Meet Your New Ground-Floor Retail Tenant — The Esports Café
Lendlease has signed a new tenant from outside the traditional realm for the retail and leisure space at its Elephant Park residential scheme in south London — an esports café.
In a quartet of east Asian brand signings, esports café Wanyoo, Taiwanese tea specialists YiFang, and restaurant and bar OISOI have taken an interconnected unit spanning more than 6K SF, and they will be joined at Elephant Park by sushi and hot food outlet Kokoro.
Wanyoo was founded in 1998 and has since become one of the world’s leading cyber cafés, with more than 1,300 locations across four continents. The new Elephant Park site will be the brand’s fourth in the UK, covering 1,917 SF and seating up to 45 esports players at any given time. Its other outposts are at Westfield Stratford City, Canary Wharf and in Chinatown in the West End.
“People of all ages love gaming, and this forms a large part of the worldwide rush towards competitive socialising,” Wanyoo UK Chief Executive Zhaorong Chen said. “We are certain that the local Elephant & Castle community will embrace e-sports, in the same way people have already done at our other UK locations. Alongside these great F&B brands, we represent modern East Asian culture, and are delighted to be bringing that to Elephant Park.”
Specialising in Taiwanese fruit tea, YiFang is set to open its latest London outlet, a 226 SF unit integrated with Wanyoo, offering a range of fruit teas, fresh milk teas and the "MudFlip" — a brown sugar pearl milk tea.
Having signed for a 3,968 SF, 130-cover restaurant, OISOI is Elephant Park’s largest dining outlet to date. It will provide a "when east meets west" concept, Lendlease said, collaborating with Michelin-starred chef Max Castaldo and combining sous vide with traditional wok-fried food.
Kokoro, a Korean-Japanese takeaway-focused brand, has taken a separate 1K SF unit.
Elephant Park is a development comprising 3,000 residential units and 50K SF of workspace in the Elephant & Castle district of London.
