Sunday 21 December 2025, 7.30pm
Please note that advance booking is essential for entry to the full event, including a five-course feasting menu (plant-based and gluten-free) with live performances.
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 of “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…
Thea, OTO’s chief culinarian, and On Yee will be manning the kitchen for the occasion. South London's realist-experimentalist Dale Cornish is performing a live set for the evening. As finale, join us for Karaoke hosted by Ash Reid! We are dedicating this menu 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.
PROGRAMME
FIVE-COURSE FEASTING MENU BY THEA SANDS AND ON YEE LO
Root Vegetable Pakora with Pear and Tamarind Chutney
Warm Potato Noodles with Gochujang, Tahini and Crispy Sprouts in Mustard Oil
Baked Kale and Herb Dumplings in Pumpkin Sauce
Ethiopian Greens with Black Cardamom and Ginger
Sweet Adzuki Bean and Pumpkin Black Sesame Tangyuan
At the bar:
Jujube and Goji Berry Mulled Cider (Alcohol-free option available)
The Feasting Menu is 100% plant-based and gluten-free.
Most dishes devised using organic, seasonal and locally grown produce from Growing Communities.
Live solo set by Dale Cornish
Karaoke Finale hosted by Ash Reid
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 a cook, artist and gardener from Paisley. She combines the three in a practice that seeks to feed back into the earth through careful cyclic use of materials found across the kitchen and garden. She runs a low waste, organic kitchen at Cafe OTO, devising affordable, seasonal, nourishing menus using produce she grows at Growing Communities’ urban farms; and uses food/plant scraps to make natural dyes, ink, photographic developers and print emulsions. She studied music at Clare College Cambridge and collects field recordings which inform her own improvisations on tape and occasional performances. She is drawn to visceral imperfect bodily forms, marled, messy, muddy textures, early music, bells, overtones, drones, domestic and folkloric rituals and the dark theatricality of sacred spaces which seep into her photography, drawings, video and sound works. She is interested in dissecting and collaging together the ingredients, materials, tools, sights and sounds experienced across her intensely physical and sensory work as a cook and gardener into a strange, deformed and surreal light that feeds her reality.
She writes recipes for Infant Tree’s regular newsletter and keeps a personal website of images and writing.
https://theasands.wixsite.com/photography
Native South Londoner Dale Cornish explores the edges of and similarities between experimental music, electroacoustic and dance music. Since being part of the London electroclash movement at the beginning of the 21st century, Cornish has carved out a singular path that both combines and distorts experimental and club music sounds and tropes into new and unusual forms. Cornish’s output includes five albums for Entr’acte and several editions for The Tapeworm. New album ‘Altruism’, his second for Manchester’s The Death Of Rave, follows his celebrated work ‘Traditional Music of South London’ from 2022.
Ash Reid is a performer and sometime writer, avid texter, current bar tender and former thought owner
