British restaurant Salon opens in Brixton Market

The 30-cover restaurant, which opened last Thursday (6 December) is using the downstairs charcuterie and cheese wholesaler to form part of the four-course set menu, in a collaboration head chef Balfe believes will be of great help to both businesses.

“Cannon & Cannon fine foods are fast-becoming one of the leading distributers of British charcuterie, so it’s a really reciprocal relationship” Balfe told BigHospitality. “They provide us with great produce and we showcase what you can do with it.

“The space up here was slightly redundant, so it just made total sense to do this here. Salon actually has loads of positives - the main one being that we gained some of Cannon & Cannon’s customers, which is great. We use them as a supplier. All of our cheeseboards, for example, come from them and we have access to 50 or 60 different cheeses.”

Having previously worked with the Young Turks chefs collective, Balfe first worked with Cannon & Cannon as s guest chef for a supper club in October. His dishes at Salon will include rosehip fizz, razor clams & sobrasada, and duck hearts with celeriac. The four-course set menu is priced at £29.

The future​

And the chef revealed hopes to perhaps expand the Salon concept, or branch out into other cuisine types, adding ‘there are other things I want to explore’.

“If I can get together a gang of chefs that think they could pull this concept off in another area then that’s certainly something I would like to roll out,” he said. “But at the moment it’s still early days.

“I’m committed to making this as good as it can be for the time-being. But having said that, it’s a small space here, we’ve got a good management team already and there’s lots of other things that I want to explore.

“I’ve spent a bit of time in Spain and there are influences from elsewhere in the world that will continue to interest me and I might want to explore them in the future.”