The View From The Pass

Posted on January 16, 2015 by admin

Anyone who has visited aqua shard on a Saturday night – our busiest of the week – will know how vibrant, exciting and energetic the atmosphere is in the restaurant. With every table occupied by guests enjoying themselves, the bar buzzing, music pulsing and staff gliding around the floor ensuring every need is met, the ambience is unlike anywhere else in London.

But what is it like for the team ‘backstage’ in the kitchen? Executive head chef Anthony Garlando and senior sous chef Francisco ‘Paco’ Carrasco lead a brigade of nearly thirty who between them, over the course of a typical six-hour service, will prepare over a thousand individual dishes for three-hundred-and-fifty guests, all unseen – until now!

On a recent Saturday night Paco set up a stop-motion camera on the pass – the area where dishes are plated up, garnished and checked by the chefs before being taken and served by the front-of-house team – then sped up the film to capture the frantic pace of a whole shift in the kitchen in just under a minute-and-a-half.

Thank you Paco for making this fantastic film for us – and to all the team who work so hard to delight our guests night after night!