Bespoke ceramics, evocative music playlists, handmade leather aprons – we may not always notice them, but these are the things that make eating out magical
Tony NaylorSun 20 Oct 2024 09.00 EDTShareThe bespoke joiner: Alice Blogg (pictured above)When visitors to Alice Blogg’s home discover her family eat from wooden plates, it often elicits a “that’s so cute” response, although she is not trying to be.
Blogg’s “healthy obsession” with wood is practical as much as aesthetic. By day, at her rural west Dorset workshop, she uses it to create everything from chopping boards to bespoke kitchens. It is a material she understands, that she believes in as a sustainable resource and cherishes for its natural beauty: “Let it be the material it is.”
Understandably, wood has become Blogg’s go-to in life, too. She and her joiner husband, Fergus Peterkin, built their home in wood, so those plates are but a tiny detail – albeit one that reflects Blogg’s enthusiasm for wooden functional-ware that wears and ages over time, developing character: “You’re getting patina and love,” says Blogg, who has previously made bowls and rolling pins for retail. “The more you use something the better it is.”
Blogg was raised in a creative, resourceful family. “We grew vegetables. We’d make everything,” says the 38-year-old, whose brothers are a fashion designer and the former executive chef at Sussex’s Michelin-starred Gravetye Manor. “It was very much about what was around us and what we could do.”
You get patina and love from wood. The more you use it, the better it isThat can-do, waste-not ethos runs through Blogg’s work. Smaller projects might use trees felled or blown down locally, and Blogg uses a range of wood, including apple and alder, as well as the more common oak and ash. For bigger jobs, she sources sustainable, usually English, timber from well-managed forests. Her furniture is, she says, “made to pass down through generations”.
This approach has resonated with restaurants. In 2011, Blogg created a prominent sideboard for Le Champignon Sauvage that stores items including napkins and cutlery. It is, says Helen Everitt-Matthias, co-owner of the Cheltenham restaurant “absolutely still in use and still receiving good comments”.
In the 2010s, Blogg made items (beer-tap handles, candle holders, A-boards etc) for branches of the then-West Country-based pizza chain Stable. She would later design and build cheese trolleys for Gravetye Manor and Devon’s Gidleigh Park.
The aim is a combination of the beautiful and useful. “These pieces are going to be used day in, day out. You need to make sure they work,” says Blogg, who visits restaurant clients to understand how an object will function in situ, painstakingly measuring items, including folded tablecloths, to ensure everything will fit in compartments.
“It’s important I understand how they push a trolley, and serve at the table,” says Blogg, who, when designing, mimics the actions waiting staff might make around her work, to ensure what she makes will be comfortably functional.
As a diner, Blogg is irritated by poor combinations of furniture, especially “high chairs and low tables I can’t fit under” and those “made with materials that are going to go into landfill. Why do we need this in our lives?”
When she designs a piece, Blogg wants restaurant staff to feel the difference. What would her ideal feedback be? “It makes our lives so much easier.”aliceblogg.co.uk
The soundtrack expert: Rob Wood, Music Concierge
View image in fullscreenRob Wood, founder of Music Concierge, photographed at his home in south London with his record collection. Photograph: Phil Fisk/The ObserverIn the mid-2000s, Rob Wood regularly found himself baffled by the music he heard in boutique hotels. In otherwise meticulously planned spaces, you might find a “bar manager playing techno at breakfast or a dusty pianist playing some godawful cover version”. To this then-DJ and music journalist such choices jarred.
Wood thought that sensitively programmed music could enhance not just a hotel or restaurant’s aesthetic “but how people feel in that space: comfortable, energised, happier”, with obvious business benefits.
In 2007, Wood, now 55, launched the music curation service Music Concierge. Today, it employs more than 60 people internationally, has offices in Shanghai and Dubai among others, and in London delivers music to restaurants ranging from Angela Hartnett’s Cafe Murano and Claude Bosi’s Brooklands to fast-casual chains, pubs and bars.
To collate playlists, staff draw on a vast library (about 250 genres; jazz has 35 sub-sections) in which tracks are tagged to enable searches for, say, “elegant music that evokes the French Riviera”. “[It’s] detective work,” says Wood.
Tom Kerridge wanted more guitar music than we’d normally includeMusic is chosen for what hospitality professionals call “day parts”. Breakfast requires a different soundtrack to dinner, and those moments in the day vary from Monday to Friday or summer to autumn. There are many variables for which Music Concierge designs updatable playlists accordingly.
“You also use music to underpin the service,” says Wood. Guests are more likely to linger for after-dinner drinks if the tempo is relaxed. Casual restaurants looking to turn tables quickly require pacier sounds, an injection, says Wood, of “energy and momentum that becomes part of [that restaurant’s] culture”.
To identify that culture, restaurants are analysed: decor, menus, trading patterns, style of service: “All those influence what we’re going to recommend.”
Occasionally, an owner may request a themed playlist that is intended to evoke a specific time and place, say 1920s Paris. Or a chef who is a music fan might lobby for certain songs. Tom Kerridge asked for Shuggie Otis and Laura Marling on the playlist at his Corinthia Hotel restaurant, alongside, says Wood, “more guitar-orientated artists than we normally include in a place like that”.
Usually, the Music Concierge approach is more tangential. Its work for Dishoom, for example, has a “retro element”, fittingly for a brand inspired by Mumbai’s historical Irani cafes. But this eclectic mix is not time coded or geographically literal. Instead, it folds together “funkier” 1970s Bollywood tracks or 1950s US exotica or jazz to create the democratic, playful atmosphere Dishoom wanted to convey.
Programming music the audience will recognise is, with certain exceptions, rarely a priority. Instead, the aim is to choose music which “in emotion and feel matches the restaurant concept”. High-end restaurants particularly, says Wood, are about escapism. “You don’t want hear what was playing on the radio as you drove there,” he says.musicconcierge.co.uk
The ceramicist: Skye Corewijn
View image in fullscreenCeramicist Skye Corewijn, photographed in her studio in east London. Photograph: Phil Fisk/The ObserverIn the past decade, the British ceramics scene has “just exploded”, says London-based potter Skye Corewijn. The number of studios and makers has grown, as has interest from restaurants in Corewijn’s hand-thrown crockery.
“Plates are like frames for food,” says Corewijn. Chefs, particularly those who value artisan skills, increasingly want those frames to be bespoke: engaging objects with an interesting backstory of local production. Mass-produced is out, bling is cringe and unique, handmade items rule, not least in tableware.
Corewijn, whose restaurant clients include the Sea, the Sea, Cycene and Planque, is a product of that renaissance in traditional skills. The Cape Town-born 35-year-old started pottery classes at London studio the Kiln Rooms in 2012, eager to mix up her desk job with something “nourishing … more tactile, something I could touch and feel”.
Her first commission came two years later from Giorgio Ravelli, then cooking at Upstairs at the Ten Bells, where Corewijn was working front of house part-time: “It was quite a wild feeling to take food out on little plates I’d made.”
Friends of friends, often chefs, would seek her out (she produced early pieces for the Clove Club and Koya). Honing her skills at Turning Earth’s Leyton studios (“Ceramics is a lot about trial and error”), and as an assistant to the potter Jess Joslin, Corewijn developed a portfolio of hospitality clients and her retail work, showcased at the Hackney Road store Klei.
Design is collaborative: “Trying to combine [chefs’] taste with something I’m proud to make.” Having worked in restaurants, Corewijn can offer frank advice about how handmade pieces handle. “I’ve seen how plates stack,” she says. “How they break.” Matt finishes are more prone to chips and cutlery marks: “Glossy finishes are more practical. But some restaurants are like, ‘We just want it to be beautiful.’”
For Corewijn, beauty means contrasts: “Matt and gloss next to each other, even clay as a texture.” Her pieces largely operate in a vogueish, earthy palette of greys and browns, partly out of necessity. Using an electric kiln to fire stoneware and porcelain narrows the colours achievable, unless you want to deep dive into glazing science. Corewijn’s interests lie more in “throwing, shape, form”.
Feel is important, literally and figuratively. Corewijn’s “dimple” cups for Assembly Coffee featured an indent grip. The drinker’s hand wraps around and into the cup, creating “a comfortable, cosy experience, which embodies a morning coffee”.
Chefs buying this work embrace the idiosyncrasies of handmade pottery. A natural material, clay may include iron flecks or produce a variety of shades. When Corewijn makes 100 plates at her Bromley-by-Bow studio, they may vary a few millimetres in diameter. “I’m not a machine,” she says. If chefs want uniform “indestructible work” they can go to factories, but, says Corewijn: “Where’s the sensibility in that, where’s supporting local business?”skyecorewijn.com
The interior architect: Richard Eastwood, R2A
View image in fullscreenArchitect Richard Eastwood and his golden doodle, Nelly, at Papillon, Liverpool, designed by his company R2A. Photograph: Fabio De PaolaOther architects may enjoy conceiving a building’s exterior, but for Richard Eastwood it is the interior that brings “joy and romance” to buildings, more so than “cladding a shape”.
Specifically, the founder of the agency R2A, which has designed such notable places as Madre in Manchester and Manifest in Liverpool, as well as the Indian chain Mowgli’s first two sites, has fallen in love with “designing some of the last social spaces in our cities”. Places where, as Eastwood puts it, lyrically, “people meet their future husbands and wives”.
R2A’s work is not about “making sure cushions match curtains”. Instead, it is a synthesis of the creative and the practical. It aims to reflect a restaurant’s “narrative” in its interior, while ensuring that, from kitchen ergonomics to capacity (“we’re masters at maximising bums on seats”), the space functions smoothly for owners, staff and diners.
Eastwood has rigorous opinions on every aspect. Comfort must always trump designer ego: “I see these cool spaces – raw concrete bench, stainless steel walls – and you’re thinking, ‘How long would I actually sit there?’”
Layered and pooled romantic lighting is “key to everything”. Table heights (usually 75cm, or 90cm in busier, central areas, to prevent diners “getting knocked” constantly), need to align with seating accurately, so you’re not “leaning forward all the time”.
When you open the door, it’s all the detail that gives a place integrityPet hates include booth tables that are a struggle to clamber into: “I want it to look cool. But I’ve got to get into the table.” As for living walls with neon slogans designed for Instagram selfies: “Maybe I’m just old and grumpy. It’s just not us,” says Eastwood, who is 57.
Defining a brand’s identity (hip, democratic, luxurious) and choosing how to embody that in materials and features is a more abstract process. Eastwood likens R2A to a music producer, refining ideas from multiple sources – the owner’s vision; a building’s history; contemporary design trends – into an achievable plan that has “confidence and clarity”.
Sometimes, interior features reference the food. Manifest has an open kitchen with counter seats and a handsome table at the entrance displaying locally grown, seasonal produce, plus an ageing cabinet for homemade charcuterie. That “elemental interior reflects [owner Paul Durand’s] cooking”.
Often, the influence and intent is less obvious. R2A’s designs at Madre makes oblique reference to traditional Mexican architecture, but “rather than being on the nose: here’s a Mexican restaurant”, it does so in a buzzy space whose lighting gives it a nightclub edge which feels woven into its city-centre location.
Madre is modern, sharp, instantly attractive, even if most visitors would struggle to articulate why it lands with such a satisfying aesthetic. It is all the detail, says Eastwood, the hundreds of small design decisions – surface finishes, colours, how a corner is styled – which, when “you open the door, gives it instant integrity”.r2a.studio
The tanner: Jack Millington, Billy Tannery
View image in fullscreenJack Millington in his tannery at Sauvey Castle Farm, Leicestershire. Photograph: Phil Fisk/The ObserverA decade ago, Jack Millington stumbled into what he describes as a “void that piqued my interest”. He was trying to find companies that could turn the surplus hides from his father’s goat meat farm into leather but found “this almost dead industry but with this massive supply of hides, which were going abroad or in the bin”.
Then working in advertising, Millington sensed an opportunity. The company he cofounded in 2016, Billy Tannery, became a rare newcomer in the now niche tanning industry. Historically, Britain had thousands of tanneries. In 2019, the industry body, Leather UK, listed 24 on its website.
Even in that group, the 36-year-old’s Leicestershire micro-tannery is unusual. It uses a pre-industrial tree bark tanning method and processes goat and deer skins rather than cow or sheep hides. It also designs its own products, made in UK workshops, which, for restaurants, range from handsome chefs’ aprons to leather menu covers, order-pad holders, table mats and bill presenters.
We can create most valuefrom something that wasgoing to be chucked awayMillington was on a steep learning curve. Both in building the tannery, with guidance from Paul Evans, a former lecturer at the University of Northampton’s Institute for Creative Leather Technologies, and in sourcing male goat skins (preferred for their higher quality) from abattoirs where previously they might have been discarded. “We can create the most value from something that was going to be chucked away,” says Millington, who contacted goat farms, abattoirs and hide merchants to connect a supply chain for Billy Tannery.
This story at the intersection of meat, artisan craft and waste reduction resonated with chefs. 12:51’s James Cochran and Douglas McMaster’s zero-waste restaurant Silo were among early fans of the tannery’s lightweight, supple goatskin aprons. Millington has also created deer aprons for the Ledbury, using hides from two herds owned by the restaurant’s chef-owner, Brett Graham.
Luckily, the tannery launched as the live-fire-and-leather-apron look was taking off with chefs. But its hospitality range, including bespoke “taco pouches” for Mexican restaurant Kol, sells, says Millington, on a combination of style, ethics and hard-headed cost-effectiveness.
“A thick, heavy, leather-bound menu can add to the prestige of a big, expensive wine list; that is definitely a motivation,” says Millington. But general managers also “want to reduce their printing costs. There’s always a practical aspect.”
Using Billy Tannery’s products requires some buy-in. Its aprons are a durable, sustainable option but benefit from wiping down attentively and periodic applications of leather cream. Its drinks coasters may “darken and age, like any leather. It might be nerve-racking to see marks on it from a glass. But over time it becomes part of the piece.” billytannery.co.uk
