Every aspect of The Cocochine is about quiet indulgence. Caviar augments several dishes, the tables are luxuriously far apart and the walls are decorated with a rotating selection of art from Hamiltons Gallery. The Mayfair restaurant, which opened last fall in a former townhouse on Bruton Place, is a joint venture between chef Larry Jayasekara and Hamiltons owner Tim Jefferies, and it embraces Jayasekara’s thoughtful approach to hospitality.
“It’s about looking after the guests, cooking with love and heart and respecting the ingredients,” Jayasekara tells Observer, speaking from the restaurant’s impressive top-floor private dining room, which boasts three Warhol paintings. “Hospitality means opening your home to friends and family. You cook for days, and then the first thing you offer [when they arrive] is water. I don’t want to have a champagne trolley in the restaurant, because that should not be the first thing offered. I want to offer guests a glass of water and let them come in, get comfortable and relax.”
Jayasekara met Jefferies while he was working as the head chef at Gordon Ramsay’s Petrus in Belgravia. Jefferies repeatedly returned to the restaurant, trying to convince Jayasekara to helm a few private dinners, to which the chef eventually agreed. After, Jefferies asked Jayasekara what he wanted to do going forward in his career. Jayasekara said that he wanted to open his own restaurant.
“He didn’t say anything,” Jayasekara recalls. “Time went along. Then he said, ‘I know a lot of people, and I could put together a group of people to help, and I could put in the art, and we could create something really special together.’ That’s how easily it started.”
Designing and building The Cocochine was less straightforward. The team started the refurbishment of the four-story townhouse in 2020, quickly realizing they would need to completely redo the foundation and the structure of the building. There was a lot to consider, including how much power the restaurant needed and how to construct the custom kitchen, which is accompanied by a chef’s counter, on the second floor. Then, Covid-19 hit, and it was difficult to get construction workers and materials.
Ultimately, it took over three years for the restaurant to come together. The small details, like leather-wrapped banisters on the staircases and a carved marble drinks station, were essential to Jayasekara, who was also able to create a custom chef’s kitchen. On the lower level, guests can experience a state-of-the-art wine cellar stocked with more than 1,500 bottles, and there’s a snug sitting area for pre-dinner drinks. When you order a steak, a server brings a box of custom knives with differently colored handles to pick from.
“We always wanted to make it a place where it’s about the level of art and the quality of the ingredients together, so it’s not just a plate of food,” Jayasekara says. “It is a whole experience. Everything here is custom-made to fit. Everything is like a jigsaw. Everything has to be matched. Everything has to be exactly how we wanted it: the flowers, the water, the steak knives, the plates, the tiles, the curtains.”
The food, too, is immaculate. Most of the ingredients come from the Rowler Farm Estate in Northamptonshire, to which the restaurant has exclusive access. The salad, for example, is composed of more than a dozen vegetables and herbs from the farm, and several of the proteins, including the pork, travel 60 miles from the estate to The Cocochine. Other ingredients, like the fish, are carefully sourced from Scotland.
Jayasekara spends one day a week on the farm, which he feels is essential to his process as a chef who focuses on seasonality and quality. He also draws on ingredients and flavors from his travels, as well as his upbringing in Sri Lanka. Each dish emphasizes decadence in an understated, elegant way, exemplified by an indulgent starter of Japanese otoro, roasted foie gras and golden Oscietra caviar.
“We’re not doing anything you’re not familiar with already,” Jayasekara explains. “I want the menu, when you open it, to have [things like] scallops, crab, lobster, mushroom, caviar. I always dreamed about having a menu in a restaurant where you can’t choose one dish. If you want every single dish, you’re in the right place. Hopefully, we’re doing that, and we’re making it focused on two or three ingredients rather than 15 [in each dish].”
Jayasekara’s obsession with quality is best understood via the menu’s standout dessert: Tahiti vanilla ice cream, served with jaggery caramel. It might be the most memorable ice cream you’ll ever taste, because Jayasekara insisted that the level of vanilla bean be significantly turned up.
First, the chef added 15 vanilla pods for every liter of crème anglaise, a significant amount of vanilla bean. “That was okay,” he says. “But I wanted the vanilla seeds to be popping in the palate. It’s not vanilla essence or vanilla powder or whatever. So I said, ‘Let’s put 20.’ And now we doing half a kilo of fresh Tahitian vanilla for one liter of crème anglaise. That is 50 percent vanilla. And believe it or not, since we opened, the best-selling dessert is the vanilla ice cream.”
Growing up in Sri Lanka, Jayasekara never imagined having his own restaurant in Mayfair, where he could test the limits of vanilla bean ice cream. He had never seen a cauliflower, caviar or a scallop before he moved to London two decades ago. His life back home was simple: surfing, barbecuing fish and eating rotis. He acknowledges that his life now is “very privileged,” but it’s taken Jayasekara years of hard work and sacrifice to get to this place in his career. He started out in London by cleaning bins, then moved on to chopping vegetables in a Thai restaurant, eventually going to culinary school.
“Learning to cook was simply about having a job, first of all,” Jayasekara says. “I didn’t know how to cook. I had never cooked before. It gave me a different passport. It changed me from a young boy surfing to starting to be anal about the size of a scallop or how the herb tastes. It’s a crazy journey. I used to wake up in the morning 20 years ago and think about how many waves were coming in.”
Jayasekara worked his way up in acclaimed restaurants like the Waterside Inn, Michel Bras and Le Manoir aux Quat’Saison, before eventually becoming head chef at Petrus, which focuses on high-end French cuisine. Despite Ramsay’s reputation, Jayasekara says the famous chef never yelled at him in the kitchen.
“It was very good experience,” he says. “He trusted me to run Petrus, and I have a huge respect for Gordon. He knows exactly what the market needs and how the menu should be. Having trust from someone like him to run one of his flagship restaurants; it was a privilege. I learned a huge amount about running a restaurant, rather than just cooking.”
Most importantly, Jayasekara learned the essentials of being the person in charge. According to Jayasekara, you need three things in order to succeed as you move up the ladder: preparation, communication and organization. “If those three things come together, you have a full experience,” he says. “As one man, you can’t achieve anything. You don’t win the Champions League just being Cristiano Ronaldo, right?”
That, to Jayasekara, defines success as a chef—not Michelin stars or rave reviews. It’s about having a loyal team as much as it is having a restaurant with packed tables and returning guests, all presumably coming back again and again for the aforementioned vanilla ice cream.
“Any accolades that are presented to any restaurant are a reward of how you work, the standard at which you’re working, the hospitality of the restaurant and how good the team is,” he says. “It’s always a great compliment to the team and to the business. Those accolades are appreciated in our work. But the real success is a guest who comes back. Signature dishes are created by the guests, not the chef. You eat something and tell five of your friends, and suddenly something becomes the chef’s signature dish. That, as I see it, is success in a restaurant.”
Emily Zemler
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