Why My Restaurant Only Has One Table

After stints at the multiple Michelin-starred El Celler de Can Roca and Berasategui restaurants in Spain, Argentinian-born chef Martin Milesi came to London with a clear vision for his next project: one table, 12 guests. UNA, with its home in the Victorian Gothic surrounds of London's St. Pancras Clock Tower, is a pop-up restaurant focusing on regional Latin American cooking—and intimate dining.

I have always loved Buenos Aires—she's like a girlfriend. I told her, I love you but I've met London and I'm going to start a relationship with her now. Maybe that's why I'm single, I fall in love with cities and not women.

I grew up in Santa Fe in Argentina and at 18, I moved to Buenos Aires to study gastronomy. This was at a time when it was very unusual to study this as a profession but from then on, I've always worked with food. I spent the majority of my time before coming to London in Argentina, with a few seasons in Brazil or Uruguay.

At the end of many years working in restaurants came probably the most important stint in my career. I worked for seven years as a teacher at a culinary arts university. It was during this time that the concept of UNA started to manifest itself. I became obsessed with the idea of creating a restaurant with only one table. I began to write and draw it out to develop it, mostly for myself at that point. It wasn't quite the right time.

When my time teaching came to an end, I returned to the restaurant business, but this time to make something of my own. I opened a restaurant but three months later, it was closed quite suddenly when the investors pulled out. It was such a traumatic experience that I decided to take a sabbatical year to travel and figure out what I wanted to do and where. I visited kitchen across Europe, and of course ate in a lot of restaurants. When I came to London, Nuno Mendes invited me to cook with him for a few days—that was special. After that, I went to Italy, got my Italian citizenship and—since I was now an EU citizen—I could come to London. It's been a done deal since then.

UNA had always been, as a business model, a permanent restaurant with just one table but in retrospect, that would have been really hard to make profitable. I had the opportunity to meet the owner of the clock tower of St. Pancras and see the space and as soon as I did, I immediately connected the dots with UNA and in that moment, it became a pop-up.

I cook about five dinners a month and each time, 12 guests who don't know each other come and share one table in a clock tower, overlooking London's nightscape.

I remember the first dinner—it reminded me how I felt when I was first starting to cook and I would make meals for family and friends. The communal feeling and connection you get from cooking for people is wonderful. I'm very lucky to have a real relationship with my guests. I greet them, I introduce each dish as it comes out—this just wouldn't be possible in a bigger restaurant. There's no connection between kitchen and table; the chef cooks, the customers eat and pay.

I was never worried about the concept not working socially. We live in a society where we're generally afraid of talking to strangers, but UNA is like being at a wedding. You don't necessarily know the people you're sat at a table with, but you become great friends for a few hours and share an experience. I remember one dinner last year was a table of people who all got on so well that they have been continuing to meet at each others' houses ever since.

The idea at UNA is to promote the flavours and ingredients of Argentina. It's the food that I've always loved. I love to create and compose, not just to cook. It's like being a musician, you can play a guitar or you can compose music—I like to compose dishes. Another positive side effect of running a one-table pop-up the almost total lack of food waste. I'm cooking for 12 guests, so I buy food for 12 people, and no more. I pick the ingredients out myself and I really think that people feel the energy of receiving a product intended for them—a product which is really their property.

I'm doing this because the food industry is not just about cooking recipes but about creating new concepts. If you're experiencing something genuinely innovative, you will—as a by product of the excitement this creates—enjoy the food that you're eating more.

As told to Sarah Phillips.