Seymourpowell worked with Dinner by Heston Blumenthal, a new restaurant created by the Mandarin Oriental Hotel Group and the Fat Duck Group. The new restaurant is Chef Heston Blumenthal's first London restaurant, opened at the award winning Mandarin Oriental Hyde Park, London, with Ashley Palmer-Watts, group executive chef of the Fat Duck, as head of kitchen.
Seymourpowell worked closely with the Dinner by Heston Blumenthal team to create the restaurant name, brand identity and key touch-point items including menus, wine list and corporate stationery. In addition, Seymourpowell co-founder Richard Seymour was also part of the early discussions of the exposed mechanical cooking system over fire in the kitchen, a type of spit to express the traditional roots of the restaurant. A design conceptualised and executed by Adam Tihany that now takes pride of place in the centre of the restaurant.
Dinner by Heston Blumenthal takes inspiration from historic British recipes, with highly anticipated menus featuring simple contemporary dishes inspired by Britain's historic gastronomic past and recipes dating as far back as the 16th century.
This historical reference was the initial inspiration for the name "Dinner." It's widely recognised that the 16th Century was a period when fine dining was emerging in Britain.
"We proposed the name 'Dinner' for Heston when we first began to really understand what he was trying to achieve," explained Richard Seymour. "The word itself has changed meaning over the centuries, so it was part of the fun to rehabilitate it! Although it originally meant 'breakfast' in Middle English, 'dinner' rapidly came to mean the main meal of the day (at lunch time or evening). It has overtones of a hearty repast and a true British ritual... which is why it resonated so strongly with Heston's ideas."
Alice Boardman, designer at Seymourpowell, was responsible for the development of the graphic identity, and design work for all collateral materials. All these design elements are sympathetic to the overall spirit of the restaurant, whilst simultaneously maintaining their own distinct identity.