The Restaurant That Wants You to Drink Wine & Actually Stay Too Long: Inside Auguste

In an industry often obsessed with prestige, perfection, and white tablecloth performance, Auguste is doing something different. Hidden in the heart of London Fields, the restaurant founded by Dylan Walters and Michael Bagnall feels less like a traditional dining destination and more like an ongoing creative experiment; one built on Abruzzese cuisine, community, nostalgia, theatre, and a healthy disregard for convention. Inspired by Edward Hopper's Soir Bleu, the philosophy of the Auguste clown, and a desire to challenge the hierarchies that have long defined fine dining, the pair have created a space where people linger over wine in the sun, eat arrosticini with their hands, and are invited to enjoy hospitality without the performance that often accompanies it.

We sat down with Dylan to discuss the story behind Auguste, the influence of Abruzzo, building a restaurant from scratch, collaborating with artists, the role of music in the creative process, and why sometimes the best restaurants begin with little more than a great idea, a lot of plywood, and a refusal to follow the rules.

TAYLOR: Tell me a bit about your backgrounds and where your love for cooking and hospitality stemmed from.

DYLAN: In terms of how Mike and I first met, I started a talent agency for chefs during a brief hiatus from the hospitality industry. I would connect chefs with brands for PR events, dinners, and things like that. Mike was the first chef we added to the roster, and then we decided to open a restaurant together.

I’m used to speaking on his behalf and learned a lot about his story, too. He was born in Australia and traveled the world cooking before he settled in London about six or seven years ago, maybe a little longer. On the way here, he stopped in Abruzzo, a region in central Italy. It’s criminally underrepresented in food and in London. There are maybe two restaurants that are Abruzzese, or consider themselves that. We are one of them. Although he’s not Italian and neither am I, we’re doing an Italian concept. But it’s very much justified because he spent so much time there. He had a stepmother figure named Janine who was like an old-school Italian nonna and taught him how to cook. It’s a dear cuisine to him, and now we’re using that as the foundation for the restaurant.

In terms of me, I spent a long time using hospitality as a means to subsidise another career, which I feel a lot of people do. You meet a lot of people in the industry who are using it as a stepping stone or using its flexibility to create space to practice until they can monetize their creative output. For me, that was music and trying to become a full-time musician for a while. I lived in LA for about nine or ten months creating music there. I ended up falling in love with hospitality for the same reasons I love music: that vicarious joy you get from making other people happy.

TAYLOR: Amazing. That answer actually encapsulated a lot of the questions I’m going to ask you. From what I’ve researched, Auguste is very artistic and collaborative with other artists. The restaurant is inspired by Edward Hopper’s Soir Bleu, with the clown figure representing rebellion against traditional dining hierarchies. When did you first come across this painting, and how does its significance translate into Auguste?

DYLAN: To be upfront, we knew about the food concept pretty far in advance. Mike had been settled on that for a while. When we found out about the restaurant, the only things we needed were a name and some kind of dining concept. I knew that I wanted to base the feel of the restaurant on a kind of Parisian, European-style dining experience. I wanted it to feel like you weren’t rushed, so that you could have aperitivo cocktails before your meal. I wanted it to have nice wine and a kind of youthful, creative energy to it, all of which we’ve achieved pretty well in a short amount of time.

The other day, we had people drinking bottles of wine outside, sitting in the sun. It definitely felt like you’d just walked onto a Parisian backstreet, which is exactly what we wanted. We spoke about our dislike of Michelin stars and the dining hierarchy of some restaurants being this white-tablecloth kind of experience. We wanted to flip restaurant norms on their heads. The idea was to create something that seemed pristine and precise on the surface, and then get people eating meat off sticks.

In terms of the clown, we wanted a name that represented the people. We researched social hierarchies, tropes, and old English pastoral themes that represented ordinary people and the countryside. We spoke about maybe doing something medieval with it, given that it was an era in which there was such a huge gap between the people at the top and the people at the bottom. The painting itself is a play on social hierarchy. The image is a white-faced clown, which is Mike’s favorite painting in the world. We discussed the art we wanted on the walls, and it just turned out that the concept of the painting and the concept of clowns really meshed. So we played on that, used it as a golden thread, and every single conversation we had about concepts ended up referring back to the idea of the Auguste clown.

In our sense, it’s the person who takes the piss out of the white-faced clown. A big white-faced clown on the wall, for us, is like the sad Michelin star and the idea of people performing work in hospitality or people who wear a mask. It’s about smiling underneath the mask, which is a phrase we’ve been using a lot. Some hospitality people complain quite a lot about having to put on a face or play a character. For us, it’s the most important part. Auguste is a type of clown, and although we love the painting, it’s not an Auguste clown on the wall. It’s more of a sad performer. We wanted to create a theatre set, and the walls are made of plywood that we varnished ourselves. It all looks quite pristine, but when you really look at it, it’s temporary. It’s a stage set.

TAYLOR: Wow, that’s really interesting. Everything Auguste presents is very chic. It’s very put together, but it also has this sense of not taking itself too seriously, so that you’re able to be present in the moment and things still feel authentic. You’re authentic, and that authenticity is translating into people coming into the restaurant.

DYLAN: That sounds right, yeah.

TAYLOR: I really like that. Back to what you were saying about experiencing this lovely moment where people are drinking in the street and things feel very community-based. Does that speak to the location of the restaurant at all? I know London Fields is a neighbourhood, but it’s also one of Hackney’s beautiful green spaces. Is there anything in particular about the area that drew you to wanting to have the restaurant there?

DYLAN: Definitely. I don’t know if this restaurant would have worked anywhere else. London is very much a collection of small towns and boroughs. You have your center of London, where most of the young people live, and then you have where people migrate to once they’ve got families. There’s this divide between West London, Central London, and East London. North London always felt a little more like yummy mummies and dogs wearing shoes. A young-family situation where bald men would come and drink themselves to death in about an hour because they knew they had to get home to their two- or three-year-old kids later on. East London doesn’t have that. It feels like a genuine place where people want to have a good time and really buy into the concept.

That being said, we are very much quintessentially East London, and we all look it. In the way that people in LA would be quintessentially Silver Lake, think of Hackney or London Fields like Bushwick: young, cool, creative, and once industrial but now heavily gentrified. Obviously, as a result, that comes with some negative implications in terms of pushing out the people who grew up here. Ten or fifteen years ago, where our restaurant is now probably had one of the highest crime rates in London. It was green, sure, and a little bit outside the center in this second zone.

Over time, it’s drawn one of the biggest communities of expats, young people, young professionals, and creatives. I’ve always worked in this area. In fact, I was working in this restaurant when it was the previous restaurant three and a half years ago. So when we found out about this site, it had a bit of sentimental appeal. I wanted to come back because I didn’t really leave with grace, so the idea of owning this spot felt quite heartfelt. It felt like a nice way to close the loop. But there’s also nowhere else I’d rather open a restaurant in London.

TAYLOR: I feel like that was the perfect comparison with Silver Lake and Bushwick. There’s something to be said about those places and the culture. There is that degree of gentrification, but there’s also this vein that runs through them that’s still deeply artistic and allows people to be expressive about who they are. So I do think it’s an amazing place to open a restaurant.

DYLAN: Thank you. I absolutely agree.

TAYLOR: Leevar Spies's artwork is featured in Auguste. When did you first interact with his art, and do you plan to continue collaborating with other artists?

DYLAN: I met him three years ago. He is a bit of a prevalent face in fashion, PR, and events. Whilst I was on my hiatus from bars and restaurants, I worked in fashion for a brand called Ronning. So I was doing some seating, PR, and worked in-store for my friend’s fashion brand. I’d see Leevar everywhere. I loved his art and thought it fit the space really perfectly because it’s quite whimsical and has this kind of clown undertone to it. One of the pieces that we have really does look like a clown in an interpreted setting. It was a no-brainer to get him involved.

We will continue to work with him, and I would love to get more artists into the space. We have another room opening in which we’ll have more wall space and, therefore, more room for art. Initially, the plan was to have artists in residence here, where artists could sell their work through the space and have plaques underneath. It got to the point where we ended up buying the art. The art belongs to us and the space now. Eventually, when we part ways, Mike and I will probably fight about who gets what.

TAYLOR: That’s really cool. I wanted to know if Mike had also engaged with any other forms of art outside of culinary arts, since you’ve had a career in music and fashion as well.

DYLAN: He did a little bit of graphic design work back in the day, so he’s got an artistic streak in him that definitely shows in the food he makes. It’s not all about how it tastes for him. It’s the plating, the presentation, the colours, and what works visually. But he’s very much a chef through and through and finds creative expression through that.

TAYLOR: On that same note of music, do you feel like you would associate any songs or albums with the process of opening Auguste?

DYLAN: I think we tended to revert back to the music that the biggest influences in our lives introduced us to. For me, it was the music my parents raised me on: energetic '80s music that made us happy or feel reassured and held. Judie Tzuke played a lot while we were building the restaurant. For Mike, it was old Italian music that Janine had introduced him to while he was living in Abruzzo. Otherwise, it was any music that would take us back to nostalgic times. Mike plays "Free Bird" by Lynyrd Skynyrd every day without fail. It’s almost a ritual now.

There’s definitely a connection to music, but it’s more about nostalgia and getting us through this period. We built the place ourselves. We funded it all ourselves. We were still painting the night before our friends-and-family opening. It was an easy way for us to feel reassured; to put on music that we loved.

TAYLOR: I think it’s also really beautiful that not only is the location nostalgic because you had previously worked there, but in all that goes into the restaurant. It’s kind of your masterpiece. You guys have built this from the ground up, and I find that really inspiring.

DYLAN: It’s certainly not a magnum opus. It’s the start. It’s our first masterpiece, if you want to call it that.

TAYLOR: Yeah, absolutely. I know that you said Abruzzo-style cuisine is criminally underrepresented. What characteristics of it made you want to highlight it at Auguste?

DYLAN: The biggest characteristic of it is something called arrosticini. Arrosticini itself is one of the oldest forms of Italian cooking. The whole cuisine comes from the life cycle of the sheep. They migrate, they’re milked for Pecorino cheese, and later in their lives they’re used to make arrosticini. The shepherd’s diet was based around getting pissed on white wine, eating great cheese, and then eating lamb and sheep while wearing beautiful clothes made from their wool. The lifestyle in Abruzzo is actually built around that, and we were particularly fascinated by that story. It’s about drawing on something really pastoral. We wanted everything from that story represented here, so we have the cheese, the wine, and the arrosticini. Everything else is kind of a blend of traditional Abruzzese recipes and seasonal British produce, which we think is some of the best in the world.

Particularly at the moment, we’re spoiled for choice in terms of seasonal produce, and we can use that to create dishes that draw inspiration from old Abruzzese cuisine. We got called a new-gen-style Italian restaurant the other day. We were a little confused by it. I guess for London, it is new-generation for meat on sticks to be presented as Italian. We have a huge Turkish community in Dalston just down the road, with a whole strip of mangal restaurants and ocakbaşı-style grill houses. We call it Little Turkey.

When we opened an Italian spot here doing something slightly similar to that, I guess people thought it was new.

TAYLOR: Amazing. So my last question can be a bit broad, but what do you hope for the future of Auguste?

DYLAN: For Mike and I to create a group of different restaurants that we really love, to tour a concept, create a travelling circus, and go and cook in France, New York, and Marseille. I think it’s about creating something that isn’t afraid to challenge norms and representing this new generation of restaurants. I’d love for it to encourage people by showing them that it’s possible to do this at Mike and my age. I’m 26 and he’s 28, so we’re pretty young by restaurant-owner standards. I’d love to be a good example for people because I really wanted to do this when I was 21. But yeah, mostly to have a good time and not burn ourselves out. That would be pretty nice.

TAYLOR: Yeah, absolutely. Those were all the questions that I had, but this conversation was brilliant. I hadn’t interviewed anyone yet from the culinary world, so this was really fascinating. Hearing about how multi-layered your process has been is incredibly inspiring.

DYLAN: Thank you. That’s very, very kind of you. I’m kind of waking up to all of this as well. It still hasn’t fully settled in yet. But I really appreciate it, and I’m very grateful that you wanted to talk to us about it.

TAYLOR: Of course.