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When Larry Jayasekara first visited London in the early 2000s, he recalls wandering through its warren of red-brick and stucco-fronted townhouses of Mayfair, overawed by the five-story buildings lining its plane-studded Georgian streets. “I’d come from a surfing village in Sri Lanka with a population of 5,000,” he explains of his childhood in Hikkaduwa, where he worked at a roadside stall frying hoppers to support his family from the age of 12. “I’d never seen anything like it before.” And yet he already had a fixed goal in mind as he circled Berkeley Square that day: to join the kitchen of a world-renowned chef, a dream prompted, somewhat hilariously, by a late-night viewing of Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares. “I got this fever in my head; it was all I could think about.” Rejection after rejection inevitably followed, until he finally won a place as a legumier at Marcus Wareing at The Berkeley, working 18-hour shifts before retreating to a hostel in Piccadilly for a few hours sleep—then racing back to chiffonade yet more herbs, concasse ever more tomatoes.
In the 18 years since, Jayasekara has worked in a constellation of Michelin-starred kitchens: with Alain Roux at The Waterside Inn in Berkshire; under Clare Smyth during her stint at Restaurant Gordon Ramsay in Chelsea; for Raymond Blanc at Le Manoir aux Quat’Saisons in Oxfordshire; and at Bras in Laguiole (“you still have to go to France for at least a year to be recognised as a chef in the world of haute cuisine”), before taking up the mantle at Pétrus, where he found himself declared National Chef of the Year before stepping down in 2018.
Now, he’s finally at the helm of his own restaurant, one that promises to revive a W1 dining scene very much in need of a shot in the arm. Jayasekara’s business partner? Tim Jefferies, who’s lent his eye for design and curation to The Cocochine. The Hamiltons Gallery founder’s decades at the forefront of London’s society set has seen the British tabloids equally enraptured by his heritage (he’s the grandson of Green Shield Stamps founder Richard Tompkins) and his dating life (Claudia Schiffer is an ex-fiancée, while his eventual wedding was held at Blenheim Palace). As far as the fashion world is concerned, however, Jefferies’s name is irrevocably bound up with 20th-century editorial photography, specifically the estates of its titans—Horst and Helmut, Herb and Hiro among them. In practical terms, this means that The Cocochine’s walls are not only adorned with Irving Penn and Richard Avedon prints, but the restaurant is a work of art in and of itself.
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Sprawling across four stories of Number 27, Bruton Place, its nearly 1,000-square-foot kitchen features a bread cabinet that Jayasekara is able to set to a precise temperature (incredibly, the entire street was rewired to ensure there would be enough power for The Cocochine’s state-of-the-art culinary tech); dry-aging units for meat and fish sourced primarily from financier Ian Wace’s Northamptonshire estate and private Scottish island Tanera Mòr; and a 1,000-bottle-strong wine cellar dominated by Burgundies and Bordeauxs and kept at a specific humidity. Equally important to Jayasekara are the neighboring premises, where staff can go to shower, change, and relax. “Hospitality means taking care of people,” he emphasizes, “and that includes our team. Cooking at this level isn’t a job; it’s a calling, an obsession. You can love other things and other people, but you love this the most.” In other words: your devotion merits a nicer place to retreat to than a backpackers’ dorm in spitting distance of Leicester Square.
It speaks volumes that the kitchen takes up almost a third of the restaurant. There are, remarkably, only 35 seats available here. Twenty-eight are spread across eight tables on the ground floor and exclusively available to reserve via phone, while upstairs, at the chef’s counter, seven have been set aside for walk-ins. Naturally, no expense has been spared when it comes to the décor; even the lighting has been carefully installed so as not to cast shadows on tables, while the serving station has been carved in Italy from a 1,800kg piece of Devon stone, and a hand-painted mosaic inspired by the works of Guido Mocafico adorns the floor upstairs. Jayasekara and Jefferies’s joint masterpiece, however, might well be the 14-seat private dining room, complete with gold latticework and a Saracen fireplace.
As for The Cocochine’s menu: it will be ingredient-led and served à la carte, with a single service each for lunch and dinner. Tellingly, Jayasekara toured more than 25 countries to set up his network of suppliers: think reindeer and cloudberries from Norway; single-origin chocolate via a Suffolk specialist; tuna and mirin from Tokyo; and coconut cream from—where else?—Sri Lanka. “Every dish will be a signature dish,” Jayasekara tells me when I ask if there’s any item on the menu that he’s particularly excited about, although he admits to a certain fondness for a dessert juxtaposing caviar and chocolate, which he considers a revelatory pairing. “A successful restaurant is always a question of harmony – in terms of ingredients, in terms of partners, in terms of suppliers,” he muses. “Back of house and front of house. When all of those come together, you have a fantastic marriage. Otherwise, it’s a divorce every night.”