Spooky Carving: The Nexo Halloween Special 🎃🍷

For one night the whole place turns into a proper Halloween hideaway — low light, cobwebs strung across the corners, skulls tucked in among the decor, and a photo wall set up for the pictures you'll actually want to keep. You walk in, someone puts a glass in your hand, and the room does the rest.

Then the main event: your own pumpkin. Everyone gets one, along with a full kit of proper carving tools — saw, scraper and scoop — which is the difference between clean cuts and the kitchen-knife massacre this usually turns into at home. Stencils and templates are laid out if you want somewhere to start, and if you'd rather freehand something ambitious, nobody's going to stop you. No experience needed: half the room's last pumpkin was a lopsided thing with triangle eyes, and that's a perfectly respectable outcome here too.

Our "Vampire Blood" sangría — dark, with berries and pomegranate — keeps coming all evening, with water alongside it and a Halloween snack buffet, sweet and savoury, open from the moment you arrive until the end. It's a small group on purpose, twenty people at most, so you end up genuinely talking to whoever is carving next to you instead of shouting over a crowd.

And when the carving is done we drop the lights, light every pumpkin at once and line them all up for one group photo — a row of glowing faces that were plain, boring pumpkins two hours earlier.