Most hotel restaurants are built to be reliable. Florence Knight wanted something else. She calls Lunette a restaurant in a hotel, not a hotel restaurant, and the room on the 11th floor of St Clement is where she makes the case.
A chef with a room of her own
Knight made her name as head chef at Polpetto in Soho at 25, and was launch chef at Sessions Arts Club in Clerkenwell. Lunette is the first restaurant where the menu is hers alone. She came to the site when it was still a building site, in a hard hat, and describes the finished space as the extension of an amazing home.
What is on the plate
The cooking starts with the producer and follows the season, and Knight has described the menu as perhaps the Western equivalent of an omakase. Dishes she has trailed include a pomme soufflé with smoked eel, roe and nasturtium flowers, a milk custard with Cévennes onion sauce and baked petals with caviar, and slow-cooked pork loin with anchovies, cinsault sauce, creamed coco beans and figs.
The hotel
St Clement is Nick Jones's new riverside hotel at Temple, looking over the Thames. Lunette is its statement restaurant, and it arrived almost five months after the more relaxed Café Clement on the ground floor.
- The vibe
- A minimalist 11th-floor room with views across the river.
- The food
- Seasonal and producer-led, with smoked eel, caviar and slow-cooked pork among the dishes trailed.
- The drink
- To confirm.
- A tip
- Book ahead.
