Today I was lucky enough to go and photograph food at Heston Blumental’s restaurant in Knightsbridge for ‘Eat Me’ Magazine. I arrived at the venue nice and early as I am always worried about been late! Heston’s restaurant- Dinner, is actually situated inside the Mandarin Oriental Hotel and has only been open for one month. It seemed like a popular restaurant as there are 55 chefs that work there and the venue can seat 140 people!!!

Obviously I went to photograph the food before the lunchtime rush. I arrived nice and early and was lucky enough to have a tour of the facilities by the restaurants PR representative, Elaine. The restaurant is actually divided into 3 areas:

First we have the main restaurant-

The Main restaurant is light and spacious. Everything has been carefully selected from the cutlery to the napkins, and you can tell! It’s the little details, such as the beautiful flowers:

To the light fittings that are actually made from Jelly moulds:

They make such an interesting feature. The majority of these tables are positioned along the edge of the kitchen or over looking Hyde park. If you are lucky enough you may even see the guards riding past on their horses for the guard change at the Palace. We did get to see this but by the time I got over to the window, I’d missed it. Maybe next time though! Here is the view from on of the tables onto the kitchen:

The next area is the Chef’s Table. This table is situated right next to the pass from the Kitchen. If you are lucky enough to sit here, you are actually served by Ashley Palmer-Watts himself. Here is the view from this table:

And last but not least is this private dinning area- It’s like a little hidden away world! It even has it’s own private entrance if you don’t fancy venturing into the main restaurant. The walls are painted bright red and are decorated with boar heads as light fittings. This private area can seat up to 12 (Well, that’s what I counted so don’t hold me to this!!), but the table is an extender so can be made smaller for smaller parties. Not only can the table be made smaller, but the centre piece light fitting is actually remote control, so it will always remain in the centre of the table:

You also have a lovely view looking over the rest of the restaurant, but if you want some quite time, then the blinds can always be used. Also to add to the quirkiness of the room, as you close the main door, there is actually a boars bottom on the reverse- You have to love Heston’s and Palmer-Watts humor! It gave me a chuckle.

Onto the ‘Pass’. This is where Ashley Palmer-Watts checks every dish before it is searved in the restaurants. I got a few shots of him here checking over the food I was about to photograph:

Ashley brought the dish over to me himself, so I decided it was a great opportunity to get a few portraits of Ashley with his ‘Meat Fruit’:

Not sure which one is my favorite, so I decided to put them all in!!

Now onto photographing the food:

I am not a pate fan but as I was eating with the stars I decided to give it a good and it was amazing!!!! It was so creamy and you could really taste the orange coating which is actually made from jelly. It was just so beautiful, I felt bad eating it!

Before I left, I couldn’t resist photographing one last feature in the kitchen- The Roasting Pineapples:

The Pineapples are actually rotated by the specially designed cogs you can see in the top right of the above image. It was an amazing set up!