The chef’s relaunched restaurant trades intimacy for ambition, pairing a 24-seat dining room with its own kitchen garden.
Gabriel Waterhouse isn’t just opening a restaurant in Hackney. He’s planting one, literally. The chef’s new iteration of The Waterhouse Project arrives with a working kitchen garden on site, the kind of commitment to ingredient control that reads less like a marketing move and more like a chef who’s decided to eliminate every middleman between soil and plate. In a London dining scene increasingly fractured between name-brand theater and underground supper clubs, this feels like a deliberate choice: go small, go deep, go direct.
The move itself represents a recalibration. The original location clearly worked, enough to warrant reopening, but this relaunch in Hackney scales the dining room to 24 seats, a number that sits somewhere between intimate dinner party and proper restaurant. That’s the sweet spot for tasting menu work, where every table becomes an extension of the kitchen’s intention rather than a service logistics problem. The addition of a wine bar suggests Waterhouse understands that modern diners want flexibility: not everyone’s booking the full tasting every night, and a properly curated wine program with shorter plates feels like the smarter play than a separate bar drowning in bottle service.
What matters here is the philosophical shift. Hyperlocal produce sourcing has become restaurant bingo at this point, but actually maintaining a garden while running a 24-seat tasting menu operation is a different animal entirely. It’s a constraint that shapes menu planning in real time, that forces seasonal discipline rather than just performing it. Hackney’s food reputation has been built on this kind of unglamorous intensity, long hours, specific vision, real conviction. Waterhouse’s relocation suggests he’s betting that’s still what people show up for.
