Located on Peckham Rye Lane, Issa Vibe is a bar and event space offering excellent food and sweet yet strong cocktails.
Tunde Aderonmu heads it up alongside two ‘silent’ partners. Partners who are in actual fact, good friends – and that becomes apparent as soon as you walk through the doors. A light-hearted, welcoming greeting awaits with all the sprinklings of lad banter you’d expect from friends who go way back, but not without making you feel as though you’re part of the crew, too.
Tunde explains to me how he started Issa Vibe:
“My group of friends and I, we’ve always love food. We got to the stage when raving became dead; we were getting too old to be raving every weekend. But we’ve always had time for food. We wanted to start a business and at first thought to run a nursery. But what we really wanted was a business we could all hang out at, so a bar and restaurant made sense.
We wanted to collectively use our mums’ recipes to inspire the restaurant, and as most of us are Nigerian we initially thought to serve Naija food. In the end though, we decided on a menu full of food we love to eat ourselves, and cocktails that aren’t watered down. Naming the bar was the easy part: Issa Vibe reflects the atmosphere we always seek.”
I can vouch for the vibe being just right. One of my friends had what she said would be a little link up for her birthday, but it really was more like a lock-in shoobs with the cocktails flooowing. What Tunde wanted from the drinks rang true too: I recommend the Issa Vibe daiquiri. It most definitely had a shot-and-a-half of Wray & Nephew rum, as promised!
Issa Vibe, 181 Rye Lane, Peckham, London SE15 4TP.
OpenWednesday + Thursday 12–3pm then 4–10pm, Friday 12–3pm then 4pm–12am Saturday 12pm–12am and Sunday 1–10pm. Closed Mondays + Tuesdays.