After six and a half years as Nanima Asian Kitchen, the Kemptown café/restaurant on St George’s Road is turning up the volume. Owners Nicky and Lonnie have transformed the space into Deep Dive, a new neighbourhood jazz and blues bar that opened on Friday 4th September.
Nanima closed in late August after six and a half years, but this isn’t quite goodbye. The food side is continuing as Nanima Kitchen Café, serving its much-loved homemade cakes, sandwiches, soups, daily specials and evening small plates from the same address. But what’s changing is what happens around it: there’s now a full bar, cocktails and a programme of live music, DJs and other events running into the evening.
And Deep Dive has been a long time coming. Lonnie traces the idea back around 30 years when he was working at legendary London venue Ain’t Nothin But the Blues in the mid-1990s. Apparently even cleaning its toilets at 4am after a packed Saturday night wasn’t enough to put him off the idea of having a jazz and blues joint of his own one day.
And now he does, with Deep Dive billing itself as Brighton’s only dedicated jazz and blues bar (although there are, of course, other jazz clubs in Brighton, such as The Verdict). As well as gigs, they’re planning to host guest DJs, open-mic jam sessions, vinyl listening parties, album launches, and conversational salons.
It’s only the beginning, too. Deep Dive’s upcoming programme already includes a video-game-music jazz jam, weekly swing dance classes, more live jazz and blues and Friday vinyl sessions. And particularly excitingly, most events are free.
It’s a big change for a little St George’s Road space that spent six and a half years as Nanima. But with live jazz and blues several nights a week, DJs, jams, listening parties and a proper bar, Deep Dive is much more than a rebrand. It’s a whole new venue, and a pretty exciting addition to Kemptown.
Deep Dive opens Friday 4th September at 36 St George’s Road, Kemptown. It will be open from Tuesday to Saturday, 11am to 11pm, and Sunday, 12pm to 10pm.
deepdivebar.co.uk
