AFTER DARK SEPTEMBER 2026 – Issue 01

There’s an hour that most magazines were never built for. The lamps are down to their last setting, the ice has stopped bothering, and someone at the table has said the two words that ruin a sensible bedtime. Esquire and GQ used to own that hour and handed it over, somewhere along the way, to grooming pages and watch adverts, and Noodle Magazine UK, which we’re proud of, is a morning read that goes well with coffee and would look odd next to a Boulevardier. So we made a second magazine for the part of the evening the first one leaves behind, and Noodle After Dark, Issue No. 01, £7.50 is put together the way the issue’s own drink is put together, stirred slowly over one large cube, sweet vermouth against a bitter edge so neither one gets away with anything, and it doesn’t want hurrying.

Boyle Opens It And A Card Sharp Closes The First Half

Danny Boyle leads, with Ink opening the 83rd Venice Film Festival on 2 September, Trainspotting turning 30, and the plain line he used to turn down Alien Resurrection, all told with more warmth than profiles of him usually bother with. Then the fiction, because a gentleman’s magazine with no fiction in it is a catalogue with opinions. The Last Table at Quaglino’s follows a card sharp called Henry Vale from a wet Brewer Street to a private room, a stolen invitation and a hand of four kings he can’t account for, and the last page of it is worth the cover price on its own, I’ll leave it there.

Then It Wanders, Which Is The Point

After that the issue does what a night does. The Hour of Gold pictorial, all noir shadow and cabaret feathers, every model fictional and AI generated and the magazine saying so on each page rather than in small print at the back. Drink takes in the World’s 50 Best Bars landing in Milan on 7 October, Blue Note opening its first London room on St Martin’s Lane on 23 September, Quaglino’s back from its centenary refit, the 55 year old Glenury Royal and a Blair Athol with 347 bottles in existence, and the Boulevardier printed with measures so you can stop guessing. Gear has the first Apple keynote of the John Ternus era, the foldable iPhone rumour, Meta’s next glasses and Geneva Watch Days with 70 maisons in town. Nightlife walks you from The Box Soho through Crazy Coqs, Proud, Sabrage and the Kit Kat Club, and prints four house rules for after dark that deserve framing. Motoring brings the Ferrari 849 Testarossa, the camouflaged Jaguar Type 01 and the $42.9m Shelby Daytona Coupe from Monterey, and Cards books you a December in the Bahamas for the $120m WSOP Paradise guarantee.

The departments at the back are where the drier jokes live. A Glasgow fox stealing milk off a doorstep, a man dressed as the Grim Reaper on a hospital roof in North Wales and fined £270 for it, the painted lady butterflies, an Advisor column that gives a Shoreditch man’s foldable phone question the answer it earned, a ten question quiz with the answers printed alongside because it’s late and you’ve had a drink, and a page of the month’s numbers. Those are the pages I went back to.

What It Doesn’t Do Yet

Venice, the Apple keynote, Blue Note’s opening night and Meta Connect are trailed ahead here rather than reported back, and the verdicts wait for No. 02. It’s also, plainly, a magazine for adults. The glamour is suggestive in the old grammar, gloves, silk, a raised eyebrow across a dim room, with nothing explicit anywhere in it, and every person on every page is fictional and machine made, which the issue says on the cover, the masthead and the back page, so no one can claim they weren’t told.

Who Should Buy It And Who Should Skip It

If you’ve ever stayed for the last hand after the sensible people went home, this is your magazine, and at £7.50 it costs less than the round you stayed for. The annual is £69. If you want your reading done by nine in the morning with nothing in it that would trouble a school gate, the sister title is on the same site and it’ll suit you better. Read this one after the speeches, with the glass you shouldn’t have ordered.