The table

Mepra S.p.A. is a cutlery maison in Lombardy, and its family workshop in Lumezzane has shaped the European fine-dining table for nearly a century. I started out as a customer. Over the Shin'Labo years that became one of the most carefully worked design collaborations I have had with any brand. Every piece of cutlery on every Shin'Labo table was co-designed with Mepra and carries my signature. In January 2026 Mepra named me its first Malaysian Ambassador, and I owe that to how much work the maison was willing to do with me.

The maison

Mepra was founded in 1948 in Lumezzane, the small Lombard town that has been a centre of Italian metalwork for centuries. The family has run the workshop the same way ever since, making flatware, hollowware and table accessories to alloy and finish standards that keep Mepra on European fine-dining tables beside Christofle and Sambonet.

Among those names, Mepra is the Italian one: precise and modern, and as careful about the alloy as about the form. The maison commits publicly to stainless steel that can be recycled, to forged pieces that last, and to designs meant to be handed down through generations. That puts it in the same European workshop tradition as Gaggenau and The Plan, the other kitchen and atelier houses I work with.

How it began: a purchase first

I first bought Mepra cutlery for Shin’Labo as we prepared to open in 2022. Mepra sold it to me, and that was that. Nobody was talking about an ambassadorship. I was a chef choosing the cutlery that suited the food best.

Over the following months the maison’s attitude to the room changed. The Krug Chef’s Table had moved from Enfin to Shin’Labo in February 2022. The Macallan’s twenty-four-month Dining Experience began around the same time. The yōshoku cooking that Robb Report would call Ryoutei Shin’Labo was finding its feet. Mepra saw what its cutlery was being used for and quietly made a decision.

The Shin’Labo sponsorship

Mepra sponsored all of the cutlery at Shin’Labo for as long as the restaurant ran. Every piece on every table at every service, for the Krug Chef’s Table, the Macallan Dining Experience and the Mortlach launch, was sponsored by Mepra. It is one of the most generous commitments any brand has made to me, and I know of few clearer acts of faith by a European maison in a Malaysian kitchen.

The design work came out of that commitment.

The co-designed range, each piece signed

Within the sponsorship, Mepra and I worked through the design of each piece of cutlery used at Shin’Labo. Weight, balance, proportion, profile and finish were settled in conversation between the workshop in Lumezzane and the room at Lalaport KL. The result was a co-designed range made for the cooking and for the yōshoku table, and for how a diner’s hand would meet the plate.

Every piece carries my signature and brand, the way an author signs work he made with someone. The pieces were used at Shin’Labo at every service for the life of the restaurant. No other establishment in Malaysia served on this range during that time.

The Pininfarina Stile rose gold edition for the Krug Chef’s Table

The most distinctive part of the range was the special edition made for the Krug Chef’s Table at Shin’Labo. It was a Pininfarina Stile by Mepra collection, developed with my endorsement and signature and finished in a rose gold made only for the Krug Chef’s Table.

Pininfarina, the Italian design house behind generations of Ferrari bodies and some of the most influential European industrial design of the twentieth century, brought its own approach to the Stile by Mepra line. Mepra brought its alloy and finishing. I brought my signature and a brief written from the Krug Chef’s Table itself. The rose gold mattered most. Asia’s only Krug Chef’s Table at the time deserved cutlery that caught the eye the way the Krug Grande Cuvée did, and Pininfarina Stile managed it.

The pieces lived on the Krug Chef’s Table: Italian alloy, Pininfarina’s design, my signature, a rose gold finish, all in one hand. It is the most considered piece of cutlery design I have been part of.

First Malaysian Ambassador, January 2026

In January 2026 Mepra named me its first Malaysian Ambassador, the first time the maison planted its flag in Southeast Asia. It is one of very few brand relationships of mine that began formally after Shin’Labo closed and after my move in 2025 from running restaurants to cultural diplomacy.

The title recognises a relationship Mepra had been investing in for years. It honours both sides: my standing with Italian cutlery, and Mepra’s own quiet backing of what its cutlery was doing at Shin’Labo. Nobody needed a new room to prove the trust. It had been built in the room that had just closed.

Where Mepra sits in my work

Each of my partners brought something different. The champagne, cognac and single-malt houses brought what was in the glass. Gaggenau and The Plan brought the kitchen and the room. Mepra brought what the meal was eaten with.

Cutlery sits between the food and the diner, and it is the piece of the meal closest to the hand. Whatever care a chef puts into a plate is lost if the knife or fork that meets it is wrong. Mepra’s were right. Course after course and year after year, its commitment to the Shin’Labo table earned the title it has now given me.

What continues

After the closure of Shin’Labo in 2024, the co-designed Mepra range and the Pininfarina Stile rose gold edition for the Krug Chef’s Table became part of the record. The ambassadorship from January 2026 carries on. Wherever we set the next table, and whatever room it is in, that part of the story has not been written yet.

I owe Mepra thanks for the sponsorship, for the design work and for its faith in me.