Inside One of the World's Best Kitchens ft. The Cocochine

What does a chef bring with him when his kitchen is more than 3,000 kilometres away? For Larry Jayasekara, chef-patron and co-founder of The Cocochine in Mayfair, London, the answer involves blue crab, aged sika deer, bitter chocolate, fresh coconut and, inevitably, caviar.

In Cairo for Cairo Food Week 2026, where Jayasekara stepped into Scalini Egypt’s kitchen for a collaborative dinner, #SceneEats asked him to unpack what’s inside one of the world’s best kitchens - and, more specifically, what had made the journey from his to ours.

First came blue crab for a Sri Lankan crab curry. Then there was sika deer from the estate that supplies The Cocochine, aged for 14 to 16 days before arriving in Cairo. Its bones and knuckles were roasted down into stock for a jus finished with 100% bitter chocolate, bringing an earthy bitterness to balance the lean meat and sweeter quince accompanying it.

But the ingredient with the longest history required considerably less ceremony, coconut. Jayasekara’s coconut roti reaches back to his younger years in Sri Lanka, when he ate it after spending hours surfing. Money was limited and roti did its job remarkably well: inexpensive, filling and personal enough that it eventually followed him into his professional kitchen.

His version mixes freshly grated coconut with an equal quantity of flour, swapping the usual water for coconut water to intensify the flavour. Then comes the caviar - not, Jayasekara insists, simply as shorthand for luxury, but because “there’s a purpose for it.”

It is quite a distance from the food he once ate every day. “To go from coconut roti to caviar,” Jayasekara said. “Wow, what a journey.”

And somewhere between the two sits The Cocochine today.