Why the best meetings happen over food

Earlier this month we did something we should probably do more often: we shut our laptops and headed to abc kitchens in Belgravia, bringing together a group of writers, photographers and thinkers who have helped make Perspectives what it is.

It’s a strange thing, editing an online magazine in 2026. So much of the work happens in shared docs, Slack threads and quick voice notes fired off between nursery runs and deadlines. You commission someone, you fall a little bit in love with their piece and you publish it, but you might never actually sit across a table from them. That felt worth fixing. So we did. Ten of us, one beautiful room, three hours, and no agenda beyond eating well and talking properly.

If you haven’t yet made it to The Emory, please add it to your list. It’s London’s first all-suite hotel, a striking architectural piece by the late Richard Rogers, tucked into a quiet corner of Knightsbridge that feels miles from the traffic on Brompton Road. From the moment you step into the courtyard, with its palms and bronze sculpture, you know you’re in for a treat. The Maybourne group – the same people behind Claridge’s and The Connaught – have built something genuinely modern here, which is a harder trick to pull off than it sounds when “modern luxury” usually means beige.

Our lunch was hosted in the private dining room set just off the pass at abc kitchens. Designed by Rémi Tessier, it’s all warm woods, polished copper and soft light, with a view through to chef Jean-Georges Vongerichten’s kitchen and leafy Hyde Park beyond. With just 10 seats, it’s perfectly proportioned, and the kind of room that makes the conversation flow easily.

And then there’s the food. It’s Vongerichten’s first London restaurant, bringing together three of his New York concepts under one roof. Think farm-to-table done with real intent: vegetables that taste like vegetables, herbs you can actually identify and the lightest of dressings. We worked our way through English pea guacamole and chips, heritage beet carpaccio, the pizzas the New Yorkers won’t stop talking about, mushroom walnut bolognese, a whole roasted cauliflower showstopper passed around the table like a trophy, and a perfect panna cotta that disappeared in a flash.

Within ten minutes someone was deep in a debate about whether nostalgia is having a cultural moment or a cultural crisis. Another person was sketching out an idea we’ll almost certainly end up commissioning. This was the whole point: the half-finished sentences, the “oh, you too?” moments, the discovery that two writers who’d never met had been circling the same idea from opposite directions for months. You can’t engineer that on a Google Meet call. You just have to put good people in a good room and let lunch do the work.

Visit abc kitchens at The Emory.
Old Barrack Yard, Belgravia, London, SW1X 7NP