Glen Padiyar: Head Chef of the Petrichor

With over 13 years of culinary experience, Glen Padiyar serves as the Head Chef of The Petrichor Restaurant, the official restaurant of The Cavendish London, a 4 star deluxe Mayfair Hotel in Central London.

Prior to joining The Cavendish team, he served as the Head Chef at the M Restaurant Group and the Charlotte Street Hotel, London. Glen commits the Petrichor to creating high quality, trendy dishes with passion, and uses the best seasonal dishes. This is reflected in the fast change of our menu since he joined the restaurant, as the former quintessentially British menu of The Petrichor has been redesigned to serve a more modern European cuisine. 

However, becoming a chef was not something Glen had planned for since young. Despite his parents having careers in the hospitality industry, he decided to pursue a career in business & marketing instead. However, it was when he decided to join the Ritz Carlton in Bahrain for his internship, where he was exposed to the hospitality industry for the first time. He spent the majority of his time in Bahrain in finance and front office, until one day, he stepped into the kitchen, and in the words of Glen himself, “it was love at first sight”. Glen knew that he had found what he loved and made an immediate decision to pursue a second degree in culinary arts management.

Glen’s Cooking Style

It was during Glen's time working at Sauterelle where he worked directly under Robin Gill, who inspired the culinary style that Glen seeks to deliver in his food.

Under Robin’s tutelage, Glen was inspired to create dishes reflecting creativity and energy, with special theatrical effects. Robin also taught him the art of not setting any limitations to his cooking, with examples being the fusion of both sweet and savoury in particular dishes.

Favourite Dishes

Starter: Confit smoked salmon with salted cucumber and horseradish - yoghurt snow

Main course: Corn fed chicken with corn custard and truffle popcorn

Dessert: Banana rum toffee parfait with yuzu and peanut butter ice cream

His Beliefs’

1) Sustainable Cooking Practices

“I live by the ethos of waste not want not”, Glen emphasises to all of us, which is also how his menu is planned around. He explains to us that for his salted cucumber horseradish & yoghurt snow dressings, he ensures that every part of the cucumber is used for the dish and not a single bit is wasted where possible.

Glen also tells us “I even ensure the cucumber skin is used in the dish, where I burn the skin peel to ashes and mix it with yoghurt to enhance its flavour. As for the seeds, I blitz them with horseradish and yoghurt to make the yoghurt snow. This way, I ensure that every part of the cucumber is used and nothing gets thrown away”.

2) Organic and Fair Foods

Chefs of all people know how foods like livestock are produced; as a result, Glen strongly believes that it is of paramount importance that the ownership is on all chefs to partake in promoting ethical production of foods and the need for proper education.

As a result, the Petrichor opts for better quality organic and locally grown produce over their mass produced counterparts.

What’s cooking at The Petrichor?

With many exciting new dishes being introduced to the Petrichor, the creative minds and enthusiasm of Glen and his team are hard at work. When asked, Glen mentions that the next project of the Petrichor will be to recreate Rosa Lewis’s iconic dishes which are inside her cookbook.  The team aims to take her most popular dishes and add modern twists to her recipes to create a new Rosa Lewis Tasting Menu.