A few days ago, I came across a post by a British food journalist describing a meal that had made her heart beat faster. She was excited about potatoes cooked in the embers, bread that arrived puffed up like a football, and strawberries with zebra stripes from the grill. The writing was warm, and the excitement was completely genuine. I felt nothing. Not because the restaurant wasn’t good – by every account, it was excellent. But because what she was describing – beautifully executed, seasonal, produce-driven, open fire, all the familiar signals – was a formula running at full power. And I have stopped being excited by formulas, however well they run.

In one of my recent pieces, I wrote about London’s love of comfort, about the rounded edges, about what this city keeps choosing not to be. Several people wrote back. The conversation is not finished; this piece goes further.

 

London and Its Choices

Going out for a meal is not always a statement. There are days when I am too lazy to cook, and I go out and enjoy the ember potatoes and the puffed bread, and I am perfectly happy. I am not criticising anyone who finds that exciting. People are different, and all of this needs to exist. But I personally will not come home and write about it. It does not stay with me, it does not change anything. And fine dining – yes, I cannot do that at home either, but I can eat essentially the same fine dining meal in Dubai, Singapore, Paris or London. The grammar is international and largely interchangeable. Technical perfection is not the same as singularity. What I am looking for is something that could only have come from one specific person’s obsession. Something that exists nowhere else. Something that stays for years and changes how you see food. In London, it is almost impossible to find.

 

The Third Thing

I want to be moved. I want to sit down in a restaurant and feel, sometime between the first course and the last, that something has shifted. That I am not quite the same person who walked in. I want the feeling you get when you fall in love – that inability to stop thinking about it, that need to tell everyone, that sense that something has permanently changed. I want a meal I will still remember years later – one that is truly unforgettable, one that changes how I see food.

London is very good at many things right now. It is very good at comfort, it is very good at fun. And it has, at the expensive end, no shortage of technically accomplished fine dining: immaculate, international, interchangeable. You could eat the same cuisine in Dubai, Singapore or Paris. Classic French technique, a nod to Japan, a suggestion of Scandinavia, tweezers, restraint, precision. Beautiful, delicious, and, after a while, very predictable in the way that perfection tends to be. But perfect is boring, isn’t it?

What London does not have, or barely has, is the third thing.

Not comfort, not fine dining. Something harder to name. The cutting edge, the obsessive, the kind of restaurant that exists not because a formula proved scalable but because a chef had an idea that needed to exist. Something that might surprise you, unsettle you, send you home still arguing.

 

Fun Is Not the Point

It seems Londoners rate restaurants based on the factor of fun. But let’s look at film. Blockbusters fill cinemas, and they are fun. Tarkovsky, Kurosawa and Buñuel are not fun, yet I have never heard a critic complain that they weren’t fun enough. The world is poorer without such directors, and so are the people who never encounter their films. We need more artists who question, not only those who decorate or offer fun. We need, in the same way, chefs who go deeper – more obsessive, more aware, more willing to reach for something that might not work. Imperfection, when it comes from reaching, is not failure. It is the mark of someone who dared. Perfection is boring. Imperfection has soul in it.

 

Four chefs. Four kinds of refusal.

René Redzepi began long ago by asking a question nobody in fine dining had seriously asked till then: what if we focus entirely on the local, the seasonal, the foraged, the particular? That was the starting point. What followed went much further. Noma became a permanent state of experiment — ingredients that appear nowhere else in western fine dining, techniques developed in their own research kitchen, applied to things most chefs would never think to touch. The plating does not reference any existing tradition. It looks like it was assembled by someone who had studied ancient art, natural history, and the deep logic of ecosystems rather than classical technique. A lobster tail on a slab of dark bark, split open, its fan-like fins spread wide, a pool of amber broth gleaming beneath it – something between a prehistoric creature and a ritual offering from another civilisation. You could not predict any of it. You could not have invented the category it belongs to. It started with one chef refusing to cook the way everyone expected him to cook. That refusal, sustained long enough and with enough obsession, became something genuinely unrepeatable.

 

Alberto Landgraf at Oteque in Rio de Janeiro cooks with a philosophy that Tarkovsky articulated better than any food writer: minimalism is not the starting point but the end point. You accumulate everything: every idea, every flavour, every association, inspiration, memory, every technique. You accumulate until it is full. Then you begin to reduce until what remains looks simple but contains the essence of everything. Alberto’s food looks quiet, but it is not quiet. Born to a German father and a Japanese mother, Alberto carries both worlds in his cooking – the discipline and the precision, the restraint and the poetry. He studied physics before he entered a kitchen. He is one of the most widely read chefs working today – philosophy, science, business, art, design – and all of it shows in the food. The plate is never just a plate. It carries the thinking of someone who has spent a lifetime accumulating knowledge across fields most chefs never touch. That is what gives his minimalism its density. The reduction is real because the accumulation was real. He refuses to sell stories. No origin myths, no romantic narratives, no carefully packaged identity. At a time when every fine dining meal almost requires a tale to justify itself, his refusal to narrate is perhaps his most radical act. He lets the food speak, and the food speaks volumes. At a moment when every chef seems to be telling you who they are, Alberto simply cooks. The silence is deliberate – the depth is the essence of everything he chose not to say.

Adam Lawrence is a young American chef, recently head chef at Ilis in Brooklyn, the restaurant founded by Mads Refslund, co-founder of Noma. But here, the story is not about his credentials. Ten years ago, Adam became obsessed with ancient Korean culinary heritage and made a decision that is almost impossible to explain in career terms: he started learning Korean from scratch – not to communicate, not to travel, but to read Joseon-era royal culinary texts in the original language. Think about what that means. A chef already working at the highest level of American fine dining, choosing to spend years on something with no guaranteed return, no obvious audience, no career logic whatsoever. Pure obsession. He studied yaksikdongwon, the philosophy that food and medicine come from the same source, not as a mystical idea but as a scientific one. He learned the five elements and five flavours not as flavour categories but as an architecture for the plate. He became obsessed with wild plants – not foraged from forests but found in fields, the plants most people walk past without looking. Every plant he uses has been studied in full – its life cycle, peak vitality, how it responds to climate, handling and time. For every ingredient that makes it to a plate, hundreds exist only in notebooks. What emerged from all of this is not Korean food, it’s not fusion, not influence in the casual sense. He created something entirely his own, built on a foundation so deep and so specific that it could only have come from him. He is developing that cuisine through pop-ups and towards his own restaurant. In his own words: “Joseon royal cuisine provided the grammar, but I developed my own alphabet.”

Andoni Luis Aduriz at Mugaritz in Errenteria does not expect his guests to love his cooking. He says so openly. He wants it to be thought-provoking, to involve all the senses, to ask something of the people sitting at his tables. Some dishes arrive without cutlery and without instructions. There are no desserts in any conventional sense. He surrounds himself with creative people from all walks of life – scientists, artists, thinkers – who widen his view and challenge him to learn. The result is a dining experience that divides people completely. You will love it, or you will not understand it. What it will never do is leave you indifferent. That is not an accident but the entire point. Aduriz has spent decades building a restaurant that refuses to please on conventional terms, that treats the dining table as a place for genuine inquiry. Most restaurants believe they have answers. Mugaritz is a question. I went, I was moved, and I licked the plate at the end. Every single drop.

Four chefs. Four completely different obsessions, four completely different results. What they share is not a style or a philosophy but something harder to name: an absolute refusal to be anything other than what they are. They do not chase approval. They do not smooth the edges to make you comfortable. They are brutally honest, authentic, singular. Each one has built something that could not exist without them and could not be replicated by anyone else. The world has a few of them. London has almost none.

 

What Silo taught us

London did have Silo. Douglas McMaster is exactly the kind of chef this piece is about – obsessive, uncompromising, driven by an idea so completely that he built an entire restaurant and life around it and ran it for eleven years across two cities. His zero-waste restaurant in Hackney Wick ran for six years before closing last December. Everything in it had been thought about deeply, even the interior – everything had been made from recycled or reclaimed materials – the plates, the lampshades, the tables, the stools – yet the result was not makeshift or apologetic. It was genuinely beautiful, considered, and designed with real intention. And then the food, which was the point of all of it. The food was delicious. I ate there on different occasions, and it was always deeply exciting.

When I spoke to Douglas recently, he was clear about what it felt like to innovate inside a system that wasn’t built for it. “It’s not safe anymore to innovate,” he said. “We are punished for doing it.” He described the experience of being reviewed harshly, not for the quality of the cooking but for the nature of the project – for speaking, as he put it, “a different language, a different frequency.” He invoked Plato’s Allegory of the Cave: humans are often aggressive towards change, towards anything that challenges the familiar. The restaurant that dares to be different pays the price.

The reviews at Silo’s London opening in January 2020 made this visible with unusual clarity. Time Out gave five stars. Jimi Famurewa in the Evening Standard called it “radically serious but surprisingly convivial.” Keith Miller in the Telegraph found “an unembarrassed thirst for beauty.” Marina O’Loughlin, then at the Times, was overwhelmingly positive, concluding that Silo turned radical environmental thinking into one of London’s most exciting meals. But Grace Dent in the Guardian gave it 3/10 and led with: “they seem to have forgotten that eating out is meant to be fun.”

What makes this extraordinary is what McMaster told me directly: it was the same menu, the same week. Every dish, the same weights, the same ingredients from the same farms, the same recipes dialled to precision. Marina’s verdict and Grace’s verdict were about the same plates on the same days. One found something close to a nine out of ten, the other gave three. The most widely read food critic in Britain at the time, Jay Rayner at the Observer, never came at all. When I asked McMaster about this, his answer was two words: “Never came. Thankfully. 🙂 ” The Hardens guide, summarising Silo’s entire London run, noted that it “never made quite the waves in the capital that it perhaps deserves.” A Green Michelin Star, six years in London, and the city’s own restaurant intelligence is left with: not quite the waves. That is not a critical failure but a cultural one.

Douglas described the project on closing as proof that circular thinking could survive in the heart of capitalism, “even if it’s like watching a fish trying to climb a tree.” The location did not help – too many people, when Silo was open, decided Hackney Wick was too far. But location was only part of it. “London is safe, it’s conservative,” Douglas said. “It likes fun and comfort. That’s not what Silo is. Silo is the opposite of that.”

He is now working on something new. More on that soon (it deserves a separate article).

 

The critics and the comfort

This is not an attack on any individual critic. Grace Dent is a brilliant writer, but her Silo review opened with a headline that said everything: “They seem to have forgotten that eating out is meant to be fun.” Three out of ten across all three: food, service and atmosphere. The review is well-crafted and honest – honest about what she values. But imagine applying the same criteria to film – we do not ask Tarkovsky why Solaris or Stalker are not more fun. We do not mark down a film for being difficult, unsettling or demanding. We understand, instinctively, that different work asks to be met on different terms. Somehow, that understanding stops at the restaurant door.

There is also something worth noting about which critics got Silo and which did not. The Guardian and the Observer – the papers you would expect to champion the intellectual, the radical, the avant-garde – gave it 3/10 or never came at all. The Telegraph and the FT were the ones who found the beauty. The conservative papers turned out to be the adventurous and more open ones. The progressive papers wanted fun. But this is not really about politics. McMaster put it plainly: “Grace gets hits, she’s a writer who entertains. That’s good for business.” The Guardian’s food pages and the Guardian’s politics have almost nothing to do with each other. Food criticism, like everything else, follows what gets read. A devastating three out of ten travels further than a considered nine because it is placed higher in Google. Entertainment beats nuance every time. The restaurant that suffers the consequences is a casualty of the attention economy.

The most influential platforms in British food media tend to reward what London’s restaurants are already optimising for: fun, ease, warmth, comfort, and a good time. The critical ecosystem and the restaurant ecosystem are feeding each other in a loop that leaves very little room for the third thing.

 

What I am asking

I am not issuing a verdict – I love this city. I am writing an impatience. Are there any obsessive chefs in London flying under the radar? Are there restaurants that are not afraid to create something new?

The Waterhouse Project is a place I have not yet visited, but intend to when they reopen. There may be others I do not know. And this is where you, the reader, come in.

If you know a restaurant in London (or elsewhere – worldwide) that would genuinely move me – strong character, obsession, genuine depth, something unexpected – I want to know. Write to me or comment.

And I have more questions than answers. Why does London, with everything it has, not produce more restaurants like this? Is it only the economics, or is it also the culture and the media? Are food critics who prioritise fun and comfort actively making it harder for something different to survive? Or is the problem elsewhere entirely?

I want to know what you think. The conversation feels more urgent than any conclusion I could offer. Do I really need to travel to be moved?

Andreja Lajh

Andreja Lajh is the founder of Haut de Gamme, a London-based agency working with chefs, restaurants and food producers worldwide. She writes about food, wine and the restaurant world at hautdegamme.net.

Disclosure: Alberto Landgraf and Adam Lawrence are clients of Haut de Gamme. The views expressed in this piece are entirely her own.