Voodoo Ray's

Voodoo Ray's sits at 95 Kingsland High Street, three minutes' walk from Dalston Junction Overground. The shop opened in 2013 as the late-night sibling to Dalston Superstore across the road, and trades on the same Kingsland Road pattern: dressed up by 11pm, queued out the door by midnight, and still slicing 22-inch pies at 1am on Fridays and Saturdays. The pizza is the headline; the bar — frozen margaritas, US craft beers, and a short cocktail card — is the reason readers come back at 11.30pm rather than 7pm.

The right visit is on a Friday or Saturday at the rush. Order the slices over a whole pie unless there are four of you; the slice rotation is where the unorthodox toppings (chicken skin, confit garlic, squash on a cream base) live. Wash it down with a frozen marg. The wrong visit is treating Voodoo Ray's like a sit-down restaurant for an early Wednesday dinner — the room is built for the queue, not the leisurely two-hour table. Ray's Bar, the basement cocktail room that opened in 2014 underneath the pizza floor, has since closed; The Nudge ran a "now closed" note in 2024.

The room is one long open-plan space with the counter and oven on the back wall, neon-pink signage and gig posters covering the front, and shared benches running the length of the floor. SquareMeal's listing captures it as "small but very popular." The Infatuation's review described it as "an American-themed late-night hangout" — the styling leans NY-pizza-shop, not Italian-trattoria. The window seats facing Kingsland High Street are the move for people-watching the Dalston Saturday-night flow.

The frozen margarita is the order — The Nudge and The Infatuation both flag it as the drinks pairing for the slices, and it is genuinely cold rather than glycerol-sweet. The beer fridge runs heavy on US craft (Sierra Nevada, Brooklyn, rotating IPAs from Beavertown and Five Points), priced around £6–7. The cocktail card is short, classical and faster than the queue would suggest — a Negroni at £9.50, a Paloma, an Espresso Martini for the 1am crowd. Skip the canned options unless the queue is short. For a deeper East London cocktail programme after midnight, walk fifteen minutes to Three Sheets London.

Time Out's listing identifies the audience as "the people behind Dalston Superstore" — meaning the same East London queer-club crowd that defined the strip across the 2010s. The shift happens around 22:30, when the dinner-pizza customers thin and the pre-club crowd shows up. By midnight it is the post-club crowd from VFD, Dalston Superstore and The Glory, plus Kingsland Road bar-crawlers. The DesignMyNight write-up calls it "the best pizza spot in Dalston," which is the framing that puts it on out-of-borough lists.