanche, Winemakers Club and Raeburn. There will be a constantly rotating by-the-glass list with specials under Coravin and lots of old and rare bottles. 

Cloth is due to open this spring, with an exact opening date and further details to be announced soon.