Rocket Room opens its first standalone bar at Highcross Leicester
The axe-throwing and shuffleboard brand leaves its food-hall base behind for a 4,000 sq ft Midlands site, with a full kitchen menu for the first time.
Rocket Room opens its first standalone venue this December at Highcross Leicester, a 4,000 sq ft activity bar with its own kitchen for the first time.
The site sits on St Peter's Square inside the Highcross shopping centre. It is the brand's second location, after a 120-capacity venue inside Market Place Food Hall in London's Leicester Square, which opened in April 2026.
Elangeni Hospitality founded Rocket Room. The group also runs the Mexican restaurant chain Benito's and the board-game café Slice & Dice. Founder Mike Pearson built the Leicester Square site to test the concept before moving it into a format the brand owns outright.
A food-hall test run becomes a 4,000 sq ft bet on tacos and flying axes.
The Highcross venue packs four AI-assisted darts lanes, two shuffleboards, an axe-throwing lane and two pool tables around a central cocktail bar. At the London site, prices run from £30 a lane per hour for shuffleboard to £80 for axe throwing, with group packages from £35 a head covering two hours of play.
Food is new to the format. The Leicester menu leans on Mexican flavours drawn from Pearson's other business, including pork carnitas tacos, baja fish tacos, loaded barbacoa fries and a char-grilled bavette with chimichurri.
Pearson called Highcross "the right second location" and said it marks the first of a number of Midlands sites the brand has targeted for the coming year.
Fifteen sites in two years
Rocket Room is privately funded and is working to a pipeline of 15 venues over the next two years, with a longer-term target of 50 locations across the UK and abroad within five years. An exact opening date for Highcross has not been set; the brand says it will confirm one ahead of the December launch.
Blake Henderson, managing director of Market Place Food Hall Leicester Square, said in March that Rocket Room "shares our vision to redefine dining and socialising" at that site. Six months on, the brand has outgrown the food hall format it started in.
A crowded corner of leisure
Axe throwing and competitive socialising have multiplied across UK high streets since 2022, as landlords look to fill units that pure drinking venues can no longer support alone. Rocket Room's bet is that a full kitchen, rather than bar snacks, keeps spend per head higher than rivals built around games alone.
London's own opening pace has not slowed either; Juno, a 265-cover Italian restaurant, opened at Olympia earlier this month as big-format venues compete for footfall. Leicester gets its venue before most of the Rocket Room pipeline is even named.
