One Dish: 17 Shots, One Lettuce and a Three-Star Team

By Daniel Okafor

Cristian Barnett's One Dish is a book built from exactly one recipe: roast gem lettuce, hen of the woods, fermented mushroom juice and elderflower, as served at L'Enclume in Cumbria — a restaurant that held two Michelin stars when the project began and holds three today. From that single plate, Barnett spun 17 photographs, 17 locations, and a folding book format of 297 × 420 mm that opens out to 297 × 820 mm.

That's the whole conceit. One dish, everyone who makes it possible, from the pot washer to chef-patron Simon Rogan. It sounds slight on paper. In practice, it gave Barnett the spine for a portrait of an institution at its 20th anniversary.

How did the project start?

The seed was commercial. In 2020, Barnett was photographing a London company specialising in large-format luxury printing, and, as he tells it, seeing work printed big for commercial use was a thrill. His own photographs, he admits, usually live online. He wanted something on paper.

As a food photographer of more than 25 years — nearly 100 cookbooks, plus hotels, restaurants, magazines and brands — Barnett knew which client fit. He took the idea to Irene, owner of Studio Meraki, the marketing agency that works closely with L'Enclume. She was enthusiastic. The restaurant's 20th anniversary the following year made the timing almost suspiciously convenient. Whether the anniversary was the reason or the excuse, Barnett doesn't say. Either way, it worked.

Who appears in the pictures?

Not just chefs. Barnett, working with prop stylist Lydia McPherson, planned shots that celebrated reservations, accounts, housekeeping, marketing and maintenance alongside the kitchen brigade. The images were often tongue-in-cheek — in one, three chefs forage on a cliff for lettuce. In another, Barnett put himself and his team into the frame, staging a photoshoot in a tidal waterway, with the stylist in a small boat surrounded by her props.

The tone is affectionate rather than reverent. That matters. Restaurant photography too often flatters only the pass and the plate. Here the book's real subject is payroll, not plating.

What did the shoot demand?

Weather, mostly. Torrential rain and strong winds hit many of the shoots — thankfully, Barnett notes, that isn't always obvious in the finished images. Everyone involved, especially Rogan, trusted him implicitly, though by his own admission "almost nobody else" understood what he was doing. The team's reaction afterwards: "Ah, that's what you were doing!"

Technically, the people were lit individually or in small groups with a large Elinchrom octabox, which made group shots demanding. In the introductory portrait of Rogan on a hill overlooking the village, Barnett's assistant Lisa and stylist Lydia McPherson held the light against the wind with all their strength.

The hardest image was the staff briefing, recreated at a nearby racecourse. The team had roughly 20 minutes before evening service, the weather was awful, and one staff member sat on a horse. With a single light, the composition is essentially as shot in-camera — it took about eight frames to light everyone properly.

Was it worth it?

Judged on the book alone, yes. Designer Mateusz Piekarski's fold-out format gives the landscapes room to breathe while keeping the people small in frame but recognisable — a deliberate echo of the project's argument that the land and the staff together produce the food. The books are sold at L'Enclume and at Rogan's other restaurants, positioned as a souvenir of the meal and, hopefully, of the people behind it.

There's a longer legacy, too. The final shot — the finished plate — pushed Barnett to experiment further with outdoor work for L'Enclume, and the pair have since built a collection of food images shot in streams, rivers, forests, trees, hedges and other natural settings.

Barnett, based just outside London and working internationally, has in recent years returned to analogue photography and begun courting clients seeking imagery tied to brand identity. Whether One Dish marks a pivot or a one-off, he doesn't claim. But a book that celebrates an entire staff in 17 frames, folded to fit beside a dessert trolley, is a modest format doing ambitious work.