Quo Vadis has stood on Dean Street since 1926. For its centenary we made a set of four knives, designed with chef patron Jeremy Lee, and the question that mattered was where the wood should come from.
It came from Soho Square. A London plane fell there in 2022, a short walk from the restaurant’s front door, and the handles of all four knives were cut from that one tree.
This is the kind of provenance you cannot manufacture. A great many knives are made from beautiful wood. Very few are made from a specific tree that grew in the same square the restaurant has fed for a century. The material and the place are the same thing.
The set is now a working line rather than a one-off, made to order for people who want a piece of that hundred years on their own board.
What Quo Vadis made possible was a set whose story is fixed to one postcode, and could not be repeated anywhere else.
In collaboration with Quo Vadis.