Ah Django Bango – we were so excited. We were so keen to get our cowboy on! But sadly, on arrival, we felt a little let down.
So much hype surrounded the new Wild West styled pop-up in East London. The promise of an immersive experience, and a buckaroo town didn’t quite meet what we were expecting.
Entering an east London warehouse, walking through an area of arcade games and 5-a-side football pitches, we headed into the Django area. Expecting to be hit with some Nashville-esq ditties, we wandered around the ‘town’ with the latest chart music blaring out. Later on there was a band – who did have incredible voices, but their music ranged from rock, to country, to reggae – it all just seemed a bit hap-hazzard.
The saloon bar, was sadly, just a square looking bar. No swinging doors, no stools to sit and rest your spurs on. The staff donned cowboy hats and branded t-shirts, but we felt had they been in the full Wild West get-up, it would have been more fun! Cocktails were good – strong, which is what we like – and a decent selection of bottled and draught beers were on offer. Food stalls provided pulled pork, nachos, and chilli – all pretty tasty and served as excellent portion sizes, we found a bale of hay to chow down.
Around the town were a couple games you could play – the spittoon, a slingshot game where you could aim for a can with Kerry Katona’s face on it (WTF?!), and a place where you could buy a cowboy hat. We at Crummbs thought rather than paying out £7.50 for a hat, that it would be better to rent them out for the night for a smaller sum. Although should you have the ideal spitting aim – you can win yourself a hat or a monster stick-on moustache!
All in all, we spent a couple of hours there but came away not really “getting it”. The immersiveness was 2 or 3 people wandering around in costume talking to people in an accent, the rooms available for larger parties didn’t really offer anything special and we’d be pretty disappointed had we paid out to hire one.
More live music, staff in cowboy get-up, less emphasis on making an extra buck here and there, and Django Bango could have something. Maybe it’s going to “get going” as the weeks go on, but for us – we’d prefer to take our boots elsewhere.
