Leonel Aguirre named executive chef at Dovetale

Leonel Aguirre has been named executive chef at Dovetale, the restaurant at 1 Hotel Mayfair that opened under Tom Sellers in July 2023. Aguirre arrives after running the day-to-day kitchen at Mauro Colagreco's restaurant inside Raffles London at The OWO, the one-Michelin-star dining room that Colagreco oversees from a distance while running more than two dozen restaurants worldwide.

Aguirre has worked with Colagreco for eight years, including two at Mirazur, the three-Michelin-star restaurant on the French-Italian border in Menton where Colagreco made his name on seasonal, produce-driven cooking. Before that, Aguirre trained at Tegui in Buenos Aires, a restaurant long regarded as among Argentina's best.

His career since has taken him through Argentina, Chile, France, the UAE and Singapore, a route that mirrors Colagreco's own expansion across continents and gave Aguirre the range to step into a kitchen as broad as Dovetale's.

A deputy who ran his own room is exactly what a hotel kitchen is built to use.

Dovetale's menu draws on European cooking rather than any single country's repertoire, running from oysters and caviar to beef tartare, charcoal pizza fritta, risotto, steak frites and crab tonarelli. That breadth sits closer to Sellers' own Restaurant Story than to the Mirazur style Aguirre has cooked for most of the past decade.

Neither 1 Hotel Mayfair nor Dovetale has said whether the kitchen's approach will shift under the new appointment, and the restaurant's existing menu remains in place for now.

A deputy who ran his own room

At Raffles London, Aguirre was effectively in charge of service while Colagreco split his attention between Mirazur, Buenos Aires, Bangkok and the dozen-plus other addresses that carry his name, a structure increasingly common among chefs who have turned themselves into global brands rather than single-restaurant cooks.

That experience running a kitchen under someone else's name, rather than opening his own, is precisely what a hotel restaurant like Dovetale is built to use: a chef capable of consistency night after night, inside someone else's concept.

Mayfair's revolving kitchens

Hotel dining rooms change executive chefs more often than standalone restaurants, since the room, brand and ownership structure stay fixed even as the person running the pass moves on, and Mayfair's five-star hotels have reshuffled several kitchens this year alone.

Aguirre's own mentor has been through a comparable cycle: Colagreco's Cetino brought Mirazur thinking to Lake Como earlier this year, proof that the produce-led style Aguirre trained in travels well beyond the restaurant where he learned it.