In many ways, the building was the easiest part. We just had to get the builders to perform, and they did so with all the usual sucking of teeth, streams of tea and stonewalling of any question that required the answer: ‘Yes, we will finish on time.’ The transferring of staff from their Aubergine existence to Royal Hospital Road had been a sensitive part of this journey. When the crunch came and everyone walked away from Aubergine after the Marcus Wareing fiasco, the only meeting place we had was Chris’s flat in Mayfair.
There we all sat around this vast oak table looking with ashen faces at Chris, who was about to announce the new dawn. I often think back to that evening. Chris was sitting there in front of them, having just agreed to move forward with this unlikely band of refugees from Aubergine, all looking imploringly at him. They needed to know that, shortly, they would be transferring to Chelsea in peace and without the Italians. I don’t know what he was thinking, but it must have been nerve-racking for him, too. One of the partners in our firm of lawyers, Joelson Wilson & Co., who had known Chris for twenty years, asked him if he was sure he knew what he was doing. Nothing like a positive, well-timed question to boost morale.
The first few nights were soft openings to welcome family, friends and staff. These were dress rehearsals to give everyone confidence in what they were doing and to find the rhythm and flow between kitchen and dining room that you need in a well-run restaurant. By the time the first till-ringing night was upon us, we were ready. It was an exciting moment, and it was then – at about 8 p.m. – that the air conditioning suddenly went down in the kitchen and the temperature rose to a sweltering forty-five degrees. There was nothing to do but get on with it and wait for the engineers in the morning.
By midnight, sweaty from the kitchen, we were able to count our first day’s takings. By the end of the first month, September 1998, we had made money. Of course, that didn’t even come near to writing off the capital expenditure, but we knew we had a business that was making a trading profit, and this was a fucking great relief so early on. Within six months, we were clearing £50,000 every month, and our debt to the bank was beginning to come down. It meant we were able to draw the £175,000 from cash flow to pay the final tranche to Pierre Koffmann and thank him for his patience. The other indicator of success was that our reservations book was stuffed solid. I had restricted the bookings to one month ahead. I had learned from my Aubergine days that a reservations book without any time limit gave people the impression that they would never get a table, so they often simply gave up.
The whole concept of reservations is always tricky. You need a definite policy so that guests know the score. All sorts of myths have grown up around the reservations books of popular restaurants. Try calling The Ivy for a table at eight o’clock tomorrow evening, and all they will want to know is who you are. No fame is no name, and your chances of a table between the hours of six o’clock and 10.30 p.m. are slim. It became a joke at Aubergine that reservations could be bought or sold on a commodity market so that punters had to pay money to someone else – I never saw it – just to book a table, which ought to be free. No different to touts outside Twickenham, Wimbledon or Wembley.
Just as The Ivy sees celebrity table allocations as a commercial way to make the restaurant work, we had to have a plan, too. And it needed to be flexible. Think of table arrangements on two of the year’s big restaurant dates, St Valentine’s Day and Mothering Sunday. Who wants a table for four on St Valentine’s Day? The reservations manager has to plan ahead to get as many twos in as possible. Mothering Sunday is a family day, and suddenly, we need tables of four and upwards. Outside these special days, there has to be a balance of twos, fours and more. Too many twos need a lot of space, more laundry, more staff, and usually less money is spent on drink – and that’s a problem. Tables of four usually mean higher drinks bills. More guests bring a bonhomie, which means more wine being poured.
And whatever happened to the table for one? That’s always there in my restaurants. It’s never going to be a money-spinner, but any restaurant that refuses a single guest for a booking shouldn’t be in the business. Few people eat on their own in a restaurant, but there are some blessed people who come just to taste the food. What greater compliment can there be? One of Chris’s old haunts is a wonderful, laid-back restaurant called Rules, serving some great British dishes – coincidentally, it’s London’s oldest eating establishment – and there is a table that only accommodates one guest. I have never seen that table empty.
There are only forty-five seats at Royal Hospital Road, which makes things easier. When the bookings for a day are complete, that’s it. If the Queen called after that and asked for a table for two that evening for herself and Philip, you’d have to offer up your apologies. There is no room to manoeuvre, short of calling a guest and cancelling their booking, and that, believe me, is never going to happen. In a bigger restaurant like Gordon Ramsay at Claridge’s, it is easier to rearrange the bookings, and there, to be honest, we always have a table up our sleeve.
But when you’re planning reservations, you have to time them. Imagine two fully booked restaurants, one where everybody turns up at the same time, and the other, where all tables arrive at fifteen-minute intervals. Which restaurant is going to perform better? You have to give the kitchen a chance, and our guests have learned to appreciate this. Not only are they happy to book for 8.15 p.m., rather than eight o’clock, but they actually turn up on time.
When I think back to the early days at The Connaught, the procession of the old school diners into the restaurant at eight o’clock was a living nightmare for Angela Hartnett, the head chef. Then there’s the appearance of London’s power brokers for lunch at The Savoy Grill, all on the dot of one o’clock. Of course, it’s difficult for the kitchen to handle. Actually, it’s a fucking nightmare.
People say that restaurants where you have to book can never attract people who are just passing by. It’s nonsense. My favourite scenario is when a party of six or eight knocks on the door at Royal Hospital Road late on a Friday night and asks if there is a chance of a table. Too bloody right there is. You wheel them in and come to an understanding that they are more than welcome, provided we can serve them with whatever we have left. It means that we can empty the fridges for the weekend and have a large bill to round off the evening. And we make the guests happy, too.
That combination of good planning and passionate staff is exactly what you need to make a restaurant successful. It’s all part of the mix that makes a brilliant restaurant stand out from an ordinary one. That was what we had set out to achieve, and it soon became clear that we were getting there. And, suddenly, there was the chance of doing it twice.
It was in this same period that we were offered a second restaurant right in the middle of St James’s. Someone had thought they would run a restaurant for fun, bring their mates, and wondered why it had all gone pear-shaped. I had a look at it, with its trolley of sweating cheeses, white- painted piano and filthy kitchen. The menu was a disgrace, and the owner was flat broke.
Before the ink was dry on a hastily cobbled contract, the bailiffs moved in. But they were just a day too late. The builders were stripping the last remains of 33 St James’s and we had secured our second premises. The name was to become Pétrus, and the chef I brought in was Marcus Wareing. He was the first person to experience the elevation from chef to a shareholding chef patron.
This was where the stable of chefs-in-waiting that I built up at Aubergine became a reality. We have been able to expand because we have brilliant chefs, and giving them a share in the ownership of new restaurants was to become the way forward for us. I knew that the chef would always be the most important player, and it became a rule that we never planned a restaurant without the chef. The location, the design and the front-of-house staff were all important, but first we had to work out who would be in charge of the kitchen.
Pétrus was not an easy site. The kitchen was below the dining room, and everything had to be carried upstairs. It was a long room without a central arrangement for guests, so familiar at Royal Hospital Road, and without the easy, comfortable ambience. But all of this