Brief.

Located in the busy West End neighbourhood of Piccadilly, and a stones thrown from Leicester Square, Layalina Piccadilly are a family-owed restaurant that has been running for over 20-years.

The team bring their passion for Lebanese street food to London, with specialities such as shawarma, fresh falafel, ultra creamy hummus, and traditional Lebanese mezze.

As they’re based in a busy, yet highly competitive area for tourist and local foot traffic, the team reached out to me to capture food photography of their core menu items, and to create Lebanese inspired food scenes - for use on their social channels, Google my Business, TripAdvisor and their other touch points.

As a lover of Lebanese food, and with lots of experience shooting this cuisine, this food photography project was right up my street!

Approach.

I kicked the project off with a quick call to learn about Layalina. They first wanted to redo their content library, with a follow-up menu food photography session and a third restaurant food photography session at their modern Essex dining-in restaurant.

Using this information, I suggested a package that included producing smaller scenes of their core menu items, with supporting props and ingredients to simply tell their story.

Once booked, I suggested props, and ingredients to be paired with their menu items, and additionally hand-picked a select of my vinyl food photography backgrounds that gave off a warm, Eastern Mediterranean feeling to the imagery.

During the 1/2 day food photography session, I worked with my contact and the head chef to produce a collection of Lebanese-inspired scenes that featured individual dishes as well as selections of dishes - to tell their brand story. Using studio lighting gave the food photography a warm, early evening feeling.

The client was very pleased with their edited food photography and immediately booked a follow-up session at their Essex branch. It’s great to see their edited food photography doing well on their Instagram, website, and TripAdvisor, helping them stand out.