July 16, 2025 |
The first sign you’re somewhere special at The Cocochine is not the whisper-quiet hush of Bruton Place itself – a discreet cobbled slip tucked behind Berkeley Square – nor the confident dark orange awning that signals your arrival. It’s the scent. A warm, faintly nutty perfume of brioche, butter and something just-pulled-from-the-earth that seems to float through the door before you even cross the threshold.
Once inside, the effect is immediate: the bustle and bluster of Mayfair vanishes, replaced by a space so calmly, beautifully composed that you half expect someone to press a crystal flute of something sparkling into your hand just to anchor you in the moment; they might just do so if you’re there, like we were, for the full experience. Bubbles to start? Yes please. Here is a restaurant – founded by world-renowned chef Larry Jayasekara and backed by Hamiltons Gallery founder Tim Jefferies – that feels more like slipping into a private club, albeit one where the walls bear Irving Penn and Richard Avedon prints.
Across four floors of this Georgian townhouse, every inch is tuned to an almost obsessive harmony. The ground-floor dining room, with just eight tables, is all warm herringbone parquet, deep brown leather and soft pools of flattering light that never dare cast a shadow across your plate. Upstairs, a chef’s counter offers seven lucky souls a ringside seat to Jayasekara’s calm, precise choreography. Above that? A private dining room that looks like it was dreamt up by a designer with a direct line to your subconscious desires – plush lounge area, Saracen fireplace, custom-made furniture, gold latticework catching the light like jewellery.
Of course, it’s the kitchen – nearly a third of the entire building – that powers this serene machine. Jayasekara, whose journey from a hoppers stall in Hikkaduwa, Sri Lanka, to headlining Britain’s Michelin cohort reads like a modern culinary epic, presides over it with the kind of quiet authority only hard-won mastery affords. This is a man who, after chasing his dream across France and England’s most storied kitchens (The Waterside Inn, Le Manoir, Michel Bras, Gordon Ramsay’s Pétrus), and winning both the Craft Guild of Chefs’ National Chef of the Year and a Michelin Star in 2016, finally has a stage entirely his own. And, when a friend and I sat down for a taste of his particular culinary flair last week, what a performance it was.
A procession of delicate canapés set the tone: an elevated take on a cheese and onion crisp, a structural caprese salad, creamy caviar-topped finger food. Paired with a 2024 Bodegas Emilio Moro Polvorete Bierzo Blanco, its bright minerality teased out the sweetness of the crab and vegetables to come. Then came that bread: still warm, onion-kissed brioche or rosemary sourdough (quite honestly one of the best bits of bread I’ve ever tasted) to tear open and smear with soft curls of butter that vanish on the tongue.
Jayasekara’s dishes often revel in their unexpected pairings. To start, a Ceylon king crab salad was bright with apple and cucumber, its sweet saline depths amplified by a crystalline crab consommé. A 64-ingredient garden salad from Rowler Farm arrived next like a miniature meadow with all the flora to match, verdant under wild garlic pesto.
For our mains, the fillet of wild Scottish John Dory flanked by lobster, a fragile courgette flower and the subtle tang of pickled peach. This was accompanied by slow sips of a 2019 Kracher Zweigelt red wine, its gentle tannins and bright berry notes acting as a graceful counterpoint to the richness on the plate. Then, perhaps the star: dry-aged Rowler Farm spring lamb, so delicate it could almost be mistaken for young game, paired with girolles, blistered tomatoes and melon – a pairing that shouldn’t work, but does, magnificently. My companion expressed that it was the best thing they had ever eaten – hands down. Try it for yourself and see if you agree.
Chef Larry Jayasekara
For dessert, I slid my silver spoon into a soft sigh of Tahitian vanilla ice cream topped with jaggery caramel while alongside me my guest savoured an exotic poached Yorkshire rhubarb, soaked in Blood Orange on a bed of yoghurt sorbet. The meal was bookended by a 2022 Zweigelt Auslese dessert wine from Weinlaubenhof Kracher, its honeyed sweetness deepening the flavour of the delectable desserts.
By the time the petit fours arrived – tiny perfect jewels of chocolate and fruit – we were grateful for the measured pace of service, which gave us time to truly savour the tastes that crossed our tongues. That old-school service, in fact, was a highlight of the evening, with waiters who attended to our every need with the poise of seasoned butlers and the knowledge of sommelier-scholars.
A successful restaurant is, in many ways, something of a question of harmony, between suppliers and ingredients – Jayasekara sources much of the eatery’s seasonal produce from the regenerative Rowler Farm Estate in Northhamptonshire, just 60 miles from the restaurant, with seafood from Tanera Island off the coast of Scotland – kitchen and floor, even back-of-house staff and the mood in the dining room. At The Cocochine, that harmony feels almost symphonic. There’s an intimacy and ease that belies the monumental effort behind it all.
Mayfair didn’t necessarily need another high-gloss address. But it did need somewhere that feels like this: a restaurant where the art on the walls speaks to the art on the plate, and where you emerge blinking into Bruton Place, slightly changed – more thoughtful, more delighted and just a little bit more alive.
Photography courtesy of The Cocochine.
