Sunday 21 December 2025, 7.30pm
Our third HOSTING is marked on this year’s Winter Solstice. Equally symbolic and celebrated like Christmas across many cultures, we’re compiling a menu that reminds us “HOME” - honouring the day’s significance with a long-held feast and communal gathering.
With recipe inspirations sourced from the extended OTO community, expect all-time festive favourites, signature family recipes, proud heritage ingredients and spices, and the nostalgic dishes we grew up with…
On Yee, and Thea, OTO’s Chief Culinarian, will be manning the cooker for the occasion. We are dedicating this menu especially to those who are spending the holiday season away from their family or home country.
“HOSTING”, initiated by On Yee Lo, is a series of “socials” encompassing food, music and communal activities, in which artists and musicians take over the OTO kitchen for a single evening to experiment with modes of hospitality. Previous hosts include Sholto Dobie, Will Peers and Judith Hamann.
Full programme and menu to announce shortly. Please note that advance booking is essential for entry to the full event, including a vegetarian feasting menu and live performances by special guests.
London-based multidisciplinary artist and cook On Yee Lo (b. Hong Kong), creates and constructs ‘Cooking Instruments’- physical systems where common meals are prepared and consumed which encompass gestures, labour and hospitality. Her performances fold together with experiences of working as both cook and musician within the experimental music communities. These systems unravel her research in culinary techniques and open transformative processes across a variety of social settings. She has exhibited and performed her work at Counterflows Festival Glasgow, LUFF - Lausanne Underground Film & Music Festival, SCHIRN Kunsthalle Frankfurt, Cafe OTO, Ikon Gallery, ICA London, Camden Art Centre, Bloomberg New Contemporaries and ARTISSIMA Turin.
Thea is an improvising cook and artist from Paisley. She takes to Cafe OTO’s stove most days, devising seasonal, affordable dishes using locally grown, organic produce with next to no food waste. She takes culinary inspiration from her time working with cooks from all over the world at Migrateful’s Cookery School.
She is interested in combining cooking with art and uses vegetables and plant matter to make inks, paint, dyes, print emulsions and plant-based photographic developers to make images with. Her current photographic project focuses on the sensory experience of cooking, eating and preparing food, highlighting the surreal, bodily textures, shapes and colours of vegetables, alongside visceral writing and recipes.
She graduated in music from Clare College Cambridge in 2019 and has performed at The Horse Hospital and Avalon Cafe. She collects field recordings of natural resonances, strange anecdotes, snippets of classical music, church bells and sacred places and keeps lists of bizarre phrases which inform her own improvisations on tape.
She contributes recipes to Infant Tree’s regular newsletter and keeps a personal website of images and writing.
