Chef Izu Ani’s Knightsbridge restaurant has teamed up with London Art Exchange and artist Gabrielle Malak on a new collaboration that treats art and food as genuinely complementary experiences rather than simply decoration hung near the tables. La Maison Ani, the French Mediterranean restaurant housed within the Jumeirah Carlton Tower, is now presenting two commissioned works by Malak, Love Letter and Eternal Été, each paired with a specific dish designed to draw a direct line between the artwork’s visual language and what ends up on the plate.
It is, admittedly, an easy pitch to make sound appealing. Food and art already share plenty of common ground: sensory pleasure, memory, a certain theatricality, and adding wine into the mix only strengthens the case. What makes this particular collaboration worth watching is less the concept itself, which has been tried before in various forms, and more the specificity of the execution.
Gabrielle Malak
Love Letter, drawn from Malak’s travels through Florence, sits alongside a peony-and-lemon-meringue dessert, with the floral sweetness and citrus sharpness meant to echo both the painting’s romantic tone and its Italian origins. Eternal Été takes a considerably more savoury route, paired with a lobster and harissa-infused tagine loaded with vegetables, accompanied by yellowtail sashimi finished with olive oil, vinegar and caviar as a palate cleanser between courses, the pairing leaning into the artwork’s Moroccan colour and mood. Diners are essentially being asked to read the paintings through taste as much as sight, tracing the same sense of place and memory across two completely different sensory registers.
Malak himself seems genuinely enthusiastic about the format. “I love the idea of bringing art into new environments and allowing people to experience it in different ways,” he said, adding that watching her work reinterpreted through food at La Maison Ani opened up what he called a wonderful dialogue between art, travel, memory and taste. London Art Exchange echoed that framing, describing the restaurant as the ideal setting for what it calls the first chapter of a considerably longer project, one it hopes to extend to other dining destinations with further works and new culinary interpretations.
Lobster At La Maison Ani
The choice of venue is not incidental. La Maison Ani has built a reputation over the past couple of years as much for its interiors as its cooking, with watermelon pink banquettes, heavy wood, marble surfaces and an open kitchen creating a setting that reads as almost theatrical, the kind of room designed to be photographed as much as dined in. That aesthetic has pulled in a fairly glamorous crowd, with Princess Eugenie recently spotted there alongside Lady Kitty Spencer and her sisters Eliza and Amelia, adding another layer to the restaurant’s growing status as a fixture within London’s overlapping royal, fashion and social circles.
For a project built around bringing contemporary art to audiences who might never otherwise wander into a gallery, that kind of visibility is obviously useful. Placing Malak’s paintings inside a room already primed for social attention gives the work a considerably wider, and arguably more varied, audience than a traditional exhibition space would.
The plan in the future is to keep expanding the format rather than treating La Maison Ani as a one-off partnership. London Art Exchange has said that future collaborations will move entirely into other restaurant settings, each built around different chefs interpreting Malak’s work through their own culinary sensibilities, which should, at least in theory, produce genuinely distinct pairings each time rather than a repeatable formula. For Malak, the appeal lies in extending the themes already running through her paintings- travel, place, memory, emotion- into an entirely different sensory medium. For London Art Exchange, it reflects a broader push to get art into spaces people actually spend time in, rather than spaces they have to seek out deliberately.
Lemon Meringue Dessert La Maison Ani
Whether the format holds up as it moves beyond Knightsbridge remains to be seen. Still, the underlying idea, letting a chef translate a painting’s mood into an actual dish rather than simply hanging the work nearby, is a genuinely more ambitious proposition than most restaurant art partnerships attempt. At La Maison Ani, at least for now, that translation seems to be landing.
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