At noon on the first of every month, a slightly frenzied ritual takes place among some of London’s more deep-pocketed foodies. It is the time when bookings open for the following four weeks at Evelyn’s Table. Punters time their midday calls with all the desperation of theatregoers trying to secure a ticket for Jerusalem, or hypochondriacs hoping to bag a GP appointment. The restaurant accommodates just 12 people at two sittings, Tuesday to Saturday evening. All slots – eight couples, two groups of four per night – are invariably gone by 12.05.
The experience rewards that fastest-finger competitiveness. Evelyn’s Table is in the former beer cellar of a storied Soho boozer, the Blue Posts, in a side street near Chinatown. At your appointed time – our sitting was at 6pm – you pass through a velvet curtain at the back of the old snug and descend a steep staircase into a narrow room with a steel-topped bar. Seated on high stools you are then within touching distance of a performance that seems part theatre, part magic show. Three intense young brothers, black-haired, bearded, all chefs, are already at dexterous work in a spotless and spotlit galley kitchen; on the night we took our seats the trio were noiselessly conjuring a dish of freshly opened, hand-dived scallops, tweezering on garnish, pipetting drops of tomato essence. Watching them perform, you are reminded a little of those families of circus acrobats, each outdoing the next in their tumbles. Here come the high-flying Selbys, Luke and Nathaniel and Theo! Roll up! Roll up! And be amazed!
Their tasting menu consists of five courses – with a couple of extra surprises thrown in. One seasonal high-wire act follows the next. The freshest Cornish mackerel comes with horseradish ice-cream and a tangy gooseberry puree; a rack of lamb is roasted before your eyes on a mini-barbecue of fragrant hay. There are no waiting staff: dishes are passed over the counter and placed before you, and described precisely by the sibling responsible. More expansive biodynamic storytelling is offered by maître d’ Aidan Monk, who spins seductive fables about wine pairings drawn from obsessive small vineyards in Georgia and Mendocino and Stellenbosch. The two-hour meal is about as expensive as box seats at the National Theatre or Wembley, but still, it defies you not to believe it is one-off worth it.
The day after I’ve watched the Selbys in action, I meet them at three in the afternoon on the upper floor of the Blue Posts at the wine bar, the Mulwray (it is named, like the basement restaurant, after Evelyn Mulwray, Faye Dunaway’s mysterious socialite in Roman Polanski’s Chinatown, famed for finding secret corners of her city where she can be fully herself). Having finished the previous night at midnight, the brothers have been prepping for four hours already and, though patient with my questions, are clearly slightly anxious to get back to it (if they don’t do it, as Theo, the youngest points out, no one else will).
They operate without juniors (one of the fascinations of the previous evening had been watching the choreography of them scrubbing the steel of the hob and surfaces back to stainless between courses and at the end of the service). They talk, like all close brothers, in a private mix of self-deprecation and banter, finishing each other’s sentences, quick to seize on any affectation. Luke, 31, the star of the previous night’s show, is very much the leader (“I’m sort of the Pied Piper,” he says, with a grin; Nat, 29, and Theo, 27, seem more than happy to follow his tunes).
In many ways, it becomes clear, as they describe to me their respective journeys to here, that they were fated to the almost monastic discipline and joyful creativity of Evelyn’s Table. All three boys were born in Saudi Arabia, where their parents had met while working in a hospital in Jeddah. Their dad, who worked in HR, was from the UK. Their mum, a biomedical scientist, was from the Philippines.
After a few years, the family moved to the UK and settled in a village near Brighton. The four boys – they also have a younger brother, Reuben, who is a fashion designer and photographer – were very tight, always looking out for each other, a built-in gang. Their early adventures were all about foraging. “Our mum comes from a family of nine in the Philippines,” Luke says. “Her mother had a rice farm, still has a rice farm – quite a few hectares – and a sugar plantation. So Mum has always had green fingers. She has three different allotments, many greenhouses. She is constantly sending us things to use in the restaurant, gooseberries, whatever. She was always excited about what was in season.”
That excitement had a big effect on them as kids. They’d go down to the beach at Shoreham or West Wittering and collect seaweed to cook, or bulging bags of mussels, or catch crabs. They’d walk the lanes blackberrying. “We had seven apple trees in the garden,” Luke says, “and every apple would be picked and cored and juiced. Nothing was ever wasted. There was always a crumble on the table.”
Theo laughs. “Mum was quite strict with us. We became a kind of production line. We were never allowed to go out until everything was prepped and processed and frozen and stored.”
The boys rebelled all the time, of course, but they learned a lot too. “Respect for produce, respect for nature,” Nat says. “We didn’t go out to eat much, maybe the Harvester on a Sunday.”
Their mother hasn’t lost her passion for discovery. “I moved back home over lockdown,” Luke says, “and showed her where she could pick caperberries. She just sent us about 10 kilos of them …”
The other formative ingredient in that childhood was their dad’s love of mealtimes. “He gets such joy from food,” Luke says, “so when I started cooking for the family – as a kid I was forever reading cookery books, watching food shows, taking notes – it gave us this real connection.”
Luke was always the driven one. If he hadn’t become a chef, he says, he may have had a career as a violinist. It was, ironically, his violin teacher, Andrew Bernardi, strings tutor at the Trinity Laban Conservatoire in south London, who prompted his first big kitchen opportunity. “We were always talking about food at lessons,” he says, “and he suggested I go in for this Rotary young chef competition, that Raymond Blanc was judging.” Luke was 14. He still remembers his menu for the final – open smoked haddock ravioli, roasted duck with blackberries and a raspberry souffle. “I came second,” he says. “But I wrote to Raymond afterwards and got some work experience in his kitchen at Le Manoir aux Quat’ Saisons. They held a job open until I finished my A-levels.”
Luke worked at the Manoir for six years. First Theo and then Nat gravitated to him, sleeping on his floor. Nat took the more circuitous route. He did a degree in illustration and only started cooking after graduation. Theo went to catering college and worked in restaurants in Sussex. Luke got them both trials at the Manoir, and for the first time they all worked together in the kitchen there; Luke as Blanc’s sous chef, Nat and Theo as commis.
They went separate ways for a while. While he was head chef at Ollie Dabbous’ eponymous restaurant in 2017, Luke won the title of national young chef of the year and a Roux scholarship that earned him time at the three-Michelin-starred Nihonryori Ryugin in Tokyo, adding a mastery of Japanese cooking to his French training. The band of brothers then reunited at Dabbous’ new London project Hide, the vast and buzzy oligarch-chic restaurant opposite the Ritz, before setting up here just over two years ago.
The contrast with Hide, with its limousine elevator, could hardly be greater. “I always loved working with Ollie,” Luke says, “but I’d got to the point where I wanted to do my own thing.” He drew up plans for the intimate kind of space he had in mind. Coincidentally, Zoë and Layo Paskin, owners of London restaurant hotspots the Palomar and the Barbary, got in touch about their ideas for Evelyn’s Table and the Blue Posts. After a couple of meetings and a look at the space downstairs, he signed a partnership agreement with them. His brothers, naturally, were a key part of the deal. Their restaurant was due to open in March 2020, but was scuppered by lockdown. Though it has been frustratingly stop-start ever since, there have been high moments: notably the award of a Michelin star at the beginning of this year (and Michelin’s young chef of the year for the three of them). The brothers gave themselves a big day out to celebrate: a six-hour lunch at Alain Roux’s Waterside Inn at Bray, followed by a couple of bottles of champagne with Raymond Blanc, who has become a kind of second father to them.
That kind of downtime is quite rare though. They have recently employed one sous chef to fill in so one of them can take the occasional night off, but otherwise they are all in. “I think we always knew we could work well together,” Theo says. “We can preempt what is going to happen, each other’s needs.” The rough demarcation, he says, is that “Luke makes the sauces and handles the protein. Nathaniel does the pastry and I deal with garnish and fill in the gaps. But we are all able to do every sort of part of the kitchen, so if one of us has a night off, we can still maintain the standard.”
Not surprisingly on free days they try to escape each other and have their own circles of friends, though Luke and Theo spend a lot of time fishing together. “We’ve just started spear fishing and freediving,” Theo says. “We are often in Cornwall, across in Anglesey recently.” They bring home spider crabs and lobsters and sea bass and pollack – though, Luke admits, their spearfishing skills still leave something to be desired.
They are inevitably a little competitive about such off-duty challenges, but one thing they are adamant about is that the open kitchen arrangement leaves no room for sibling tension. They have worked in shouty restaurants but are happy to have replaced that with a kind of hush and a funky background playlist (they all chip in with favourite tracks). Otherwise, Luke insists, there is no place for simmering rivalry. “If something was off, the diners are so close they would feel it straight away,” he says. “And anyway we all enjoy the process. We all know every element that gets put on the plate.” And with that, two hours before curtain up, they get back to it.
Evelyn’s Table, The Blue Posts Cellar, 28 Rupert St, London W1D 6DJ
