Short pieces on produce, technique and the way we run service at Davelona. We write when there is something worth explaining, not on a schedule. Most posts come out of a question a guest asked at the table that deserved a longer answer than we could give mid-service.
Where the vegetables come from and why the menu follows them rather than the other way around.
Why certain things take as long as they do, from curing fish to resting dough between rolls.
How the dining room runs, why the kitchen is open to the room, and why we do not turn tables.
What students actually take away from the pasta masterclass, and what is easier than they expected.
Two pieces are live at the moment. We add to this page when something is worth writing down properly.
We stopped printing a fixed menu around 2017, mostly by accident. A week of wild weather wiped out the tomato supply we had planned around, the chef walked into the room and told everyone the menu would be different that night, and nobody complained. Here is what that moment turned into.
Most people who sign up for the pasta masterclass arrive expecting the hard part to be rolling or cutting. In practice the hardest part is the two minutes of doing nothing. Dough needs to rest after kneading, and it needs to rest again after rolling, and if you skip either rest you will feel it the moment you try to cut a clean edge.
Both posts on this page get back to the same two ideas. One is that the market decides the menu, not a spreadsheet written three weeks in advance. The other is that cooking well is about pace and patience more than technique.
If you read both and want to taste the result, a table at the dining room is the easiest way in. The chef's table is the deep end.
Roughly 82 percent of everything we cook was picked or caught within 48 hours of reaching your plate.
Nine hours of curing on the snapper. Eight on the ragu. Dough rests twice. Patience does most of the work.
Everything is finished twelve steps from the table, in view of any seat in the room.
Eighteen seats, one booking at a time. Eighteen is the number that lets one cook plate every dish.
Every post on this page gets written at the same long timber table the guests sit at, after service on a Sunday. That is probably why most of them come back to the same handful of dishes and the same handful of producers.
Four views from recent weeks. The room, the pass, the cellar and the courtyard, which stays open well past the last course.
Where the posts get written
The open pass at service
Around 400 bottles behind the wall
Courtyard, after the last plate
The journal explains what we do. The two bookings below let you sit inside it. One is an evening at the chef's table, the other is four hours with your hands in the flour.
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Seven courses over roughly three and a half hours for six to fourteen guests.
Four hours at the bench with a maximum of eight students learning two dough bases.
One message a month with the latest piece, what is coming into the kitchen, and when the next round of pasta classes opens. Nothing else and no daily emails.
One click and you are out at any time. Full detail sits in our privacy policy.
Short answers on how we publish, who writes the posts and whether we accept guest pieces.
Send a SuggestionA few of the Victorian suppliers whose name comes up in nearly every post we write.
Book a table, take the private chef's table for a group of six or more, or spend four hours with flour on your hands in the pasta masterclass. The kitchen is more interesting in person.