The exciting story of Onyx’s transformation started in November 2020, with the Last Supper event, where the biggest makeover in Onyx’s history began with the hammer served as the final ‘course’. Throughout the Metamorphosis, the Onyx team celebrated the changes with a special event at each key stage: the SITT street fine dining event in May, the Deconstruction Dinner in June and the Relicvia Memorial Fair in July. Metamorphosis has been in progress for almost a year, and Coninvest is also present at the next milestone: in November, Műhely, the Onyx’s anteroom, will open, with a show kitchen designed by Coninvest experts.
“Coninvest’s cooperation with Gerbeaud and Onyx is not new,” says Mirjam Kertész, CEO of Coninvest. “As soon as Anna Niszkács took over the management of Gerbeaud House from her mother, Katalin Pintér, one of her innovations was to add classic warm café dishes to Gerbeaud’s menu. For this purpose, we then set up a serving kitchen in the back of house area on the ground floor. But by the time we were ready, Covid had arrived, with all its limitations. At the same time, the new Gerbeaud House events centre was completed, but instead of guests enjoying champagne, we received a steady stream of cancellations. But the Onyx people didn’t give up, and after the famous Last Supper, they embarked on a journey that included commissioning Coninvest to design the new Onyx Műhely show kitchen. And in life, there are no coincidences: when Anna discovered Marrone’s unique Metamorphosis cooking block in our showroom in Budaörs, it was a foregone conclusion that they would cook on one at the Onyx Műhely.”
Márton Lengyel’s visual designs give us a glimpse of the Műhely, which is still under construction, and Marcell Fekete, Onyx’s Strategy Director, tells us more about it:
“The Műhely, which will also function as a creative space, will be set up in a part of the old Onyx guest area. This is where we will experiment with the dishes that we will present to our guests in the restaurant.
When designing the Műhely, we wanted the kitchen to be able to accommodate four chefs at the same time, with everything at their hand, all the tools at their fingertips, and all the kitchen technology, from baking to steaming to refrigeration, all within easy reach. One of the biggest challenges for us in the design was that we had to fit the kitchen into a very small space, with ergonomics as the primary consideration. The Műhely is essentially an experimental kitchen, which can also function as a show kitchen, so we had to fit the kitchen and the 16-seat guest area into the space. It also houses Onyx’s gastronomic library and ceramics workshop, and we wanted to create a separate area for the pastry workshop within the kitchen. It was no small task to fit all this optimally into such a small space.
We already had our ideas when we visited Coninvest in Budaörs. It was here that we saw the Marrone cooking block that we fell in love with at first sight: a perfectly crafted countertop, ergonomically and design-wise, as if it had not been put together by human hands. And it is only fate that Marrone has given the cooking block the name Metamorphosis.”
The Onyx Műhely is planned to be open to guests from 4 November. We will definitely be among the first ones!
