How talent and graft have brought Larry Jayasekara to the stoves of Mayfair's Cocochine

Jayasekara sits in the gleaming chrome of his development kitchen on Mayfair's Bruton Place, 16 doors down from Cocochine, the 49-cover fine-dining restaurant that opened its doors in October. It's 5,500 miles from Sri Lanka, but light years in feel. A square metre of property here will set you back £40,000. It's the domain of the ultra-rich – a heady mix of old and new money; of Savile Row suits and polo shirts; of hedge-funds and Lamborghinis. So, when Jayasekara reminisces about climbing coconut trees for 20 rupees a pop (roughly 12 pence) to afford a bowl of rice, it's hard not to dwell on the wealth gap. What would his 14-year-old self make of him now?

"He'd think he's been very lucky," he says, with a self-effacing smile. But I'm not buying that.

Larry Jayasekara's career and life

Those who have been following Jayasekara's career will know his new role as chef patron of a Mayfair restaurant is no fluke. His CV boasts such heavyweight titles as National Chef of the Year in 2016, Young Chef of the Year in 2007 and 2010, as well as stints at the Waterside Inn in Bray, with Michel Bras in Laguiole, France, as senior sous chef at Belmond Le Manoir aux Quat'saisons, and as head chef at Pétrus from 2015 to 2018.

Jayasekara is here not because of fortune but thanks to talent and graft – working his way up from a bin man on the streets of Devon barely able to speak English (more on that later) to opening Cocochine. Where a tiny sliver of luck does come into it, is that a chef with such precocious talents has managed to find a business partner with deep enough pockets to back him, and in Mayfair, no less. Enter Tim Jefferies, the uber-connected curator of Mayfair's Hamilton Gallery, and a fortuitous meeting that would change Jayasekara's life.

Let's rewind back to 2014, when a neighbour asked Jayasekara – then working at Marcus Wareing at the Berkeley – if he'd cook dinner for a friend: "I was working six days a week, I'd never done private dining but I said I would meet him," he recalls. The friend just happened to be Jefferies, a world-renowned photography dealer and gallerist with a legendary contact book. Of all the dinner parties in all the world, Jayasekara just happened to cook for the man who famously dated the likes of Claudia Schiffer, Liz Hurley and Elle Macpherson, and chaired the Serpentine Gallery's exclusive Summer Party committee. As Jayasekara moved on to the Gordon Ramsay Group, taking the role of head chef of Pétrus, the pair stayed in touch.

"Tim asked me one day what I wanted to do in the future. I said that if you ask any chef they'll say they want to open their own restaurant, but I don't have that kind of money. He asked me how much I needed and I replied: it depends where you open.

"‘Well, if you want to open a restaurant, it has to be in Mayfair!' he said. ‘Mayfair?! In that case you need millions and millions!' Three weeks later he asked me to meet him for a coffee and said: ‘find a site and I'll fund it'."

He must have loved your cooking, I say. "He must have," he replies, then bursts into a bout of high-pitched, infectious laughter.

"I just hope I can still remember how to cook that meal when this place finally opens!"

That was 2018. What followed was an epic quest, as Jayasekara waited for a suitable site to become available near the Hamilton Gallery. "We were looking for four or five years. When you look at how many sites come to the market – that circle of Mayfair is really secure and hardly anyone moves. One site on Berkeley Square fell through because the property management went into liquidation. Another one we looked at was too big – it was 6,000 sq ft and we didn't want a big property. And that was it."

Did they ever consider expanding their search area? "No. Tim and I always agreed that the restaurant needed to be five minutes from the gallery. Then this site became available. Tim wasn't sold at first but when he saw the top floor, he said: ‘Let's do this'."

The four-storey site, formerly a studio for model Kate Moss, has a feature both Jefferies and Jayasekara fell in love with: a series of three huge, vaulted sky-lights, drowning the room in daylight but never direct in sun. It did, however, come at a price: the vast amount of construction work the building needed to bring it up to standard.

"We've had to rip all the floors out, install new floors at different heights, re-concrete everything," says Jayasekara. It's no exaggeration to say the site was gutted – taken back to the bare bones and rebuilt internally, with delays compounding delays. An initial opening date of April became June, and then October as new power had to be re-routed across Mayfair to reach the site.

The top floor now plays host to a 14-cover private dining room, complete with original fireplace, while the ground level hosts the 28-seat main à la carte dining room – adorned in a rotating cast of work from Hamiltons Gallery – while the first floor houses the kitchen and seven-cover chef's table. All of which is the perfect showcase for Jayasekara's simple, modern cooking that leans into luxury ingredients. After leaving Pétrus, in 2018 and waiting to find a site, he took the opportunity to travel and absorb new influences, seeing around 16 countries in four years. The result, he says, is a recalibration of his culinary instincts.

"Most places I've worked we have 10 or 12 elements on a dish. You don't need them. Simplify it. You go for two or three top-quality ingredients, and that means fewer working hours and the team not running around and the guests get a better experience."

An example is the dish of tuna on the menu, made up of seven-day-aged tuna imported from Tokyo, seasoned with a little soy sauce and paired with caviar from Jefferies' long-term supplier. "All we need to do is look after the tuna, keep it at the right temperature, cut it well – you don't need any more. It melts in the mouth. You can taste the tuna, taste the caviar, taste the soy," he says.

Then there is Jayasekara's take on a French onion soup. "I used to have it when I worked in France. You always have a French onion soup before anything else. So I wanted to redo it and make it lighter." He cooks eight different types of onion for 12 hours, then seasons them with soy and balsamic vinegar before serving with a tortellini filled with caramelised onion and thyme and a truffled cheese crouton on the side.

"If you close your eyes and eat it, it'll remind you of a French onion soup. That's what I want guests to feel."

Jayasekara and Jefferies have also taken the lease of the site opposite, with plans to open it as a deli offering grab-and-go sandwiches and meals, using the cuts from whole animals that the restaurant doesn't need.

The Cocochine's menu has nods to Tokyo, to Paris – will it pay homage to his Sri Lankan heritage? "Yes and no. The problem is getting consistent Sri Lankan ingredients over here. Take bananas. There are 13 types of banana. Beautiful. But one week they are available here, the next week not. It is difficult."

What lead Larry Jayasekara to the UK?

The one nod he is able to give his homeland is selection of hand-rolled, cold-brewed teas from Sri Lanka. But in almost every way, this feels like a different galaxy – a different universe, even – from the beaches of Sri Lanka that he grew up on. So what was it that first led to British shores? "A girl," he says, with another infectious laugh. "I married an English girl. She said: ‘Why don't we go to England?' I always believe that every human gets one opportunity in life, so I took it."

When he was still just a teenager – not even old enough to legally drive a car in the UK – and with only basic English, he followed her back to Devon.

"I had to get a job, so I became a bin man in Torbay. I had to get up at 4am and I had 135 bins to empty, and I had to be done by 8:30am. So I was always running. It was December, so it was dark and cold – I'd just come from 35ºC in Sri Lanka! But I'm never shy to work. I didn't want to be sitting at home doing nothing."

From there, he enrolled in South Devon College and did an NVQ in cooking, overcoming the challenges of growing up half a world away. "We were being taught how to make cauliflower cheese and the lecturer said go to the fridge and get some cauliflowers. I went over but I was too embarrassed to ask: ‘What does a cauliflower look like?'" Yet despite starting off with less knowledge than his colleagues – and only basic English – he picked up the student of the year award and saw a pathway for himself in the UK.

"I realised this was something I could do. I didn't have an education growing up in Sri Lanka, I came from a poor family, so I didn't finish high school."

Determined to forge ahead in the industry, he travelled to London, doing a day at Angela Hartnett at the Connaught. "I'd never seen a building bigger than two storeys! I walked into the Connaught kitchens and I was mesmerised by these people moving like machines." From there, following a stint back in Devon, he landed his first full-time role as a commis at Marcus Wareing's Pétrus. "It was the right time. They were looking for staff. I got lucky." Surely you make your own luck? His reply: another long, high-pitched chuckle.

A chance encounter serving Michel Roux at Pétrus ("I didn't know at the time who he really was") led to a job offer at the Waterside Inn in Bray and then stints at Michel Bras and Le Manoir, before returning to Marcus Wareing at the Berkeley and finally landing his first head chef role at Pétrus. Even now, he says, some aspects of running a kitchen don't come 100% naturally to him. "Writing English for me is still difficult. If I send you an email, it may have some errors in it. If there is a big word I have to Google it first."

It was while at Pétrus that he won the 2016 National Chef of the Year Award, cementing his status as one of the country's most talented chefs. Surely, I ask him as our time runs to an end, he's not going to put that down to luck? For a second, his modesty slips to one side and peeking through is a glimmer of his relentless drive.

"Look, in any industry, if you've put the time and effort in and you focus, you will be able to get the rewards and the recognition from people you look up at. But if you don't, you're not going to get anywhere." And – testament to that – here he now is.

About Cocochine

Address 27 Bruton Place, London W1J 6NQ

Covers Main dining room: 28; chef'scounter: 7; private dining room: 14

Example dishes

Canapés

• Tartlet of carrots, pickled red onion and smoked reindeer heart
• Doughnut with barbecue eel and black Australian truffles

Mains

• Coronation crab
• Hand-dived Orkney scallop, carrot purée, spiced cream, dry kombu
• Truffle bao, brown butter
• Banana leaf barbecue native lobster, crème fraîche, yuzu, spiced lobster jus
• Miso cauliflower

Dessert

• Chocolate tart caviar
• Quince tart, crème fraîche ice-cream
• Snickers