Larry Jayasekara lays the snacks down like a manifesto. It’s the kind of comfort food you’d ask for first upon reaching home if you’d traveled the world while your new restaurant was being renovated.
Back when the building was a photo studio, they’d lifted a car into the loft for a shoot with Kate Moss, ruining the floor – one of the hold-ups that led to the two-year construction time.
We’d read that Larry had traveled to 25 countries during those two years while The Cocochine was under construction. “No, it was 26 countries, I think,” Larry squints, trying to remember.
Added to the comforting take on Quiche Lorraine, there’s Larry’s Coronation Chicken (made with a French chicken, the legs confit, some Sri Lankan curry powder, Earl Grey tea-soaked raisins, apples, almond tuile, and pickled apple).
Then, like a spin of the globe – revealing The Cocochine’s true identity as “an ingredient-led restaurant, from around the world” – there’s a carrot and Norwegian reindeer heart snack. A Comté cheese-filled donut. And some yellow tail topped with their house Golden Oscietra Caviar caviar. The caviar, carefully crafted for The Cocochine so as not too salty to allow it to work its way, subtly, into more dishes, will make lots more appearances, including in one of the desserts.
Use The Past To Look To The Future
Behind us, the open fire is as comforting as the snacks. On the other wall, staring through us the way celebrities do, are a series of Warhol portraits. Larry’s cofounder is Tim Jefferies, owner of the Hamiltons Gallery. In the centre is a portrait of Henry Geldzahler – the opinionated art curator famously depicted by artists like David Hockney and Andy Warhol. Warhol once said of Henry that he, “understood the past, but he also understood how to use the past to look at the future.”
In Larry Jayasekara’s storied past, he arrived from Sri Lanka to the UK, to Torquay, in 2002. He worked as a bin man, chopped vegetables in a Thai restaurant, before embarking on a stint at catering college. Inspired by an episode of Gordon Ramsay’s ‘Kitchen Nightmares’, he moved to London, working with culinary luminaries: Marcus Wareing at the Berkeley, Gordon Ramsay at Hospital Road, Alain Roux at the Waterside Inn, chef Michel Bras at Laguiole in the Aveyron, and, upon returning to England, at Gordon Ramsay’s Pétrus.
When, around that time, Tim Jefferies asked him about his own plans, all those formative experiences pointed to one future: opening the restaurant that would become The Cocochine.
Located in a four-storey townhouse down Bruton Place, off Berkeley Square, The Cocochine is a block or two from Savile Row, which provides its front-of-house team with their dapper attire.
Charles Rolls, co-founder of Rolls Royce, lived around here, and so did Winston Churchill. You suspect Churchill would approve of Larry’s occasional plundering of ingredients from around the world – the reindeer from Norway or the Otoro “directly from Ginza” – balanced with a real commitment to local produce.
Riches From Rowler Farm
The rich, Rowler Farm Roasted Onion Soup comes with a truffle cheese toastie and onion agnolotti, with the broth, seasoned with balsamic and soy sauce, poured on top – a metaphor, perhaps, for the contrarian touches at The Cocochine, where things are often flipped and reversed. Take the homely living room at the top of the house, not the bottom, serving as a private dining room – the one where Henry Geldzahler’s portrait stared past us – or the counter downstairs, where just seven seats look into the immaculate and vast kitchen, with Larry and the team seemingly occupying only a corner.
As the name of the onion soup suggests, lots of ingredients, like the beef dry-aged for 40 days, come from The Cocochine’s mixed farmland on the Rowler Estate in Northamptonshire, less than a two-hour drive away, depending on London traffic.
Seafood From Off-Grid Tanera Mòr
Then there’s seafood: shellfish, turbot, and salmon from Tanera Mòr, an island in the Inner Hebrides, with captivating natural beauty and a proud history. It’s a barely tapped source of seafood, and Larry is the exclusive recipient of produce like the hulking, deliciously meaty scallops that are so large he has to cut them into two to serve. They’re topped with strawberries and served beside a pumpkin puree. Then a scallop dashi is poured around them as if submerging the scallop once again in the deep waters they were hand-plucked from.
There’s a book of images of Tanera on the counter at The Cocochine by photographer Kevin Percival, Larry hands us, by way of illustration, full of black and white windswept landscapes and fishing boats, and the off-grid existence of the island’s stoic residents.
Larry Jayasekara’s The Cocochine Is Reshaping Culinary Geography
The rest of the menu proceeds with the same locally-affiliated and wanderlusting spirit. It’s a gastronomic journey that refuses to be confined by borders, yet remains deeply rooted in the produce of the British landscape, creating a dining experience that is at once exploratory and intimately familiar. “Like the rack of deer,” Larry says, setting down the mains, “that’s from our farm, which we age for 20 days, with a BBQ oyster on top, and three purees on the plate that the animal would eat on the ground – including quince and local herbs – there are cloudberries from Norway, and it’s finished with bitter chocolate.”
Then there’s the desserts, delicate sculptural works – one set on tiny pedestals by artist Nadege Mouyssinat – and the 66% Chocolate Cremeux, topped with the Golden Oscietra Caviar which makes a welcome reappearance.
While Warhol spoke of understanding the past to glimpse the future, The Cocochine goes one better. This isn’t just looking forward – it’s actively reshaping culinary geography. And Larry Jayasekara doesn’t merely reference influences; he deconstructs them, remixes them, and serves them up on a plate that’s part time machine, part global positioning system. The future isn’t something to be understood – it’s something, in Larry’s experienced hands, to be savored.
