Sketch London Has Always Been More Than a Social Media Moment

Even those who’ve never set foot in Sketch are likely familiar with its maximalist, colorful interiors. The London dining destination is one of the city’s most Instagrammed spots, often attracting guests just for its egg-shaped toilets and ornate afternoon tea. 

But despite its flashy appearance, Sketch, which houses multiple restaurants and bars within a historic 18th-century townhouse, wasn’t created for the sake of attention—and particularly not of the online kind. In fact, Sketch existed before Instagram debuted in 2010. Its owner, Mourad Mazouz, acquired the space a few years after successfully opening North African restaurant Momo in 1997. The plan was for a friend to install a nightclub in the Grade II-listed building, which was previously the headquarters of the Royal Institute of British Architects, a headquarters for British suffragettes, and one of Christian Dior’s London ateliers. That plan didn’t come to fruition.

“He didn’t want it,” Mazouz tells Observer, speaking in Sketch’s three-Michelin-starred restaurant, The Lecture Room, in early March. “I had no clue what I was going to do with the building. Should I keep it? Should I give it back? But the beauty when you’re younger is you don’t really think. So we decided to jump and see where we would land.”

Mazouz had a hospitality background, and at the time, he also ran a record label. He wanted to converge all of his interests in one place—art, food, music, partying. “There wasn’t really a vision,” Mazouz admits. “It took me four and a half years to build this thing, and I didn’t even know what it was going to be. I just wanted to give it as much of my heart as I could.”

Mazouz knew he would need a chef with a similarly creative spirit. In 2000, he visited Pierre Gagnaire’s eponymous Paris restaurant to ask if one of his chefs wanted to join Sketch. The project reminded Gagnaire of his original restaurant in Saint-Étienne, Le Clos Fleuri, which shuttered due to bankruptcy in the mid-‘90s, despite earning three Michelin stars. So he replied, “Why not me?”

“Coming together with Mourad was a chance to redo what I didn’t achieve,” Gagnaire says. “It was also an opportunity to work with somebody who was not from my world. We were so different culturally, and that was interesting.”

Sketch opened in 2003 as part restaurant, part bar, part art space and part nightclub. The Gallery, now a more casual bistro-type restaurant where afternoon tea is served, showcased video installations during the day. The space, conceived by Mazouz and Noé Duchaufour-Lawrance, was originally a blank white room with 12 screens. “Most of them were quite provocative,” Mazouz says of the videos played there. In the evenings, it transformed into a restaurant, and later each night, the furniture was cleared to make a nightclub. The culinary offerings befuddled the guests, especially the appetizers that arrived via trolley. 

“It was food that you’d never seen before in your life,” Mazouz says. “People were scared. They thought it had been on the trolley for a long time, although everything was fresh. Everybody thought it was a bit too much. The idea at the beginning was for people to experience something extreme. We dimmed it down a bit and tried to reach the people. If it was just up to me, I would always push this place even more.”

The early assessments were harsh. The Independent ran a review under the headline “Dog’s Breakfast and Baby Sick” while another outlet described it as a “horror gallery.” People told Mazouz that Sketch would be closed within six months. It’s now been more than 20 years. Although there are still a lot of opinions about Sketch, its reputation is far better. Getting a Michelin star in the Lecture Room, the upstairs fine dining restaurant, in 2005 helped, as did the second and third stars. 

“Michelin judges the consistency of a restaurant, the personality of the chef, the culinary techniques and the menu and the creativity,” says Daniel Stucki, who has been the head chef of the Lecture Room since 2020, after joining Sketch as sous chef in 2014. “But one important point is the consistency of a restaurant. You need to create a story lasting over the years. And Sketch is such a beautiful story. Getting those stars five years, 10 years, 15 years after means the restaurant is continuously striving to do more.”

Gagnaire says the recognition is “reassuring,” but earning three stars in the Lecture Room hasn’t changed his approach to the food or service. He and Stucki shape the restaurant’s menus, which include an à la carte option, based on the idea of plunging guests into an experience. Each dish arrives with “satellite” plates that allow the chefs to showcase an array of techniques, textures and flavors. 

“The guests come here for something with a different culinary approach and a different service,” says Stucki, who got his start in his home country of Switzerland and applied for a job at Sketch to work with Gagnaire. “Nothing is conventional. Everything is special. Coming to this restaurant is like going to an art gallery. It doesn’t matter if you actually understand it—people want to be immersed. And it goes two ways: either they’re a bit shocked and surprised and traumatized, or they open up and let us guide them.”

Stucki estimates that his team, which ranges from 15 to 20 chefs at a given time, uses between 100 and 250 ingredients to create the dishes at the Lecture Room, including the tasting menu, vegetarian tasting menu, à la carte menu and the lunch menu. It’s unusual for a three Michelin-starred restaurant to offer à la carte, but Mazouz says he keeps it because he hates being forced into a tasting menu. “That’s not my conception of a restaurant,” Mazouz says. “I want to choose.”

A lot of the decisions behind Sketch stem from Mazouz’s personal preferences and interests. He stays away from social media and doesn’t really watch TV. The restaurant’s spaces are filled with art, but he doesn’t collect any at home. He certainly isn’t interested in external perception. That’s perhaps why Sketch has been able to be so imaginative in its offerings and décor over the years. 

“I don’t give a shit what people think,” Mazouz says. “I really don’t. And when people criticized us early on, I could have changed the chef or taken another direction. But I didn’t do that. We continued what we were doing.”

It also helps that Mazouz isn’t particularly attached to anything in Sketch. The name reflects the idea that the space is like a sketchbook, always being erased and redrawn. He tweaks the décor constantly, and Gagnaire and Stucki shift the dishes on the menu seasonally, never repeating a particular menu. In 2014, Sketch debuted a cotton-candy-pink design in the Gallery—a decor choice that amped up the Instagram fervor. It became visually synonymous with Sketch and was perpetually photographed and filmed for online bragging rights. Seven years later, the restaurant announced a redesign and ditched the popular pink hue. 

“I had enough of pink,” Mazouz says. “With so many people taking pictures of it, I should be very happy. But I had enough. People were obsessed with the pink room and taking pictures all the time, and that was too much.”

The artwork in Sketch also shifts. The venue has showcased more than 50 exhibitions since it opened, and Mazouz regularly invites notable artists to transform the Gallery. Earlier this year, British artist Jonathan Baldock created 84 clay masks for the restaurant, which were installed alongside wool cocoons and floral wall sculptures. 

“Sketch felt like an exciting opportunity, as my work often sits somewhere between sculpture, theater and lived environment,” Baldock tells Observer. “I’m interested in how objects behave in spaces that are already emotionally and socially charged—not just neutral white cubes. The restaurant setting allows the works to be encountered in a more embodied, informal way.”

He adds that Sketch offers artists an audience who may not regularly go to galleries, but who enjoy looking at art. “It’s a very different sort of exposure, not just about visibility, but about the work entering everyday life and being experienced over time rather than in a single focused visit,” Baldock says.

The toilets, known as the “pod loos,” are as famous as the Lecture Room or the artwork—maybe more so. The abstract, self-contained stalls are built into giant eggs, which fill an enormous room behind the Gallery. The space was originally intended as a bar. While building Sketch, Mazouz regularly awoke from nightmares about the design. One morning, he woke up in a panic about the bar and called Duchaufour-Lawrance. 

“I said, ‘We have to change it,’” Mazouz says. “I used to go to a lot of music festivals with [porta-potties], so I thought we could make eggs. So we did a dozen eggs to fill the space. It was very complicated. We found someone on the Isle of Wight who does boats [to make them].”

He shrugs when asked about the photo obsession guests have with the toilets. “It’s a bit annoying,” he says. “But at the end of the day, it’s the world we live in. It’s a ridiculous thing.”

The Lecture Room is similarly Instagrammable. Everything is immaculately and artistically plated, and the décor is pleasingly ornate, with patterned walls and colorful silk drapes. Mazouz says he’s “always adding layers” to the room, and Stucki says the designer, Gabhan O'Keeffe, regularly comes in to update or fix elements. 

The décor and the food are big, bold and unapologetic. The tasting menu is £225, the vegetarian edition is £205, and the four-course lunch is £150. When I dined in February, the meal started with eight small snacks. The bread course came with three types of butter. The famous Pierre Gagnaire’s Grand Dessert was presented as six different desserts, served simultaneously. 

“It’s about generosity,” Gagnaire says. “We want to give people the best, so we want to give them more when possible. The dessert is like a flower bouquet that comes together at the end.”

The Grand Dessert can be comprised of as many as eight different plates. It changes four times each year, but particular items shift more often depending on what’s in season. “We want to ensure it’s always exceptional,” Stucki says. “If we don’t have eight good dishes, we do less. It’s about quality and consistency, not quantity. A journalist, a culinary critic or an inspector can come every single day, so everything you do you need to do it at a three-Michelin-star level.”

Stucki adds that, like Mazouz, he chooses to ignore the social media flurry around Sketch. “It doesn’t affect the style of the food,” he says. “The most important thing is tasty food. I’ve realized that honesty, sincerity and being genuine are more important than what it looks like in a picture. We do our best, but it needs to be genuine.”

Currently, Sketch has four restaurants: the Lecture Room, the Gallery, the Glade and the Parlour. There is also a small bar underneath the room with the toilets, open until 2 a.m. on weekends. Afternoon tea is a booming business in the Gallery and the Glade. Some guests are under the misconception that it’s a three-Michelin-starred afternoon tea, but the Lecture Room is unrelated to the tea offering. Each space has a completely different vibe.

“I see it as being like a street with different places that make sense for different people,” Mazouz says. “At the beginning, I thought, stupidly, that we could put all types of people in one room. But I realized how someone wants to feel is not the same thing for everybody. So there is a room for anyone.”

Mazouz and Gagnaire both split their time between London and Paris. Gagnaire has numerous restaurants around the world, while Mazouz also owns Moroccan eatery Le 404. Stucki devotes seven days a week to maintaining and improving the Lecture Room—something he enjoys. “We invest our time, creativity and energy continuously to strive to achieve perfection every day,” he says. “We don’t take anything for granted.”

Mazouz has plenty more ideas for Sketch. He wants to swap out the bar in the Parlour, and he has plans for further tweaks if the budget allows. Ultimately, he wants to maintain an evolving vision. If people like or want to photograph it, great. If not, he isn’t that concerned. 

“We are concentrated on what we do and what we feel,” he says. “Honestly, I don’t even know if people copy us, because I don’t look outside [of Sketch]. I look inside. Pierre does also. We look at what we can do and what we can change. I know I have to change something when it becomes a burden in my head. And then, if the money allows, I change it. I never look at what’s happening around me.”

It’s a philosophy that’s benefited Sketch, proving that an uncompromising sense of imagination results in true longevity.