{"id":27342,"date":"2026-09-15T19:38:17","date_gmt":"2026-09-15T19:38:17","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.diningandcooking.com\/restaurants\/27342\/"},"modified":"2026-09-15T19:38:17","modified_gmt":"2026-09-15T19:38:17","slug":"aj-records-is-a-rapper-backed-french-restaurant-bar-and-music-studio-taking-the-hakkasan-hanway-place-space-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.diningandcooking.com\/restaurants\/27342\/","title":{"rendered":"AJ Records is a rapper-backed French restaurant, bar and music studio taking the Hakkasan Hanway Place space"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>    <img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/www.diningandcooking.com\/restaurants\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/ajrecords.jpg\" itemprop=\"image\" alt=\"AJ Records is a rapper-backed French restaurant, bar and music studio taking the hakkasan Hanway Place space\" width=\"1500\" height=\"1000\"\/><\/p>\n<p>Nearly two years after the original Hakkasan at Hanway Place closed, a new restaurant and bar are getting ready to open in its place, and it&#8217;ll be quite a change.<\/p>\n<p>AJ Records is being billed as an &#8220;Urban Culture Dining Club&#8221;, and it&#8217;s brought in a French rapper as one of the partners. It&#8217;s going to be a southern French restaurant, a late-night cocktail bar, a live music venue and will even boast a &#8220;state-of-the-art recording studio&#8221;.<\/p>\n<p>On the food side, there will be a large restaurant, with room for 160 diners. At this point, all we know is that it will serve Southern French cuisine and there will be a fair bit of table service (as well as a dessert trolley). We&#8217;ll have more news of that menu closer to the opening date. There&#8217;s also going to be a 12-seat chef&#8217;s table and a separate cocktail bar.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>The entertainment will be a big part of things and they&#8217;re apparently in the process of getting &#8220;a collective of performers, lyricists and producers&#8221; to pull that together. They do say that from 5-8pm, there will be acoustic sets alongside early dinner, and the music will build through the night from there. They have a 3am licence, so they&#8217;ll be keeping that party going.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>Behind the whole enterprise are\u00a0co-founders Josephine Garreau (who is also an actress) and Alexandre Santamaria (who previously worked at Hakkasan globally). Joining them is\u00a0French rapper and producer Dinos, and he&#8217;s going to be the music director (as well as partner).\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>It&#8217;s early days on this one, so we&#8217;ll have more news closer to the opening in 2027.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>\u00a0<\/p>\n<p class=\"subheading\">More about AJ Records<\/p>\n<p>Where is it?\u00a08 Hanway Pl, London W1T 1HD<\/p>\n<p>When does it open?\u00a0Spring 2027<\/p>\n<p>Find out more: Follow them on Instagram\u00a0@ajrecords_london.<\/p>\n<p>\u00a0<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: center;\">Subscribe to be the first to get the news from Hot Dinners<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Nearly two years after the original Hakkasan at Hanway Place closed, a new restaurant and bar are getting ready to open in its place, and it&#8217;ll be quite a change. AJ Records is being billed as an &#8220;Urban Culture Dining Club&#8221;, and it&#8217;s brought in a French rapper as one of the partners. It&#8217;s going<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":27182,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[45,46],"class_list":["post-27342","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-french-restaurants","tag-french-restaurant","tag-french-restaurants"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/vive.im\/@dnc\/117276746975303199","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.diningandcooking.com\/restaurants\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27342","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.diningandcooking.com\/restaurants\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.diningandcooking.com\/restaurants\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.diningandcooking.com\/restaurants\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.diningandcooking.com\/restaurants\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=27342"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.diningandcooking.com\/restaurants\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27342\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.diningandcooking.com\/restaurants\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/27182"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.diningandcooking.com\/restaurants\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=27342"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.diningandcooking.com\/restaurants\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=27342"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.diningandcooking.com\/restaurants\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=27342"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}