The Charlie’s experience: nature-led and unique 

The passionate culinary team at London’s oldest hotel welcomes guests to be a part of its sustainability journey. We join Executive Chef Andrew Sawyer and Head Chef Fernando Montejo Moraga in the kitchen to learn the stories behind what’s on your plate at Charlie’s.

An evening spent within these wood-pannelled, botanical-painted walls might begin with a slice of Lambton & Jackson’s smoked salmon, its distinctive flavour born of a unique juniper-smoking process. Your classic British main might be Charlie’s Dover sole, dry-aged to perfection in-house to transform its texture and deepen its natural sweetness. A CEO who crossed an ocean to taste it called it the best Dover sole he’d ever had.

The freedived scallops – a delicacy offered at only three UK restaurants through an exclusive partnership with Greenstraight – are hand-caught on a single breath in Devon’s unspoilt Start Bay, without air tanks and with no disturbance to the seabed. Chef Andrew and his family joined diver James Kirkaldy on his boat to witness the experience: ‘Two and a half minutes feels a lot longer when you’re waiting for someone to come up for air. But he comes out of the sea with the scallops, removes the frills, cleans them in seawater and adds a squeeze of lemon, before offering them for a taste. The purest way you’ll ever eat a scallop.’

Table talk

Between courses, ask about the tomatoes simmered for seven hours into a rich ‘mother sauce’, watched over by multiple chefs as the day-shift hands over to the evening team. Learn about the Straciatella dish with honey derived from bees that forage among wildflower meadows in Wales. As the cheese trolley is wheeled out, discover the Straccone made from the milk of cows feeding on the greenest mountaintop grass in Italy. Every ingredient has a place, a season, and a story.

This commitment to provenance plays out across every part of the sourcing at Charlie’s, from soil or sea to plate. The chefs choose farmers and producers whose standards are equally uncompromising, visiting them in person to learn their methods, and overseeing the entire supply chain – only accepting, for example, fish that is delivered in seaweed rather than on crushed ice, to maintain a more natural environment and preserve its delicate flesh.

Conscious seafood

As well as partnering with trusted suppliers, the gastronomy team embraces a bold in-house maturation system that allows greater creative freedom with their dishes. An exciting development in the kitchen’s move towards self-sufficiency is its dry ageing machine. Opening the glass-fronted chamber, Head Chef Fernando Montejo Moraga demonstrates how this specialist method results in more tender and flavourful fish:

‘We received this bluefin tuna yesterday from Barcelona. It’s the most sustainable tuna in the world, dispatched with the humane ‘ikejime’ method, which has a profound impact on quality and flavour. The supplier’s barcode tells us everything from the name of the captain on the boat, right down to the life of the fish, including what it last ate and when.’ Gesturing to the whole tuna almost filling the machine, Fernando details, ‘It will hang here for two or three days to rest and settle. When we cut it, it will be firmer, and the flavour will completely transform. Already, you can see the colour has changed.’

This attention to detail extends the shelf life of the fish, allowing the kitchen to use every part efficiently. The same method is used for the hake sourced from the Ajax, a Cornish boat whose crew catch only mature fish, with virtually zero bycatch of other species. Through dry ageing, the hake’s delicate flesh is made denser, its subtle flavour more pronounced.

The taste test

‘We eat our way through the job, ’ Chef Andrew says with a smile, ‘because the only way to be sure we’re offering our guests the best ingredients is to try them ourselves first.’

This undertaking saw the team tasting no less than 37 different sausages to make sure the Brown’s Hotel breakfast is the finest in Mayfair: ‘We chose Huntsham Farm for the best sausages in the UK. Their ethos is giving their pigs a good life, keeping them as occupied as they would be in the wild, rooting around in the straw and socialising together. As a result of this commitment to their wellbeing, their fat is as flavourful as their lean meat.’

The team applied the same rigorous tasting to the breakfast’s black pudding, white pudding, bacon, and eggs. Emblematic of the hotel’s signature balance of excellence, innovation, and fun, Managing Director Richard Cooke took up Chef Andrew’s suggestion to add Christmas pudding to last year’s Boxing Day breakfast – a nod to his mother’s ‘Ulster Fry’ – which became an instant hit with guests.

Dining at Charlie’s is an experience as rich in narrative as it is in taste. From working with local, like-minded artisans, to reducing food miles by growing living ingredients in the kitchen’s indoor garden and educating the front-of-house team on the stories behind each dish, the restaurant is leading the way in mindful dining.