A budding salsera's recommendations to the best salsa venues in London. There's something for everyone - serious salseros and people just wanting to hop onto the bandwagon for a good Latin night out!
* All venues offer salsa classes except Floridita. Always ask for student discounts for entry and class fees.
Floridita (100 Wardour St, Soho – map)
Floridita consists of a main dining area upstairs and a bar downstairs, where you can also order food. The bar – & dance floor – downstairs is my favourite salsa hangout in Central London. Born from the same historic tradition as its eponymous ancestor in Old Havana, it apparently serves its Daiquiri’s from the same original recipe (at least we’d all like to believe it), so famously favoured by the Pulitzer Prize- & Nobel Prize-winning American writer Ernest Hemingway, or as he was known in Cuba, ‘Papa’. The London outpost may not cloak you in the old-world sensation that its Cuban counterpart does but its music is as local as they come: Floridita’s live musicians, who play every night from about 7 – 11 p.m. followed by DJ music till 2 a.m. (3.am. on Thursdays & Fridays), are auditioned and flown in directly from Cuba. Open and playing Latin music every night of the week (except Sundays), my favourite nights are Friday and Saturdays nights for dancing. Other nights of the week are much quieter, and perhaps better for a lingering conversation over a drink/snack with a friend or colleague – and of course, if you so choose, you’ll have the lamentably small dance floor to yourselves. For a while there used to be a monthly salsa event called ‘Salsa Contigo’ held on a Tuesday, which would offer up a professional salsa performance and a freestyle competition partaken by the audience before following on with the usual club night, but looking at its Facebook group (join to be notified of upcoming events), Salsa Contigo now seems to be taking place at Studio Valbonne (62 Kingly St, Soho) – next dates are 10th September and 8th October, and 27th October at Cafe de Paris (3-4 Coventry St, Piccadilly Circus). On Salsa Contigo nights ladies usually get in for free before 10pm and men have to pay £5-8. Otherwise, on a usual night it usually costs about £10 to enter Floridita so it isn’t the cheapest place to go dancing, but mostly it’s worth it. Floridita is also a good place to bring non-salsa fans because it is usually peppered by a good mix of people – not just gung-ho salseros 
– who are there to drink and chill like in any other bar in London.
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This blog is the sporadic labour of Emily Ding - 24-year-old Malaysian-Chinese female, child of the digital generation, and by-product of globalisation. Read and comment. (
La Teta Asustada
The Milk of Sorrow is the first Peruvian feature film ever to win the Golden Bear at the Berlin International Film Festival (watch the video, it’s quite emotional and you can watch the leading actress Magaly Solier speak the indigenous Quechua language) and the first ever to be nominated for an Oscar, this year. Its title in English however, doesn’t quite have the same impact it does in Spanish – La Teta Asustada, which of course they could not have done, because it would then have read something ridiculous like ‘The Terrored Teat’, which just goes to show you can never translate anything literally. But The Milk of Sorrow is close enough in meaning and once you’ve seen the film you’ll realize that both translations are beautifully apt.
Directed by Claudia Llosa (niece of the esteemed Peruvian writer Mario Varga Llosa, which aficionados of Latin American politics should have heard of), the film’s protagonist is an Andean young girl called Fausta who is shown to be ill at the start of the movie. And when she is brought to the hospital by her uncle, the doctor reveals that she has a potato stuck in her vagina.
Well. It turns out that Fausta suffers from an illness contracted from her mother’s breast milk when she was a baby. But this illness is not a disease caused by bacteria or an infection; it is a psychological illness, a sociological illness said to be suffered by a whole generation of women in Peru who were tortured or raped by security forces during the uprising of the Maoist terrorist group Sendero Luminoso (Shining Path) from 1980 to 1992. And this generation of women who suffered so terribly were said to pass down their ‘illness’, this fear, to their daughters. And that, in La Teta Asustada, is Fausta’s story. We come to understand that the potato inserted into her vagina acts as a sort of shield against all men and the harm she has learnt that they can unleash on women; and its extraction, accordingly, marks the start of her journey to freedom.
What’s In A Name?
When asked where the film got its name, film director Claudia Llosa replied that it was what the illness was already called by those who suffered. Authority seems to have be taken from the book Entre Prójimos by Kimberly Theidon, Associate Professor at the Department of Anthropology at Harvard University and Director of Praxis.
In an interview with Reportaje al Peru, Kimberly Theidon offers an insight into the name ‘la teta asustada‘, as translated by moi:
Q: How widespread was the phenomenon of la teta asustada?
A: Absolutely ubiquitous. During the years of terror there were fears of breastfeeding children, of passing on to them “rabies milk”, “milk of fear”. There were women who tried to leave their babies to die. “Look, I gave them rabies milk, what will happen to that child? How will it live?” they would cry. There were women who left their babies face down, hoping that they would suffocate to death. Women committed infanticide to avoid causing their children a life of misery and suffering. It was widely and seriously believed that a baby who drank that milk from its mother, whether in utero or in infancy, would never be a normal baby.
Q: Did you coin the name ‘la teta asustada’ or was it already called such?
A: It’s the name I came up with translating it from Quechua. It’s what they call it – “rabies milk”, milk of fear”. For me la teta asustada was the best way to translate this phenomenon, and I used it for the first time in my thesis and later in various articles and books. I put myself in the position of how a woman would feel with the fear that her very own body could be a danger to her baby, that the most natural thing to give to a baby is what hurts it. It’s terrible.
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