With a brand-new look and its star on the rise, Westaway says that the year is off to a good start for Jaan—Tatler Dining’s Restaurant of the Year for 2023
Good food, like most other forms of art, connects the audience with its creator. For Kirk Westaway, the executive chef of two-Michelin-starred restaurant Jaan, that connection is made through stories of his childhood growing up in the coastal county of Devon in southwest England.
Those stories can be sensed in the design choices, as well as the food. In the newly renovated restaurant, the mirrored corridor leading to the dining room is adorned with abstract artworks that hint at life in Westaway’s home town. Splashes of blue and grey represent sea spray crashing against the shore, and strokes of green denote the region’s rolling hills. Even the carpet, which shifts through gradients of blue, is a subtle nod to Devon’s coastline.
Read more: Why you need to revisit Jaan by Kirk Westaway in 2023
It was in this earthy pocket of the English countryside that Westaway formed his love for food, and his passion for excellent ingredients— even if he didn't realise it at the time. “You don’t realise how special [Devon] is until you leave [it],” he muses. “To go to a quaint café by the river or by the beach, where you’re having scones with cream sourced from a farm down the road and raspberry jam made from berries grown in the back garden.”
Westaway fondly remembers the gardens surrounding his childhood home.
“My family were keen gardeners, my mum especially,” he says, recalling a front garden with a huge rosemary bush “several metres wide, which perfumed the whole street”. In the back garden, the Westaways grew strawberries, carrots and salad greens; on the back of the hill on which the house sat, they grew potatoes and rhubarb, and even cherry and pear trees. Furry-footed bantam chickens roamed the property.