Londoners want more, says chef who teaches diners to plate food
Diners are demanding more of an “experience” to keep them interested, according to a restaurateur whose chefs help customers plate their own food.
Paul Hannagen’s firm, Cuisson, has provided high-end private dining to companies including Louis Vuitton and Veuve Clicquot.
He is now running a pop-up in Piccadilly called POPdown, where guests interact directly with the Michelin-trained cooks.
Mr Hannagen, 26, told the Standard: “We have the diners plating up at the pass. They come up and use the tweezers and hand-guns and we help them in the art of plating. They’re doing everything — dressing the plates, getting the tweezers out, being shown how to garnish with micro-herbs, sauce it, oil the plate.
“You can eat in a top restaurant in London for £30 so you’ve got to be doing something absolutely spectacular to win the customer.
“They are going away having learned something. They are getting a very layered and multi-sensory experience. People want that now.”
His chefs also field questions and act as waiters at the pop-up on Charles II Street, which runs until the end of this month.
“Londoners have such a knowledge of food at the moment through TV, they always love to learn from professionals,” Mr Hannagen said. “Our chefs communicate with the guests, because more and more we’re cooking in the most congested market in the world, so it’s about layering the experience.”
His head chef Pedro Passinhas, who worked under Heston Blumenthal, has also created dishes that are not what they seem, including a watermelon carpaccio that looks like raw beef, noodles made from goats’ cheese and a “quail’s egg” palate cleanser.
Mr Hannagen, from Galway in Ireland, said: “It looked exactly like a raw quail egg in its shell.
“It was actually a lemon grass jelly that was not quite set, and in the middle was a liquid ravioli of passion fruit.”
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