“You can’t see how pretty she is. But she’s very pretty,” says Florence Knight, showing off her new restaurant kitchen on the 11th floor of Nick Jones’s St Clement hotel off the Strand. It’s a few weeks before the opening of Lunette (meaning “half moon” and inspired by the semi-circular windows at the nearby old Aldwych tube station), but already the space is taking shape. “I’ve spent my life on tiptoes so these stainless-steel benches have been lowered to my specifications,” says Knight, who stands at 5ft 2in. “I’ve never been able to see directly into the salamander before,” she adds of the overhead grill, now dropped to her eye level.
Plating up milk custard, Cévennes onion sauce and baked petals with caviar © Dean Hearne
Flowers by Croco Floral in the restaurant © Dean Hearne
It’s been two and a half years since Knight (once dubbed the “golden girl” of British cooking) left Sessions Arts Club, the restaurant in a Grade-II listed former courthouse in Clerkenwell that she launched with artist turned entrepreneur Jonny Gent in 2021. Her understated, seasonally led menus helped to turn it into one of the most desirable destinations in town. Before that, she was head chef at Polpo, the Venetian-inspired bacaro in Soho. Her signatures included the spicy pork and fennel meatballs and baccalà mantecato – a whipped salt-cod dish that the late Russell Norman called “the holy grail”. Lunette is her first solo venture. “Everything is me, from the coasters to the glasses to the steak knives,” she says.
