Food. The Good Life Factor
“Once in a while you’d have to treat yourself really good. I mean, really!” says Christian Leyk. “I’m not talking about constant over-indulging, but of course I don’t mean ‘once in a blue moon’ either…”
Maybe one of the ways of summarising the coquine[design] philosophy is ‘good life’. And who would disagree? We all want a good life and we want to enjoy what we do. We want to enjoy work, be proud of it. We want a pleasant evening after work. Eat well, have a nice glass of wine or a refreshing beer with colleagues on a Friday evening. Relax. Life is of course not without duties and chores, and not everything we have to do is fun. Yet overall, with a few ups and downs, we want a good life.
And then we are also designers. Which means we are creative people with the power of dreaming things up. And we like to dream up things that make people happy, so their lives are good, too. Again, reality might not always work like that, humans are complicated by nature. But we believe in the principles. This is what we want and we work hard to achieve it.
But coming back to the treats… we have been on a little culinary trip to London yesterday. Lunch at Yoshino (close to Piccadilly), one of our favourite Japanese restaurants in central London. It’s small and quite well hidden with just a small neon sign saying ‘Sushi’ pointing to it. But over the years we have been coming back regularly, because the sushi is absolutely spot on and the variations of wagyu beef, including a little ‘tapas-style’ wagyu (black) pudding cross-over masterpiece are delicious.
Next on our itinerary was a proper turkish coffee just across the road at Kahve Dünyasi and, after the unavoidable shopping, ice cream from Scoop (there’s one in Brewer Street and one near Covent Garden).
“But let me jump straight to the culinary highlight of the day… well, maybe not just the day. I would say this was one of the best dinners I have ever had!” continues Christian quite euphorically. “We went to Canvas @ Chelsea where Ruben Aguilar Bel is the head chef, and we were treated with a 6 course surprise tasting menu (plus 2 amuse bouche). I am not trying to spoil the surprise by describing every course, but the variety of the different flavours and the cunning combinations were wonderfully inspired and the results simply sensational. That, combined with an excellent wine pairing (we didn’t go for full pairing but followed 2 ‘simpler’ recommendations) and the very friendly service means that we will most certainly come back for another treat.”
This again confirmed to us how important the great food factor is as part of the good life. And it confirmed that, as we at coquine![design] want to create this good life experience for our clients, we will go ahead with our long term ideas of the ‘lifestyle hub’ and centre our studio activities around a good food place.
The pictures you can see here were taken at Chelsea Market in New York, a place that combined food and shopping and the odd music performance in a very nice way. We haven’t seen the combination of restaurant, art gallery, music venue and design studio anywhere yet, but we are convinced it will work!
