Celebrated chef Florence Knight’s hotly anticipated restaurant Lunette opens next week at St Clement, Nick Jones’s spanking new luxury hotel overlooking the River Thames at Temple. The 11th-floor venue is the hotel’s statement restaurant, and follows almost five months after the launch of the less gastronomically ambitious Café Clement on the ground floor.
Florence made her name as head chef at Polpetto in Soho aged 25. More recently she was launch chef at Sessions Arts Club in Clerkenwell, where her cooking was described in the Harden’s guide as “inventive, even magical“.
Interviewed ahead of the Lunette launch, she insisted it would be a “restaurant in a hotel” rather than a “hotel restaurant“. “I fell in love with the site, it was a blank canvas. I came to this empty building site in a hard hat and wandered around. I thought, ‘This is where I want to be.’ It feels like the extension of an amazing home.”
She added: “There isn’t a concept here. And, yes, hotel restaurants are often consistent and reliable. We’re not trying to be that. We’re trying to do something special, something with longevity. This is deeply personal. Like Ikoyi and Toklas, I want to have an identity.”
The menu would be “perhaps the Western equivalent of an omakase experience“, she said. “I’m trying to make everything as perfect as I can. It starts with the producer. People have been asking me about the food here for a while now — it’s a jigsaw. It’s just whatever I think works best in this space.”
Dishes trailed include a pomme soufflé made with smoked eel, roe and nasturtium flowers; a milk custard served with Cévennes onion sauce and baked petals with caviar; and slow-cooked pork loin with anchovies, cinsault sauce, creamed coco beans, fresh figs, fig mustard and fig oil.