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London · Venue

Cafe OTO

A compact Dalston room for exploratory live music, daytime coffee and close-up listening.

Upcoming shows
56
Capacity
150
Address
18-22 Ashwin Street, E8 3DL London
Phone
020 7923 1231
Next show
Fri, 9 Oct 2026
Official siteDirections
Cafe OTO in London

About Cafe OTO

Cafe OTO is a 150-capacity café and concert room in Dalston, London, built around adventurous live music. Its defining feature is the single-room format: performers play in the same brick-and-low-ceilinged space where the audience drinks, sits or stands, giving improvised and acoustic sets unusual immediacy. The venue’s programming reaches from free jazz and free improvisation to folk, noise, rock and electronics, while the daytime café keeps the room active before doors.

A paint works becomes a listening room

The Ashwin Street building housed Reeves and Sons, a paint-mixing company, from 1866 until 1954. Hamish Dunbar and Keiko Yamamoto opened Cafe OTO there in April 2008, aiming to give creative new music a regular home; concerts quickly developed into a seven-night programme. That origin still explains the place’s scale and purpose: a working café adapted for focused performance, with a schedule built around artists whose work benefits from attentive listening.

A second chapter began in 2013, when OTO Projects opened a separate nearby Project Space for workshops, talks, film screenings and installations. Designed by Assemble and built with help from volunteers, it extended the venue’s work beyond gigs. The Project Space closed in 2023 after a decade, leaving the original room as the centre of the operation.

The room today

Cafe OTO’s concert programme is managed by OTOProjects, a Community Interest Company, and runs seven nights a week. Expect experimental music at the core, alongside jazz, sound art, international folk traditions, noise, rock and electronics. The performance area sits at the back of a wide, single-level room, with furniture arranged around each show; sightlines are clearest near the front because there is no raised stage. A bar, daytime pastries and snacks, books, records and tapes make it easy to arrive early, while venue air conditioning helps during packed sets.

Sources

  1. Info — Cafe OTO
  2. ‘You always know you’ll get something interesting’: an oral history of Cafe OTO — Time Out
  3. The gig venue guide: Cafe Oto, London — The Guardian
  4. Cafe Oto — Wikipedia
  5. Name: cafe OTO — Hackney Museum
  6. Cafe Oto opening new space for workshops and installations — The Wire

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