Opening in Edinburgh at the end of this month is a new venue dedicated to supporting the performing arts – The Gilded Saloon bar & kitchen.
The bar and venue on 45-47 Lothian Street, overlooking Bristo Square, will open its doors in time for the Edinburgh Fringe, with a 200-capacity club and venue in its basement.
It arrives as a joint venture between comedy operators Gilded Balloon, Scots musical and arts festival Kelburn Garden Party, and neighbouring creative community pub Paradise Palms.
The three businesses will use the new space to support the creative and performing arts community from across Scotland with gigs, club nights, music performances, comedy shows, pub theatre, spoken word and more.
Alongside the entertainment, The Gilded Saloon will serve up a broad selection of draught beers, wines and spirits alongside modern pub grub and a Fringe pop-up, ‘Coop’, during August by local chef Tomas Gormley, well-known locally for his restaurants Skua and Cardinal.
As a year-round ‘supportive artist space’, the Gilded Saloon will provide discounted food and drinks to the creative sector as well as rehearsal, workshop and collaborative space to established and grassroots artists and promoters.
Gilded Balloon is a family run enterprise, presenting shows across the Edinburgh Festival Fringe as well as tours year-round throughout the UK.
This year it will celebrate 40 years at the Fringe with a programme featuring some of comedy’s most iconic names including Rosie O’Donnell, Smack the Pony and Alan Davies.
Run by co-directors Karen and Katy Koren, Gilded Balloon will run comedy, theatre, sketch and non-music programming at The Gilded Saloon which is named after the venue they lost during the infamous Cowgate fire over 20 years ago in 2002.
Kelburn Garden Party is an independent music and arts festival, which has just celebrated its 15th edition at Kelburn Castle on the West Coast with a sell-out attendance.
The team behind the festival will programme oversee much of the club bookings, while mobilising their team of festival supporters and artists to collaborate and help curate this new year round creative space.
Paradise Palms claims to have been set up to be ‘a community centre as much as it is a bar’.
Always championing the grassroots and marginalised the venue also runs its own record label – Paradise Palms Records – which it uses as a platform to promote the music it loves and artists from Scotland and overseas.
It will assist in general programming and oversee the operation of the new venue.
The Gilded Saloon opens 30th July for Fringe shows, and then the full year-round programme of events specifically curated by Paradise Palms, Kelburn Arts and Gilded Balloon will be launched from September.
