Serve up art on a plate with the new Sessions Arts Club cookbook

Sessions Arts Club – the London restaurant, gallery and performance space – has a divided atmosphere. On the surface, it is cool, calm and collected, yet bubbling below is an undercurrent of energy and theatrics. Food is the centrepiece, and to founder Jonny Gent, it is art. For the artist, who also founded Cabin Studio, a wider company dedicated to creating ‘spaces built on the pillars of art, food and supplies’, Sessions Arts Club is a blank canvas he uses to express himself.

'Food Volume 1: Sessions Arts Club'

The location, a former courthouse, is constantly reimagined, changing with the exhibitions and performances it hosts. However, the food served is consistently crafted and plated with artistic vigour – and everything that goes into this is captured in Gent’s new book, Food Volume 1: Sessions Arts Club.

The book is more than a recipe book, also charting the history of Sessions Arts Club and documenting dishes prepared throughout its time, and is dedicated specifically to the chefs and porters who have served from 2021 to 2026.

Gent’s priority was to capture the interest in an archive of the people and processes behind the restaurant, noting that the book is ‘an homage to the people that worked and made things. I wanted to remove all hierarchy, all romance, all poetry.’

Recipes are treated like working documents to reflect the realities of a professional kitchen, stripping back the romanticism and highlighting fast-paced cookery. The book's 66 dishes – from decadent chocolate torte and creme fraiche to trout, beetroot and horseradish – are accompanied by notes on the restaurant's architecture, suppliers, kitchen zones and daily operations. Food Volume 1 stands as a record of Sessions Arts Club and an ode to the people behind it.

sessionsartsclub.com