NIPO Reveals Founding Kitchen Team Following High-stakes Newcastle Cook-off
Newcastle’s new Japanese-Brazilian dining concept, NIPO, has revealed the founding kitchen team that will bring the ambitious new restaurant to life on Newcastle Quayside later this month.
Before launching the brand-new concept, the NIPO team faced a unique challenge, finding elite culinary talent capable of blending two very distinct food cultures and translating that vision into a distinctive new dining experience.
The recruitment process saw more than 128 applications submitted, followed by 36 interviews, before the field was narrowed down to a final shortlist. The finalists were then invited to an exclusive, high-stakes cook-off at Blackfriars in Newcastle where they were challenged to demonstrate their creativity, technical ability and understanding of Japanese and Brazilian cuisine.
Held at the Blackfriars Cookery School, the finalists were supported by the team and given access to a pantry containing 185 unique ingredients and were each required to create nine dishes completely from scratch — three starters, three mains and three desserts.
The brief was deliberately demanding, with every dish expected to bring together Japanese culinary precision and technique with the bold flavours, fire and energy of Brazil. Following an intense day of cooking and tasting, resulting in 36 individual dishes, Connor Marley was selected as NIPO’s Head Chef and Aura Lena Sto Domingo appointed Kitchen Manager.
The pair will form the core of NIPO’s kitchen leadership, with Connor taking responsibility for the restaurant’s culinary direction and Lena overseeing the kitchen operation and helping to build and develop the wider kitchen team.
The cook-off was made possible through the relationship developed between NIPO the team behind Blackfriars, providing the new restaurant with access to the historic venue’s cookery school and facilities. The event also took place as Blackfriars celebrates 25 years under the ownership of Andy and Sam Hook, who have transformed the 13th-century former Dominican friary into a vibrant hospitality and heritage complex and an established part of Newcastle’s food scene.
For NIPO’s founders, the partnership provided an opportunity to bring together two local hospitality businesses and demonstrate the importance of collaboration and support within the sector.
Rodrigo Grassi Duarte, co-founder of NIPO, said:
“The relationship we’ve built with the team at Blackfriars made it possible for us to hold what was an incredibly important stage of the NIPO recruitment process in such a fantastic setting. There’s a real strength in collaboration across the hospitality sector, and we believe supporting one another is incredibly important, particularly when you’re building something new and ambitious.
The cook-off was an intense day in the kitchen, and we’re hugely grateful to the entire Blackfriars team for their support and for helping us create the environment we needed to put the chefs through their paces.”
The recruitment process was designed to go beyond simply identifying chefs with strong CVs, instead testing how the finalists think, collaborate and perform under pressure.
Rodrigo added:
“We wanted the process to be about finding people who could genuinely understand what NIPO is trying to achieve. Japanese and Brazilian food cultures are incredibly different, so we needed chefs who could respect the foundations of both while also being creative enough to bring them together in a way that feels exciting and natural.”
NIPO has been created to offer something distinctive to Newcastle’s increasingly ambitious food and hospitality scene. The restaurant will combine Japanese cooking techniques with Brazilian flavours and hospitality, with the menu featuring a sushi station, robata-style cooking and flame-cooked Brazilian specialities.
The food will be complemented by Japanese-Brazilian inspired cocktails and a curated wine selection, with the overall concept designed around the full guest experience.
Howard Eggleston, co-founder of NIPO, said:
“Opening in Newcastle is an important first step for us, it’s a city with a strong and increasingly ambitious food and hospitality scene, and we see the Quayside as the perfect setting to introduce NIPO to the market.
Building the right team has been a huge part of that process. We wanted to invest the time in finding people who share our ambition and understand that NIPO has to be about much more than the food on the plate.”
NIPO will hold an exclusive VIP launch event on September 22, before officially opening to the public on September 23.
