From tonight until Sunday, Hotel Il Pellicano is in residence at Bobbi's Bar, the late-night bar of St Clement, the hotel Nick Jones opened this year at 180 The Thames, on Temple Place. The dates are October 13 to 18, 2026, aperitivo hour runs from 4pm to 8pm, and the press release opens with the reason: "To celebrate Frieze Week."
Frieze London and Frieze Masters open in The Regent's Park tomorrow and close on Sunday, the same day the residency does. Nothing else connects the two. There is no artist commission, no gallery partner, no talk, no work on the wall anywhere in the announcement. What is announced is a barman, four drinks and two hoteliers who like each other's rooms.
That is worth taking seriously rather than dismissing, because it is an honest picture of how a fair week now works.
What is actually on offer
According to the release, every evening of the residency is a collaboration between Federico Morosi, who has spent almost 20 years behind Il Pellicano's Bar All'Aperto in Porto Ercole, and the Bobbi's team. Morosi pours three house drinks, the Teller Negroni, the Dana and the Patsy Spritzer, and the two teams have made one new cocktail together, described as a Pellicano take on the Bobbi's Martini.
The quotes are the kind hotels give each other. Marie-Louise Sciò, CEO and creative director of Pellicano Hotels, calls St Clement "the perfect setting for a little Pellicano mischief." Jones says the bar "is where a hotel really comes alive: a room full of people having a good time," and that Il Pellicano "has always got that exactly right."
It is not Il Pellicano's first London week. The hotel took over Claridge's Restaurant from February 17 to 22, 2025, with Morosi at the bar and the Teller Negroni on the list, as reported by Tianna Williams in Wallpaper*. The move from Mayfair's grandest dining room to a bar that opened months ago is the more interesting half of the story. Claridge's lent Il Pellicano its authority. This time Il Pellicano is the one lending.
The art in the room is photographic, and it is in the name of a drink
If the residency has a claim on an art audience, it is through photography, and it is older than Frieze.
Il Pellicano is one of the few hotels whose image was made by photographers with a place in the canon. Slim Aarons was, as Stephen Ringer put it in Highsnobiety, "perhaps the hotel's most famous chronicler." John Swope's pictures from the early years "still line the walls of the bar," the same piece reports. In 2009 Juergen Teller photographed a party Sciò threw at the hotel, and those pictures were published in a book alongside Aarons's and Swope's. The Teller Negroni, Wallpaper* notes, is a homage to him.
So the one work of art travelling to London this week is a cocktail name. That is a thin thread, and the release does not pull on it: Teller is not mentioned, and neither are Aarons or Swope. A hotel with sixty years of photographic history arrives in the city during its biggest art week and chooses to talk about aperitivo. Whoever made that decision either thought the art crowd would find its own way to the reference or did not think the reference was the point. We suspect the second.
Readers who followed our piece on the Elton John and David Furnish photography collection at the Jeu de Paume will recognise the mechanism in reverse. There, a private taste was given public standing by a museum. Here, a set of photographs that already has standing is left at home, and the taste travels alone.
Why this address
The choice of host does more work than the menu.
St Clement sits inside the 180 Quarter, the development Mark Wadhwa has built around 180 The Strand, which Sofia de la Cruz, writing in Wallpaper* in June, credits with turning the area into a cultural hub. The hotel has 90 rooms, with rates from around £600 a night as reported by Hot Dinners, a sound system in Bobbi's by Devon Turnbull, Brian Clarke glass screens throughout, and George Nakashima and Jean Royère furniture in the lobby. De la Cruz's verdict on the interiors was that they are "polished and sleek, but it does not want to vaunt."
In the same quarter, 180 Studios opens Ryoji Ikeda's DATA-COSM [n°1] on October 14, the day the fair opens, and runs it until December 20, according to its own listing. That is the real art event at this address this week, and it is not part of the residency either.
Put the pieces together and the logic is plain. A new London hotel needs the fair-week crowd to learn its name. An Italian resort hotel needs to stay in the mind of the people who book it in summer, and those people are in London this week. Sciò has described Il Pellicano as "a very self-selective place. It's not for everyone," as quoted by Highsnobiety. A bar open four hours a day for six days, at a hotel on the river and well away from the tents, selects in the same way.
What it tells you about the week
We wrote in July that in Miami Art Week the density is the product: one main fair, a dozen satellites, and a week built so that nobody has to justify the flight. London has reached the same point with a different cast. The free part of Frieze is in the park until November 1. The ticketed part is in the tents for five days. Around both sits a third layer that sells nothing to do with art and depends entirely on art having gathered the room.
The residency is a good one of its kind. Morosi is a serious barman, the drinks are the real ones from Porto Ercole, and nobody is pretending that a spritz is a cultural programme. That restraint is to its credit. But "to celebrate Frieze Week" is a phrase that should cost something, and here it costs nothing: no artist is paid, no work is shown, no gallery is involved. The fair supplies the audience and the hotel supplies the gin.
For a collector in town this week the practical reading is simple. If you want the Il Pellicano bar without the flight to Tuscany, it is at Temple from 4pm. If you want the art at 180, it is Ikeda, and it starts tomorrow.
Dates, hours, drinks and the quotes from Marie-Louise Sciò and Nick Jones from the press release issued for Hotel Il Pellicano and St Clement by Lucien Pagès Communication (October 2026). The 2025 Claridge's residency and the origin of the Teller Negroni as reported by Wallpaper* (Tianna Williams, January 16, 2025). Il Pellicano's photographic history and Sciò's "self-selective" quote from Highsnobiety (Stephen Ringer). St Clement's design, the 180 Quarter and Bobbi's Bar as reported by Wallpaper* (Sofia de la Cruz, June 22, 2026); room rates as reported by Hot Dinners (Catherine Hanly, June 1, 2026). Ryoji Ikeda's dates from 180 Studios. Images are press images supplied with that release, courtesy of St Clement and Pellicano Hotels; they show the two bars, not the residency itself. This is desk coverage: we have not visited the residency.
