Spring Table is a pop-up restaurant ( conceived by Tom Dixon ) from Dock Kitchen’s award-winning Stevie Parle, open for public lunches and dinners and is housed in the 14th century Leonardo Da Vinci Monastery inside the Milan Science Museum.
Spring Table serves delicate British dishes but also Italian ingredients in an extremely suggestive open-air location, operating for both lunch and dinner
Evening ( and day time ) dinners are held below the frescoes within the Sala del Cenacolo, the original monk’s dining room where visitors dine underneath 16th-century frescoes.
This space, connected by Nokia, holds a 40-seat table installation by Design Research Studio, creating a modern setting in contrast to the monastic surroundings. The Cenacolo dining is furnished by exclusive Tom Dixon steel chairs made live on-site in Tom Dixon‘s Stamp Give Away exhibition.
Day-time dining is also served beneath the impressive 18th Century Cloisters in the very heart of MOST over-looking a court-yard garden and Roman ruins
Stevie is serving over 120 people at lunch sittings (both restaurants have been full since they opened), operating from a fairly basic kitchen.
‘It can be interesting when you have constraints on your cooking because you’re forced into thinking of different ways of doing things – it can make you quite creative.’ It’s certainly a challenge but one that Stevie admits was self-imposed, ‘we set ourselves the challenge because we like a challenge – we could have just stayed at home but where’s the fun in that?
Stevie has been getting up at 5am every morning to go the Milan food market (the second largest food market in Europe), to source the freshest ingredients for his exclusive pop-up restaurant, Spring Table, connected by Nokia.
Stevie is no stranger to site-specific pop-ups and believes that it’s important for food to match the space, so he’s created an Anglo-Italian menu that is ‘spring-like and delicate’ to reflect both the season and the environment at MOST. Using traditional Italian ingredients, delicate British dishes, designed for sharing, ignite the Italian tradition of coming together to the table to share food.
‘It’s a very seasonal menu using all sorts of well-known Italian ingredients but cooking them in a British way.’
Spring Table diner testimonial ……. ” This evening a friend and I were lucky enough to get a table for dinner in the beautiful halls of the ex monastery.The chef who mastered our delicious meal of three starters,one main course and two deserts was Stevie Parle who’s reputation is well earned if the food I just ate is anything to go by. This was the first time I’d ever eaten the tips of hops plants in a salad, or monk’s beard with fish…fantastic ”
” Todays total experience in the Museum was a triumph of sensual stimulation ”
