Magazine

The pause before the glass

A tasting glass asks for a pause before it reaches the nose; at Magazine in Hyde Park, London, Damian Riley-Smith works as master distiller and blender with a vocabulary formed around whisky. His time on the tools has not been a single bench so much as a sequence of rooms where provenance, language, storage, and pouring carry equal weight. Since 1998, he has been founder and contributor of Whisky Magazine, a place where the discipline of tasting notes meets the patience of distillery stories and collector expectation. In 2000, he extended that culture into Whisky Live, moving the dram from print into the room, where a pour has to hold attention on its own.

That background matters in a restaurant built beside a gallery, because the work here asks for the same control of sequence. The guest arrives through architecture first, then light, then table, then glass. Riley-Smith’s known lineage is editorial, live, and hosted, rather than a published apprenticeship under a named distiller. The through line is whisky as material: the cabinet, the tasting room, the conversation, the chosen glass, the held breath before aroma fixes itself.

Small plates under a white roof

The kitchen at Magazine has changed register since its early Japanese-influenced period. Around 2014, Oliver Lange led a menu that moved from sushi and sashimi into pork cheeks, sea trout with unagi, Black Angus fillet with yakiniku sauce, hamachi sashimi ceviche with mango and scallop crisp, and roasted monkfish with coconut and lemongrass. The current food is quieter and more shareable: harissa aubergines, Norfolk chicken caesar, slow-roasted cauliflower, bonfire potatoes, soda bread with seaweed butter, and poached apple. The format is small plates and à la carte, with a curated wine program beside the food.

The stated sourcing direction now leans toward local produce and zero-waste cooking. That does not make the room austere. It gives the pass a useful limit. A cauliflower can arrive slow-roasted rather than disguised; seaweed butter can carry the soda bread without a longer argument. For a maker whose own work has been built around comparison and controlled pours, the restaurant’s best register is also one of restraint: a plate, a glass, a view, then enough quiet to notice what changed.

Glass on three sides

The room does not need theatrical service to make its point. Zaha Hadid’s extension gives Magazine its working frame: white pillars widening into an arched roof, glass on three sides, and park light moving across the tables through the day. The building has an undulating exterior, and inside the detail is spatial. Tables sit in an airy volume rather than a tight dining room. Conversation carries without the place hardening into noise.

That architecture changes the craft at the counter and the pass. Plates leave the kitchen into a room already full of reflection, greenery, and pale surfaces, so excess would read quickly. The better gestures are measured ones: aubergine against harissa, chicken against caesar dressing, a pour held long enough for the glass to settle. The tasting glass keeps Riley-Smith’s work legible in any room.