NQJPN, a brand-new late-night concept from the team behind arcade bar NQ64, will open on Berwick Street, Soho on Friday 23 October.
Built around two contrasting worlds behind one door, NQJPN combines a late-night cocktail bar and club with a specialist arcade filled with cabinets imported directly from Japan.
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The main NQJPN bar is a darker, more grown-up evolution of the world created by NQ64. Black, red and chrome dominate the space, with saturated lighting, street-art influences and a futuristic, almost Neo Tokyo feel.
Twelve signature serves anchor the cocktail menu, combining flavours and ingredients including dragon fruit, matcha and cherry blossom. The menu features a Melon and Cucumber Daiquiri, Frozen Dragon Fruit Piña Colada and Chilli Pepper Margarita, alongside alcoholic bubble teas (e.g. Tequila, Apple & Yuzu) Japanese highballs, whisky and a considered alcohol-free range.
Cocktails are served with the same attention to detail as the space itself, including ice cut and shaped specifically for individual serves.
The bar will be open until 3am seven days a week, set to a soundtrack of bass forward tech house and dance. On Friday’s and Saturday’s DJs take over the bar with a harder-edged electronic soundtrack, turning the space into a late-night dance floor as the night progresses.
Beyond a translucent red butcher’s curtain, NQJPN changes completely. The soundtrack shifts and the bar gives way to a dedicated arcade built around specialist machines imported directly from Japan. The collection spans rhythm, action, driving and candy-cabinet games, including cult titles such as maimai, jubeat, Wacca and Dancerush — machines rarely encountered together in the UK and experiences that can’tsimply be replicated on a home console.
The arcade draws on the visual language of late-90s and early-2000s gaming, manga and anime, but pushes those references through NQ64’s own aesthetic to create something darker, stranger and more futuristic.
Sitting within the arcade is NQ Mart, a deliberately brighter, hyper-colour counter inspired by the energy of Asian convenience stores. Guests can create more than 2,000 different drink combinations by choosing a spirit, soft drink and flavoured syrup or foam, alongside alcoholic bubble teas and 20+ unusual soft drinks sourced from Japan, America, Thailand and beyond.
NQ Mart will also feature a self-serve ramen station, bringing another layer to the late-night experience.
NQJPN will open at the former NQ64 site at 53–54 Berwick Street, following NQ64’s move to its much larger new Soho home at Orange Yard.
Rather than a new version of NQ64, NQJPN has been developed as an entirely separate concept: taking inspiration from Japanese arcade and drinks culture, then colliding it with nightlife, electronic music, street artand a futuristic visual world of its own.
Matt Robson and Andy Haygarth, co-founders of NQJPN, said: “While NQJPN comes from the same team as NQ64, we wanted to create something that feels completely different.
“The starting point was the games. We’ve brought over an incredible collection of arcade machines from Japan that you just don’t normally get to play here and built a whole new world around them.
“From there we’ve taken influences from Japanese drinks and gaming culture and mixed them with everything we love about late-night bars, electronic music, street art and arcade culture. The result isn’t supposed to recreate somewhere that already exists – it’s our own version of what a futuristic arcade bar can be.
“There are loads of details to discover, from cocktails made with Japanese ingredients, Purikura inspired photo booths to NQ Mart and an arcade that feels and sounds completely different from the room you’ve just left. We can’t wait for people to see it.”
