Immersive experience cabaret company The Lost Estate is inviting audiences to an unmarked door in London to travel back in time to the heart of Montmartre in 1896 to drink and dine.
The event. named Chat Noir, is set to open this month at The Lost Estate’s West London home and is the latest creation from the company behind live performances such as The Great Christmas Feast and 58th Street.
Attendees will be transported to the bohemian climes of Montmartre during the 1890s and, at the centre of the story stands Rodolphe Salis – the real-life proprietor of Le Chat Noir and architect of its most notorious cabarets – where he prepares what is being termed as “a celebration like no other”.
The role of Salis, played by cabaret stalwart Joe Morrose, drives the tone of the event as he rallies people around him and performs as “a man who has summoned the greatest artists of his age”.
As part of the experience, there will be magicians, dancers, mime artists and the club’s house band and The Lost estate has named Piper-Heidsieck as its Champagne partner. Added to this, a troupe of musicians, led by the young Erik Satie, will join Satie along with the band Les Enfants Vagabondes which will perform arrangements of French late-Romantic masterpieces by The Lost Estate’s composer-in-residence, Steffan Rees.
Champagne and absinthe pouring
As the evening unfolds, performances are set to spill from stage to floor with Champagne and absinthe pouring and musicians roaming between tables. The experience will also centre around the secret suppers of Paris’s aristocrats and guests are set to drink and dine on classic haute cuisine dishes that inspired dishes such as Coq au vin and crème brûlée.
The Lost Estate co-founder William Kunhardt said: “Every experience by The Lost Estate begins the same way – an obsession with a moment in time when art, hospitality, and visionary people collided to create an inflection point in culture.”
‘Dining, drinking and artistic freedom became one’
Kunhardt explained that “Chat Noir is the expression of our latest obsession: the bohemian subculture of 1890s Paris, the dawning of French haute cuisine, and amidst it all the impresario Rodolphe Salis with his masterpiece, Le Chat Noir.”
According to Kunhardt: “It was the world’s first cabaret–a nightclub where great French artists gathered to share and experiment, where every layer of Parisian society came to be entertained, provoked, and liberated. Dining, drinking, and artistic freedom became one. A movement was born that would change global culture forever. What a moment to bring back to life – to give people the chance to travel back in time and step inside this extraordinary nocturnal world, indulge utterly and live out one of the most explosive, daring and hedonistic moments in European cultural history.”
Related news
UK’s best beer garden hotspots revealed for 2026
Wine Society eyes up fine wine growth as demand from members increases
Court warns of lengthy process winding up Oenofuture’s liquidation