A bright but overcast afternoon in late September. Eleven floors up at the St Clement hotel – a new build near the river, looming over Temple Gardens at 180 The Thames – Florence Knight is holding court at her new 30-seat restaurant, Lunette. Flooded with early autumn light, its off-white palette, swathes of pale wood, steel tabletops, artist monographs artfully arranged on a coffee table and an abundance of Jean Prouvé’s modernist ‘INSA’ panels lining the walls make it resemble a curated loft apartment as much as a dining room. Lunette is a deeply personal project for Knight and, though the space was a concrete shell when she first saw it, the potential was clear. ‘I could see it instantly; the kitchen here, the bar there. The light, the movement and the water, it feels like it’s almost holding you,’ she says.
Lunette at St Clement
Knight is a quietly totemic figure in London’s food scene; first leading the pass at Polpetto (a standalone spin-off of Russell Norman’s game-changing Soho bacaro Polpo), and then at Clerkenwell’s Sessions Arts Club, the beautifully weathered palazzo of a restaurant she co-founded with artist Jonny Gent in 2021. In 2024, she departed Sessions with the intention of opening her first solo venture. Where Sessions was ‘a roaring beast’, Knight says, ‘I realised that I wanted a sense of intimacy, something smaller.’ Nearly three years on, Lunette – developed with 180 Quarter’s Mark Wadhwa, St Clement mastermind (and Soho House founder) Nick Jones, and interiors studio Eagle + Hodges – is the result.
Given Knight’s epicurean bona fides, it may seem disjointed to talk design before dishes. But Lunette – named after the arched windows of the nearby disused Aldwych underground station, and a word that ‘writes beautifully’ – is a full-service undertaking, and irrefutably dreamy to look at. Knight studied fashion before segueing into kitchens, and she has the vibe of an artist who just happens to be a dynamite chef, too.
All of Lunette’s sofas, dining surfaces, chairs and lighting (save a midcentury Pierre Chapo teardrop table, and a wooden service station fashioned by Southampton’s shipyard fabricators Calshot) are of Eagle + Hodges’ own design – as is the chic utilitarian staff garb, created by co-founder Alex Eagle’s fashion label. But Knight commissioned nearly everything else: from the steely open kitchen to ceramics by Tetsuya Otani and Michel François, sinuous blown glassware by Danish designer Alexander Kirkeby, and even the finely layered and weighted paper menus, the embossed double ‘t’ in Lunette resembling a Lilliputian table. The room’s speaker system was created by artist and audio engineer Devon Turnbull, a neat callback to his immersive listening room up the block at 180 Studios, while the Prouvés were drawn from the personal collection of real-life couple Wadhwa and Eagle.
‘Florence has got amazing taste,’ says Eagle, a longtime friend of Knight’s. ‘She cares about texture, about light, about feeling and space – which is what makes me and Sophie [Hodges] tick. The collaboration is people coming together and being inspired, rather than trying to elevate or change her.’
Fundamentally, Eagle says, the room functions as a ‘very chic blank canvas’ for Knight’s food – which is, naturally, the main draw at Lunette. Even then, says Knight, ‘it’s completely transmissible’ to the surroundings. The balancing of layers and textures, of hard and soft (not least in the curtains, which she insisted were translucent, ‘like a thin onion skin’), is integral to her identity as a chef. ‘I’m always seeing things from a visual perspective,’ she says. ‘I just think that food is my material.’
Knight’s cooking is precise, seasonal, ‘reasonably gentle in flavour’, and inspired by nature and art. It has developed over the years, but there are through-lines for those who’ve been following. Take the fêted Sessions dish of layered confit potato and eel cake – at Lunette, it’s reconfigured into a pomme soufflé with smoked eel, roe and nasturtium flowers. These things, she says, ‘just matured with my technical ability, and with where I am as a person’.
There’s a painterly assemblage of raw, late-summer runner and yellow French beans with slow-cooked squid, dressed with tomato water; a sunny dish of rice cooked in crab stock, with a sauce of long peppers and tomato juice, egg-yolk jam and cock crab in crab-shell butter; a more autumnal plate of French guinea fowl with a hazelnut and celeriac sauce, beetroot purée, and a jus split with hazelnut and tarragon oils; and an edgeless chocolate tart, its super-short pastry crisp with rice flour and depth afforded by tea-soaked raisins. The full dinner menu will feature eight courses, plus sundries.
Even on a restaurant scene as punctilious as London’s, the presentation is impressive, but ‘the precision is not to intimidate people’, Knight says. ‘Food is about pleasure, right? It needs to be joyful and fun, and have those nods to nostalgia and the things that we love.’
It’s clear how meaningful an endeavour Lunette is to Knight – every facet of it is a crystalline evocation of exactly where she is, right now, as both chef and aesthete. ‘Everything I’ve done has been personal because of the level of care and attention I’ve tried to give it,’ she concludes. ‘This time round, it is so much more than just the food. From someone who’s a control freak, it feels even more special.’
Lunette is located at Level 11, The Thames, St Clement 180, 12 Temple Pl, Temple, London WC2R 2NF, United Kingdom
A version of this article appears in the December 2026 Entertaining Issue of Wallpaper* , available in print on newsstands, on the Wallpaper* app on Apple iOS, and to subscribers of Apple News + from 5 November. Subscribe to Wallpaper* today.