Jaguar: Michael O'Hare opens Café Eighty-One in London
The Leeds chef behind The Man Behind the Curtain brings afternoon tea, and a dessert shaped like a car, to Jaguar's new Knightsbridge showroom.
Michael O'Hare has opened Café Eighty-One inside Jaguar's new Knightsbridge showroom, pairing a reworked afternoon tea with a pastry shaped like the carmaker's next production model.
The Michelin-starred chef, known for The Man Behind the Curtain in Leeds and now running Inlamentation in Boston Spa, designed the menu for the two-floor site. It sits inside a wider redevelopment of Jaguar's London showroom that mixes car retail with design, culture and hospitality.
The food centres on a reworked British afternoon tea: a range of teas, savoury courses and a reinterpreted scone. The showpiece is a sculptural petit gâteau built around the oloid, a geometric form of two intersecting circular arcs that also shaped the design of Jaguar's Type 01, the brand's upcoming production car.
That's a philosophy I share with Jaguar: familiar rituals, looked at differently.
Café Eighty-One's shared design language
"From the beginning, the ambition was to create something genuinely original," O'Hare said. He described the menu as one that "takes familiar British rituals and looks at them differently," adding: "That's a philosophy I share with Jaguar."
Santino Pietrosanti, director of Jaguar UK, said the café is "designed to be open, welcoming and inspiring," meant to give visitors a more personal way into the brand than a standard showroom visit allows.
Café Eighty-One will also host rotating collaborations, seasonal menus and curated tastings under what Jaguar calls its Taste Series, so the kitchen changes hands through the year rather than settling on one fixed menu.
A showroom built to linger in
The café is one of several features in the redeveloped site. A separate installation traces the evolution of Jaguar's Leaper emblem, and a "Design Vault" offers buyers a dedicated commissioning experience, with digital personalisation and cinematic presentations of the car.
The move follows a wider pattern of hospitality names stretching into new formats, from The Wolseley's leap into a New York members' club to car brands treating showrooms as destinations rather than sales floors.
Jaguar has not published prices or opening hours for Café Eighty-One. It says the first items from the Taste Series will roll out through the rest of the year, alongside the Design Vault bookings.
