Creative Restaurant Group kept the wood-fired kitchen it built for Humo and gave it to a chef who uses the grill for precision, with tasting menus led by the coast.
IGNI sits at 12 St George Street, close to the junction with Maddox Street, in the room where Creative Restaurant Group ran Humo. The group kept Humo’s wood-fired kitchen and gave it a new chef. Humo has become IGNI this year. Theo Clench now cooks there over a four-metre grill, and the restaurant serves tasting menus only.
What stayed at number 12
The group’s own brochure describes Humo as a wood-fired restaurant at this address and records the Michelin star it was awarded in 2024. The figures for the room are the same under both names: the whole restaurant seats 34 on exclusive hire, and a private room below holds ten. The name comes from ignis, the Latin for fire.
Creative Restaurant Group is also behind Endo at the Rotunda in White City and SUMI in Notting Hill.
Ash curing and Shetland scallops
IGNI lists the techniques its kitchen uses over the grill: charring, searing, ember-roasting, hot and cold smoking, and ash curing. Its stated aim is to let flame and smoke reveal an ingredient rather than mask it. The produce it names includes hand-dived Shetland scallops, the day’s fish and marbled beef. Fermentation, preservation and dry ageing run alongside the fire, which the restaurant frames as treating time as an ingredient.
The menus draw on coastal cooking and Japanese flavours. Lunch, served Monday to Saturday, comes in three, six or nine courses. Head sommelier Alessio Ragusini leads a wine programme matched to the tasting menus.
A chef raised on the Sussex coast
Clench is Sussex-born, and IGNI traces his interest in seafood to a childhood of family fishing and foraging trips by the sea. The restaurant credits him with global experience and a Michelin-starred restaurant among his achievements. He runs the restaurant with general manager Gaëlle Dubois.
Over its first months IGNI hosted At the Pass, a series of collaborations with visiting chefs, which it has since closed with a note that more is to follow.
Ten seats below the dining room
The room downstairs works in two ways. On Thursdays and Fridays it is the Chef’s Table, launched in September, where the chefs take ten guests through each course, the season of its ingredients and the techniques behind it, at £185 a head. On other evenings it is a private dining room for up to ten, available Monday to Saturday.
For a larger occasion the whole restaurant is available on exclusive hire for up to 34 seated, with the sommelier team pairing wines to the chosen tasting menu. IGNI names corporate dinners, product launches, milestone celebrations and small wedding receptions among its uses.