Most restaurants decide what the food is and then decorate around it. We wanted the room to make the same argument the menu does, which meant starting the design from the same place: two cultures, held in balance, neither one overwhelming the other.
The reference is a mountain
The starting point was Vinicunca, the striped peak in the Peruvian Andes better known as Rainbow Mountain. Layered mineral bands in ochre, rust, deep red and grey, laid down over millions of years and only visible where the rock is exposed.
We translated that into a room that feels less like a restaurant on a new estate and more like a house in the Peruvian highlands. Warm mineral tones and heavy texture set against harder industrial surfaces, cement and raw finishes, so the softness has something to push against.
The Japanese side of the equation shows up in the discipline rather than the decoration. Clean lines. Restraint in the detail. Nothing there that does not need to be.
Everything is made by hand
This is the part we are most stubborn about.
The chairs are being carved for us specifically. There is an artist working on them and has been for months. They are not being ordered from a catalogue, because a carved chair holds a room together in a way a specified one does not.
The ceramics are thrown by hand in Moldova. Every plate that reaches your table was made by someone rather than pressed by a machine, and the surface of a hand-thrown plate does something for a piece of fish that a factory glaze cannot.
Wood is the primary material throughout. It is the honest choice for a room meant to feel like a house rather than a venue, and it ages in a way that concrete and steel do not.
The kitchen is not hidden
Two floors, eighty-two covers, and almost nothing behind a wall.
The raw bar and cocktail bar are on the ground floor, in full view. The robata grill, the hot kitchen and the sushi counter are upstairs, also in full view. You can watch fish being sliced, skewers going over charcoal and nigiri being formed, from wherever you are sitting.
That is a deliberate risk. An open kitchen means there is no bad night that goes unseen and no shortcut that goes unnoticed. It also means dinner has something to watch, which is most of the reason we did it.
What we are actually building
We did not want to open a good restaurant for Canary Wharf. We wanted to open a restaurant that people would travel across London for, that happens to be in Canary Wharf.
The bet is that if the room, the plates and the food are all made with the same care, people notice, even if they could not tell you exactly what they were noticing.
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