A French restaurant group’s latest Italian venture invited guests to leave with rather more than a full stomach at its City of London opening last week.
Big Mamma, the Paris-founded group behind a string of glitzy Italian restaurants, launched Edmondo at 6 Lombard Street to a crowd of over 700 guests.
The event’s most talked-about feature was an in-house tattoo artist, offering permanent ink from a curated selection of Edmondo-themed designs.
Options ranged from a cocktail glass motif to the rather more committed phrase “I GOT DRUNK AT EDMONDO” etched permanently onto guests’ skin.
Whether anyone chose the latter option remains unconfirmed, though the cloakroom had already stopped accepting bags by 7:45pm, suggesting the night was well under way.
Staff navigated the heaving crowd carrying giant wheels of pasta-filled cheese above their heads, apparently unbothered by the scale of the chaos around them.
Meanwhile, the aviation industry’s own party atmosphere proved considerably shorter-lived, with the Airlines 2026 summit descending into conflict within roughly a quarter of an hour.
Virgin Atlantic chief executive Corneel Koster used the event to publicly attack Heathrow over its decision to separate his carrier from alliance partner Delta, vowing to challenge the move “extremely hard.”
Koster went further, floating the idea of interrupting a later on-stage conversation scheduled with Heathrow chief Thomas Woldbye, a suggestion that third runway bidder Surinder Arora quickly echoed.
Transport secretary Heidi Alexander, whose presence might have added further combustion, declined to join proceedings, citing a prior meeting.
Elsewhere, Nvidia (NVDA) boss Jensen Huang provided headline writers with what may be the year’s richest seam of wordplay, after reports emerged of alleged extramarital activity involving a woman named Alice Huang, described in some accounts as a suspected Chinese spy.
The story prompted a wave of quips about the chip giant’s chief executive, including references to the need to huang on to his job and warnings about controlling his own semi-conductor.
Nvidia shareholders, nursing losses following a market value collapse of around $430bn, may be finding the jokes more therapeutic than most.