Adaeze Mensah
Founder · executive chefTrained in Lagos and Lyon. Cooks Sunday brunch for her family every week she is in town. Believes the most important seasoning is timing.
The point of dinner isn't the food. It's the four hours either side of it.Founders' note · 2021
ForkPour started in a borrowed kitchen on a Sunday in 2021. We cooked a five-course dinner for nine friends to celebrate one of them turning forty. There was no plan beyond the menu, the wine, and a sense that the rooms most of us spent our birthdays in had stopped feeling worth the trip.
By the time the table was cleared, three guests had asked us to do it for them. By the end of that year, we were cooking two dinners a week, with a producer, a sommelier, and a borrowed van. We didn't call it a business until clients started asking what to call it.
Five years on, the studio is twelve people. The kitchen is no longer borrowed. The wine list runs to forty bottles. The principle, though, is exactly the same. The four hours either side of dinner are the part that matters, and our job is to make sure that nothing else needs your attention while they happen.
The dish is plated the same way at table nine as it is at table one. The bottle is opened the same way at midnight as it was at seven. Standards aren't aspirational; they're the thing we sell.
An extra pour, a second helping offered without asking, a guest's allergy remembered from a dinner in March. Hospitality is a thousand tiny gifts. We notice each one.
Quiet, never showy. The room should look like dinner, not like a stage set. Restraint is the most expensive ingredient on the table.
Trained in Lagos and Lyon. Cooks Sunday brunch for her family every week she is in town. Believes the most important seasoning is timing.
Worked the floor at three Michelin houses in Brussels before crossing. Built our wine list. Will tell you what to order if you ask.
Spent a decade producing live theatre. Now produces dinners. The earpiece you don't see is in his ear, and he's been on the night before yours.
A typographic system in Cormorant Garamond and Jost; a colour palette of five tones built for low light. We use it everywhere: the wine list, the place cards, the website you're reading.