Since opening the minimalist 50-seater Lyle's restaurant in London’s hip Shoreditch area in 2014, chef patron James Lowe has bagged a Michelin star and the number 38 spot on the World’s 50 Best restaurant listings for his daily changing menus of the finest British seasonal produce. His CV encompasses a broad variety of styles from modern French at La Trompette in Chiswick, Italian at the River Café, molecular gastronomy at The Fat Duck and British at Fergus Henderson’s St John Bread and Wine (where he was head chef) and Lowe has distilled those disparate influences into something entirely his own. Eater.com described Lowe as, ‘a gifted chef and one of London’s foremost proponents of the quality of British produce’ and said that, ‘his relaxed brand of fine dining regularly celebrates mutton, game and goat, as well as wood fire-cooked seafood and seasonal English vegetables’. Lowe’s menus are deceptively simple. A starter of beetroot, cured beef and walnuts takes two days to make with Cornish topside cured in house and the beetroot cooked, dehydrated, vacuum packed with reduced beetroot juice and finally glazed to smoky perfection in the restaurant’s wood oven. It’s a good example of how Lowe extracts every last ounce of flavour from ingredients to create memorably intense dishes. Lowe was one of the first chefs in London to embrace the supper club movement with his Young Turks collaboration in 2011 with Isaac McHale (now head chef of The Clove Club) and he continues to collaborate with chefs from around the globe with his Guest Series which has seen some of the most exciting names in modern gastronomy cook at Lyle's, including Fredrik Berselius (Aska, Brooklyn, two Michelin stars), James Syhabout (Commis, San Francisco, two Michelin stars) and Sota Atsumi (formerly of Clown Bar, Paris). Lowe has a particular love of game. As well as featuring it regularly on his menus in dishes such as roasted breast of mallard with celeriac ‘pasta’ (dehydrated celeriac that’s cooked in butter, water, seaweed and cooked celeriac juice) and brown butter and pickled blackberry sauce, Lowe also organises deer stalks and bird shoots for fellow chefs and an annual collaborative game dinner in September. In addition to the Michelin star and World’s 50 Best placing, Lyle's was voted number seven in the National Restaurant Awards 2018 and Lowe was named Best Chef, GQ Magazine Food & Drink Awards 2016 and Breakthrough Chef of The Year in the Food and Travel Magazine Reader Awards, 2015.