IGNI

Fire kept at the centre

The four-metre grill gives Theo Clench, chef of IGNI in London, a visible station for judging heat by hand, eye and pace. At the Mayfair pass, flame is not scenery; it is the method he has chosen for a room built around tasting menus, seasonal produce and the close timing of service. Clench arrived here after a career that began with the labour of a kitchen porter in Brighton, then moved through chef roles at The Stafford Hotel and Trinity, sous chef and head chef work at Bonhams Restaurant, development work at The Clove Club, and the head chef role at Portland Restaurant in Fitzrovia. From 2020 he served as executive chef at Akoko, before the Cycene chapter in Shoreditch from 2022–2024. IGNI is the current bench, opened on 22 April 2026 in the former Humo site on St George Street. The room keeps the live-fire infrastructure but puts it under Clench’s own pressure test: extracting optimum flavour from simple ingredients without hiding the material under excess. His own line about dining “in someone’s home” belongs to an earlier statement of intent, but it fits the discipline here too. Precision has to feel close, not remote.

A tasting menu measured in heat

IGNI works through set menus, with three, five and eight-course formats forming the main architecture. The kitchen’s stated centre is fire-led cooking, shaped by flame, smoke, fermentation, preservation and dry ageing, with ingredients selected from farmers, fishers and growers known to the restaurant by name. That last part matters because the grill asks different things of each material. Hand-dived Shetland scallops need heat that opens sweetness without taking away their line; richly marbled beef can take smoke, rest and a deeper crust. The cooking is influenced by coastal traditions, but the pass is Mayfair fine dining, so the gesture has to be controlled. Fire can flatten a dish when it becomes the point. Clench’s task is to let it act as seasoning, structure and tempo. The Summer Menu named for July 2026 begins with a Summer Spritz and moves through four courses, a separate seasonal expression within the larger program. The important measure is not spectacle, but how each course lands after the one before it.

The room around the grill

The room is intimate enough for the grill to change the atmosphere. Heat sits at the centre, not behind a door, and the pass carries the usual theatre of service without needing to announce itself. In a Mayfair townhouse setting, that gives IGNI a particular tension: formal service, conversational volume, refined plates, and the elemental pull of wood fire in the same field of vision. Clench has said, “I have no problems with being watched by guests.” That ease matters in an open kitchen. The hands cannot rush because they are visible, and they cannot perform because the scallops, beef and seasonal vegetables would show it immediately. The counter and the tables share the same rhythm, course by course, with smoke arriving before the plate does.

What the house is asking of fire

IGNI replaced a Michelin-starred predecessor, but the work here belongs to its own address and date. Creative Restaurant Group kept the site’s live-fire possibility and gave Clench a new frame for it: a fine dining restaurant where flame has to behave with the precision of a sauce, a cure or a fermentation. If the next proof comes, it will come from repetition at the pass, through the grill, the seasonal menu and the hand-dived Shetland scallops.