The second project from longtime collaborators and Trivet co-founders Jonny Lake and Isa Bal has finally opened its doors in Mayfair. Lake, a Canadian-born chef whose career has taken in acclaimed kitchens from Canada to Italy, and Bal, one of the world’s most respected master sommeliers, first joined forces at Heston Blumenthal’s three-Michelin-starred restaurant The Fat Duck in Bray. In 2019 they struck out on their own with Trivet, which earned its first Michelin star in 2022 and a second in 2024.
The pair’s new venture, Labombe by Trivet, is at the Como Metropolitan on Old Park Lane, taking over the space that once housed the legendary Met Bar. The name comes from Lake’s school days in Canada, when he dreamed up an imaginary French restaurant called Labombe for a class project. Thirty years later, that idea has come to life.
Labombe displays the easy confidence of people doing what they love: relaxed, welcoming cooking with brilliant wines and the same attention to detail that made Trivet so special – an exciting addition to Mayfair and a lighthearted continuation of their story.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity. Listen to the full conversation on ‘The Entrepreneurs’, from Monocle Radio.
When you first started working together at The Fat Duck, did you immediately sense this was a partnership that could go further?
Jonny Lake: It was an intense, exciting period when it felt like the world’s attention was on this tiny restaurant. We clicked straight away and what struck me was that if I showed an interest in Isa’s world of wine, he always made time for me, which was rare. In most restaurants, if you were lucky enough to work with a wine team they didn’t want to talk about wine to people outside of that team. Isa was different.
We were a similar age, came into the industry in similar ways and shared a real passion for what we were doing. We never said it out loud at the time but it was clear that we both knew where we wanted to go. You can even see it in old photographs – the body language shows a partnership forming, even before we ever spoke about it.
Like a great wine and food pairing, it comes down to chemistry. What was your approach to building the business when you were starting?
JL: From the moment that we said out loud we were going to do something together – even though it had been in our minds for a while – we had to work to figure out what we wanted to do. It was great that we wanted to have our own restaurant but what did that look like? That took us a few years because it wasn’t super obvious and we didn’t know what we were doing operationally.
There’s creating the concept and then there’s actually doing it. We worked with some great people and had some good conversations to draw what we wanted out of ourselves. Once we had that, we had to think of the practical considerations, such as location. But among everything, we tried to stay true to what we wanted to achieve, knowing that we didn’t know what we were doing and asking a lot of questions to try to figure it out. It was a valuable experience of learning – maybe we would do it differently another time, but we gained a lot through that experience.
It’s amazing how many entrepreneurs claim that early-stage naivety was a superpower when it came to launching their businesses. Do you have any regrets about the moves that you made?
Isa Bal: It brought out the fighting spirit in me. We were going to find a way to make what we wanted to happen, happen, one way or another.
What conversations happen around you when you start to see success? Once things go well, is everyone knocking on your door with new opportunities?
JL: It’s good to explore opportunities when they present themselves but only within what makes sense for you. We didn’t have any prospects for a long time, so when interest arrived, we couldn’t take it for granted. From the start, we had ideas beyond just a single restaurant but Trivet is such a personal project that we could never replicate it. Over the years we have explored a few opportunities of varying scales but they didn’t come to fruition for different reasons. We turned down some because they weren’t right for us, while others fell through on the other side. This new restaurant is the first one that has worked and feels right for us – and we’re excited about it.
Where did the seed of Labombe first appear?
JL: The name comes from a school project I did when I was about 12 or 13, growing up in Canada. In French class, we were given an assignment to create a menu for a restaurant and I called mine Restaurant Labombe. I rediscovered the project in my parents’ basement a few years ago while I was helping them move.
Inside was a handwritten menu: some simple bistro dishes and others completely over the top – things you would only see in royal banquets. Prices were all in French francs and the teacher’s only comment was that I’d forgotten to list any drinks. It felt oddly fitting that, decades later, I would end up opening a restaurant with a sommelier, finally completing the missing piece of that school project.
IB: He brought the folder back to London and showed it to me at the restaurant. As soon as I saw it, I said, “That’s it – that’s what we’re going to call the next one.”
At the time, we were trying to open Trivet an extra day each week, because we were closed for two days. But honestly it wasn’t possible because it would have put too much pressure on the team. So we began thinking about what we could do with fewer people, less intensity.
We’ve always enjoyed wine bars and wine-focused restaurants, so we thought, “Let’s do Labombe on Monday evenings at Trivet.” The idea was to have a simpler menu – though of course it turned out to be more complicated than expected – and highlight a few wines while keeping the full list available. That’s how it started.
Isa, your approach to wine is unusual. Instead of focusing on geography, you have looked at chronology, tracing wines back through history to their origins. Why is that important?
IB: When I was at The Fat Duck, I had the chance to taste wines that people worship but, after a while, it became repetitive. I realised that I was focusing my career on three or four regions and maybe 20 producers. I needed a way to keep myself excited.
Being from Turkey, which has one of the world’s oldest winemaking histories, I began to think about wine differently. I recalled a lecture from Patrick McGovern, a biomolecular archaeologist, about the origins of fermented drinks. That inspired me to create a wine list in chronological order. I even emailed him to check the sequence and he suggested a couple of tweaks.
What resulted was an engaging and informative wine list, without the preachiness. It sparked better conversations between guests and staff and it reignited my passion. The chronological approach is something I’ll carry into the new restaurant too, though in a slightly different form.
Jonny, do you feel the same with food – that you sometimes need to step back and re-energise your own creativity?
JL: Ideas can come from anywhere and we have always worked on new dishes together, often with input from the whole team. We don’t keep track of what other restaurants are doing, strangely enough, but it’s worked for us.
