The Cocochine: Meet Larry Jayasekara, a chef like no other
Bruton Place, number 27. A man in a faded cap moves with a polisher that seems to float as it hums over the parquet. “This didn’t used to be here,” he says, tapping the wood. “They saw it in number 20. We had to take it up, cut the bottoms off, and relay it here.”
The other man in the room is a chef, Larry Jayasekara, who grins. “There is a lot here we wanted to be perfect,” he says. He nods to a serving station in the middle of the room. It was sculpted, he explains, from a single 1,800kg piece of stone brought up from Cornwall especially. “And I don’t want ice buckets to show, so we carved it for bottles.”
Jayasekara is standing on the ground floor of The Cocochine, a four-storey restaurant he’s opening next Monday with help from Tim Jefferies, the Hamiltons Gallery owner. The chef all but skips between rooms, pointing
