Mei Ume: AB Concept took the building’s own trade and told it from the other end

Interiors

Reading time: 9 min

Asked to put a Chinese and Japanese restaurant inside the headquarters of the Port of London Authority, AB Concept did not import a story. They went to the archive and found that the building’s own business had been tea, silk and ceramics arriving from Asia. Mei Ume tells that trade from the other end of the voyage.

---

Mei Ume opened on 9 June 2017 inside the building at Ten Trinity Square, and it was AB Concept‘s first project in the United Kingdom. The name is the same flower twice: mei in Chinese, ume in Japanese, the plum blossom.

The room seats 48 in the main dining room, with a ten-seat bar, a private dining room for twelve now called the Chairman’s Room, and a sushi counter. It won two Restaurant & Bar Design Awards in 2018, taking both Luxury and Best Overall UK Restaurant.

The interesting decision is the one made before any of that. Ed Ng has described the process, and it started with a constraint rather than a concept.

“The first thing we did after being commissioned was sit down with the heritage building expert and discover what we could and couldn’t be doing in this amazing space.”

Then came the search for a subject. What they found was already in the building.

The building was the trade

Ten Trinity Square was built as the headquarters of the Port of London Authority, to a design by Sir Edwin Cooper who won the competition in 1908, with construction running to completion in 1922. It is Grade II* listed, Historic England list entry 1079138, listed on 3 March 1972.

The list description is worth reading for what it tells you about the room. Portland stone, near-square on plan with a canted entrance corner, four storeys over a basement, a deep entablature, paired Corinthian columns at the pavilions, a four-column portico rising into a tower, and what Historic England calls “colossal figure sculpture.” That sculpture is Father Thames, begun by Albert Hemstock Hodge and, after his death, scaled up and completed by his assistant Charles Doman. Lloyd George opened the building in 1922 and called it, on the day, a beautiful and handsome edifice.

What the Port of London Authority did there was administer the docks. The cargo those docks landed included tea, silk and ceramics from China and Japan.

That is the hinge of the whole scheme, and it is Ed Ng’s own account of finding it:

“The next step was to find the right Asian story to bring into this very Western building. We immediately began thinking of stories of Anglo-Chinese trading: the merchants and their silk, ceramics and tea, the way trading allowed them to influence each other’s cultures. That became a very strong narrative for us.”

Most East-meets-West restaurant schemes work by importing a set of motifs into a neutral shell. This one did the opposite. The building already had the story; AB Concept simply told it from the sending end rather than the receiving end. It is a small distinction and it is the difference between decoration and argument.

Portholes, which are the giveaway

The motif that runs through the restaurant is not a flower. It is a porthole.

The plum blossom screen at the entrance is enamel paint on glass, suspended between two of the room’s original columns, and it hangs from metal screens of portholes that then recur throughout the restaurant. A porthole is a shipping detail. In a room dressed for a Chinese and Japanese menu, inside a building that ran a port, it is the element that quietly holds the two halves together.

The rest of the material list is short and consistent: red lacquer frames, bronze and metallic motifs, enamelled glass, and hand-painted panels with silk embroidery. Red is used deliberately for its associations with happiness and celebration.

The focal point of the main dining room is a three-layer gilded triptych in a crimson lacquer frame, depicting a feast in a garden, built up in layers under glass so that the image shifts as you move past it. Trade coverage describes gilded works at either end of the room, so there is likely a facing piece.

The semi-private dining room is closed off by a hand-painted panel with silk embroidery, and the bar sits under a pavilion-inspired structure hung with a line of black metal lanterns.

The columns stayed, and the lighting hangs off them

The room AB Concept were given is double-height and structurally fixed. Every original Corinthian column was retained, and the design works around them rather than against them.

The move that makes the room work is that the halo-shaped light fittings are suspended by metal from those columns. Rather than treating the columns as obstacles in a large hall, the scheme uses them as the anchor points that break a double-volume Palladian space into intimate seating nooks. The listed fabric becomes the servicing strategy.

Ed Ng has described the ambition for that balance precisely, and it is a good description of what a designer is actually trying to achieve inside a heritage envelope:

“You want something contemporary but that also gives people the illusion of ‘Has it always belonged to here? But why does it look so contemporary?’”

Who did the rest of the building

AB Concept did the restaurant. The building around it is the work of a much larger team, and the credits are worth setting out because they are rarely given together.

Aukett Swanke were lead architect and coordinated a project team that included six interior designers for different parts of the building. Donald Insall Associates were conservation architect. Museum of London Archaeology handled the archaeology, and Ardmore Group built it. The client is Reignwood Group, which acquired the building in 2010.

Of the six interior designers, four are on the record: Bruno Moinard and Claire Bétaille of 4BI in Paris did the entrance hall and rotunda, the guest rooms and suites and the Club Château Latour; Martin Kemp Design did the forty-one private residences; Joseph Caspari did the private members’ club; and AB Concept did Mei Ume. The other two are not published anywhere.

The conversion took the City Heritage Award in 2019 for the best conservation or refurbishment project in the City of London.

One piece of the building’s history sits directly above the restaurant’s concerns. The domed rotunda over the central courtyard was destroyed by bombing in 1940, and the skylit space that replaced it is what you pass through to reach Mei Ume. In 1946 the building hosted the reception for the first session of the United Nations General Assembly, in the old Port of London Authority board room, still called the UN Ballroom.

Two kitchens, one room

The plan carries a decision that most East-meets-West restaurants avoid: the two cuisines are not blended, they are separately staffed.

Mei Ume opened with Tony Truong, previously of Royal China, running the Chinese side and Mun Seok Choi, previously of Sake no Hana, on sushi, with a dim sum chef from Yauatcha and a wine list built by Jan Konetzki. That dual structure is why the room needs both a live sushi counter and a kitchen capable of a whole Peking duck, and it is why the plan has more distinct service points than a 48-cover dining room would normally carry.

The design answers it by zoning rather than dividing. The columns and the halo fittings break the volume into nooks, the bar sits under its own pavilion, and the private room is closed with a fabric panel rather than a wall. Nothing is partitioned permanently, which for a listed interior is both the polite solution and the only available one.

The current chef de cuisine is Peter Ho, who grew up in Singapore. The cocktail list was originally built on four elements of traditional Chinese astronomy and now runs on a Silk Road theme, which is the trade story again, in a glass.

Nine years, which is the real test

The awards are worth one more line, because of which category matters. Mei Ume won Luxury and Best Overall UK Restaurant at the Restaurant & Bar Design Awards in 2018, and it was also shortlisted for Restaurant or Bar in a Heritage Building. That third shortlisting is the one that describes the actual problem.

Ed Ng has been candid about the difficulty of designing hospitality that lasts:

“We always need to design for the future because people are always changing the way they live, work and relax. But if it takes years for a project to materialise, and then the finished space must be relevant for years after that, it becomes very hard. It means these days hospitality designers all have to be fortune tellers.”

Mei Ume opened in June 2017 and is still trading in 2026, adding menus rather than being refitted. Nine years is a long run for a hotel restaurant, and it is the only measure of this kind of work that means anything.

What has changed since 2017

Three things, and two of them are significant enough that any current writing about this restaurant has to account for them.

The hotel changed its name. On 2 October 2024 it became Four Seasons Hotel London at Tower Bridge, dropping “at Ten Trinity Square”. The building is still Ten Trinity Square; the hotel is not called that any more.

La Dame de Pic London has closed. The Anne-Sophie Pic restaurant, a separate operation in the same building that opened alongside Mei Ume in 2017 and held two Michelin stars from 2020, closed on 15 February 2025 at the conclusion of the partnership. In its place, Cooper’s Cut opened on 2 March 2026, a 72-cover steakhouse under executive chef Luke Armstrong, named for the building’s architect.

Mei Ume itself is open and busy. In July 2026 it added a sushi counter experience, a dim sum and duck brunch and a weekend set menu, which is a restaurant expanding rather than one being propped up.

Frequently asked questions

Final thoughts

The easy version of this commission was available and AB Concept did not take it. A Chinese and Japanese restaurant inside a grand Edwardian classical building could have been done as contrast: lacquer and gold against Portland stone, the two traditions politely ignoring each other across a room.

What they did instead was research. They asked the heritage consultant what was possible before deciding what to design, then went looking for a subject and found that the building had one already. The Port of London Authority existed to move tea, silk and ceramics off ships and into the country. A restaurant serving Chinese and Japanese food in that building is not a foreign object in an English shell. It is the far end of the same journey.

The proof is the porthole. It is a maritime detail, an English one, and it is doing the connective work in a room otherwise full of plum blossom and gilding. Anyone can put a flower on a wall. Finding the one motif that belongs to both halves of the story takes somebody who went and read the file first.