Provisioners restaurant at the new Dixon hotel on London’s South Bank, is a stylish place for both guests and locals to eat. Gently innovative, the chef focuses on pink and black food such as beetroot tagliatelle, squid ink-battered skate and black coconut ice cream. By Jenny Southan
Opened at the beginning of the year, all-day restaurant Provisioners is a good example of a 21st-century hotel restaurant. Set up by Clive Watson, co-founder of Blixen, by it’s stylish yet approachable, serving a la carte food from 6.40am until 10pm daily.
Attention has also been paid to the design of the restaurant, which sits in the transformed Tower Bridge Magistrates Court. Once again colour plays a part, with a palette of millennial pink, ice blue and mint green to appeal to a more youthful, aesthetically-minded audience.
It’s nothing ground-breaking and the quality isn’t always spectacular, but Globetrender did observe a leaning toward pink and black food, which is an on-going trend.
With Instagram pushing chefs to create ever-more visualising interesting plates, employing colour in surprising ways is an effective way of getting people to post.
A 2018 article on Bloomberg says: “Sensationally colored foods have a short shelf life in the Instagram news cycle. Unicorn lattes might last a few months, before fading from view. Black foods are an exception to the rule…
“Among the reasons are the popularity of bitter, charred foods from such places as Scandinavia, the acceptance of squid ink as more than a novelty ingredient, and the rise of activated charcoal as a health food. And there’s the visual impact, which should never be underestimated in this age.”