The Latine Mayfair French-Latin restaurant has arrived on London’s most scrutinised dining circuit, tucked behind Bond Street on a cobbled courtyard that feels, improbably, like it belongs to another city entirely. The project is the work of brother duo Amine and Nacer Chadli, who spent approximately two years searching for the right location before committing to a site in Mayfair, then a further year and a half restoring it to its current state.
The result is a room that rewards the search. Limewashed walls, parquet flooring and solid wood tables are paired with bouclé seating, and the overall effect is cool without being cold, light without being spare. Even the outdoor courtyard tables feel sealed off from the surrounding city: seated there, the traffic noise from the main stretch of Bond Street registers as something distant, almost theoretical.
The Space Behind Latine Mayfair’s French-Latin Identity
The Chadlis enlisted interior expert Victoria Vogel to curate the environment. Her brief, as she describes it, was about balance. ‘We wanted Latine to feel transportive but still grounded in Mayfair,’ Vogel says. ‘It was about balancing Latin warmth and energy with a more refined, European approach, creating a space that evolves as you move through it, from light and open to something more intimate and atmospheric as day progresses to night.’ The architecture of the experience, in other words, mirrors the menu: two distinct traditions, calibrated against each other until neither overwhelms.
At the kitchen’s helm is executive chef Francisco Lafee, whose cooking sets classical French technique against the flavours of Latin America. The collision is neither timid nor gimmicky. Boeuf bourguignon arrives folded into a corn tortilla, the slow-braised beef cheek lifted with pickled pineapple and sweet potato purée. French escargots trade their traditional garlic-parsley butter for chimichurri. Duck croquettes, fried to a proper crisp, come with guava and chipotle chutney. Each dish lands its central idea quickly, without fuss.
A Menu That Takes the French-Latin Fusion Seriously
Mains run to lamb chops, served with mashed potato and optional truffle shavings, the kind of plate that makes no attempt at novelty and doesn’t need to. The meal closes with a tarte tatin au plantain, which replaces apple with ripe plantain and arrives with coffee caramel and mascarpone ice cream. The combination of bouncy base and flaky pastry centre is the kitchen’s most confident statement: a French classic reframed just enough to feel genuinely new.
What the Chadlis have built here is not simply a fusion restaurant in the way that phrase is sometimes used as a warning. The Latine Mayfair French-Latin kitchen operates with a clear logic: take something already refined, apply a different set of flavour instincts to it, and see what survives the encounter. More often than not, the answer is something better than either original. The escargots with chimichurri, in particular, make a compelling case that certain pairings were simply waiting to be discovered.
Finding the site took years because, presumably, the Chadlis knew what they were looking for: a location with Mayfair’s prestige and none of its noise. On both counts, they appear to have succeeded. The courtyard, the limewashed walls, the bouclé chairs: all of it conspires to make the surrounding city feel briefly irrelevant. Step back out onto Bond Street and the spell breaks immediately, which is, of course, the point. Latine is at once entirely of Mayfair and quietly removed from it, which is a harder balance to achieve than the menu, and the menu is no small feat.
