The counter
A small room built around a closed loop.
Cook in the open, source in a circle.
Cook in the open, source in a circle, and let the season set the pace. We keep the menu short so the sourcing can stay honest.
Florilege is a counter for twenty seats, set close enough to the fire that you can hear it. The kitchen runs in full view because there is nothing to hide: a single animal is read whole, a vegetable is used to its last trim, and the day decides the order of the plates. We measure the room the way we measure the cooking, in restraint.
Nothing happens out of your sight.
The counter is the whole restaurant. If a step in the cooking cannot be done in front of you, it is a sign we are doing it wrong.
How the loop holds
Four habits keep the circle closed.
01
Cook in the open
The counter is the whole restaurant. If a step cannot be done in front of you, we do not do it.
02
Source in a circle
One animal, one herd, one set of growers. What we take, we use, and what is left feeds the next service.
03
Keep it short
A small menu is the only way the sourcing stays honest, so we cook few things and cook them plainly.
04
Measure the waste
We weigh what leaves the kitchen and post it by the door, because a claim is only worth its proof.
Rin Asano cooks at the centre of the room, within arm's reach of every guest.
Years spent between a Burgundy farmhouse and a Tohoku dairy taught her to treat one animal and one field as a closed loop. She built Florilege around that loop: trim becomes stock, fat becomes candle, whey becomes the next ferment. The counter is her way of staying accountable to it in front of the people she feeds.
Rin Asano
Chef of the counterA slow path to a closed loop.
2014
Rin opens a ten seat counter in a converted dye works, cooking one animal a week.
2017
The dairy circle begins with a single herd in Tohoku, milk in and whey back out.
2020
The kitchen moves to bare concrete and the counter doubles to twenty seats.
2023
Kitchen waste to the bin falls to near nothing, audited each season and posted by the door.
Today
A short menu, a closed loop, and a room that watches every step of it.
The few hands behind the counter.
Tomas Vidal
Sourcing and the whole animalMai Sundberg
Dairy and fermentsKenji Aalto
Cellar and the roomCome watch the loop close, one service at a time.