Nook at Night is a dinner series built around a simple idea. If the traditional path to becoming a great chef is broken, build a better one.
Instead of staging in kitchens with unclear learning outcomes, each dinner is designed as a hands-on exploration of a specific culinary discipline, from
butchery to fermentation to growing and harvesting ingredients.
Guests experience the process in real time, through a multi-course menu that reflects what’s being learned, tested, and refined in our kitchen.
THE STORY
When our Sous Chef Kage was accepted to stage at one of the world's top restaurants in Spain, we asked a simple question: what exactly will you learn?
The answer was mostly grey area, and it came at a moment when the industry was reckoning loudly with the reality of
free labour propping up fine dining. We decided there
had to be a better vehicle. One where the learning is intentional, the outcomes are clear, and the chef
doing the growing is recognised and given the
space to do it properly.
Kage is a chef with real skills and Nook at Night is the environment we built so he can sharpen
them on his own terms.
As it happens, every person on our team has gone deep on something. One of us has spent years obsessing over butchery, another over fermentation, another over pasta, another over how food actually grows. Put us all in a room and between us we can cover almost every discipline a serious chef understands.
So that is exactly what we did. Each week a different skill takes centre stage, helped by whoever on the team has lived it most. It comes down to something we genuinely believe at Upward: how we do
anything is how we do everything. A kitchen should be a place where people earn a proper
wage, have time for their lives outside of work, and still do something they care deeply
about. Nook at Night is our way of showing that those things are not in conflict.