Belgrade does something to you on first arrival. A few walks in and the city reveals itself as fascinatingly layered, neoclassicism colliding with Yugoslav brutalism, massive and intricate verticality sitting alongside futuristic block architecture that manages to be both unique and modular at once. It lacks only neon to read as cyberpunk. Paris-based art and design studio Supaform felt it immediately, and when the brief from their clients at Esthetic Joys Embassy landed, a design direction inspired by a spaceship and the Yugoslav K67 kiosk, it all clicked into place.
The result is EJE Belgrade, a 250 square metre bar, listening room, dining space and hotel occupying a stately 1920s building on Dobracina ulica in Stari Grad. It is, in the words of its own creators, a futuristic, autonomous station of aesthetic pleasures.
The spatial concept draws from Yugoslav modernism of the late 1950s and early 1960s – a moment when civic optimism expressed itself through soft, aerodynamic forms and an almost utopian faith in the future. The key visual departure point is the K67 kiosk, designed in 1966 by Sasa Machtig, whose rounded geometry looks equally at home on a Belgrade corner and in a lunar crater. Supaform reinterprets that sensibility through a post-modern lens, less a period reconstruction than a scene from a parallel timeline, where mid-century clarity meets something more playful and cinematic.
Sound was the other essential starting point. A pair of vintage JBL 4435 studio monitors and a deep vinyl collection anchor the space in the tradition of the Japanese listening bar: a room built around the ritual of hearing recorded music with full attention, on serious equipment. Supaform’s question was a good one, what would a Japanese listening bar look like in Yugoslavia, existing somewhere between the past and the future? The vinyl library here is curated with a digger’s logic. Records are not decoration. They are the point.
The colour accent throughout is a warm, deep yellow, simultaneously playful and rich, as if from a hallucinatory dream about the past and the future. The DJ booth evokes the K67. Above it, oval light panels flood the space with a shifting glow that sits somewhere between a spacecraft and a health sanatorium. Tucked to the left of the booth hangs a Dulton Double Face, a Japanese station clock designed for public spaces, waiting halls, offices, transit hubs. In this context, it is no accident.
The sofa upholstery is original moquette from the London Underground, the very last production run of designer Misha Black’s District Line pattern, sourced directly from the mill before it was discontinued. That fabric now exists at the London Transport Museum and, as of this year, in Belgrade. Supaform frames it as an anchor for collective memory of journeying: through space, through time, in the company of good strangers, swapping stories and sharing ideas while you ride.
The layout moves from open and social toward increasingly private. At the far end of the bar sits a row of six Ichiran-style booths, individual seats divided from one another, each with its own service hatch and a curtain that draws closed. Headphones on. World out. It is the most introverted corner of Japanese bar culture, transplanted into the Balkans and somehow feeling completely at home.
Then there is the food. Japanese chef Katsuhiko Kobayashi’s menu is rooted in yoshoku, the tradition that emerged during the Meiji Restoration, when Japanese cooks began absorbing Western dishes into their own culinary logic, producing something that was never imitation but exploration. At EJE, bisque ramen sits alongside hambagu, a Japanese reading of the ground meat patty that is so central to the Serbian table. Whether you wash it down with rakia, sake or Armenian brandy is entirely up to you.
EJE is a restless and eclectic patchwork that somehow leaves you feeling calm, even optimistic. Belgrade deserves it. – Bill Tikos
Esthetic Joys Embassy Dobracina ulica 39, Stari Grad Belgrade, Serbia +381 69 3696369 Monday to Thursday 10am to midnight Friday to Saturday 10am to 1am Sunday 10am to midnight estheticjoys.com