PEOPLE TO WATCH, PLACES TO BE, PRODUCTS TO BUY
Ugly beautiful
New restaurant. New cookbook. New beginnings for a pioneering London restaurateur
“I walked away from Polpo with nothing,” says Russell Norman of his departure, in the summer of 2020, from the restaurant group he had founded and co-owned for over a decade. “Zero,” he adds. “Not a single penny.”
After that, “I said to anyone who would listen, ‘I don’t know what I’m going to do next, but I do know one thing: I will never, ever open another restaurant as long as I live.’” He takes a sip of coffee. “By December 2020, like a drug addict with his dealer, I was on the phone to my property agent saying, ‘Anything coming up?’ I said, ‘Just one thing: not Soho. I’m too scarred by my experiences in Soho.’”
A boyish 57 — floppy hair, trendy specs, white-linen shirt open at the collar to reveal an Italian tan (he’s recently returned from Venice) — Norman, when I speak to him, is philosophical about Polpo’s demise. He doesn’t seem embittered so much as slightly incredulous at the turn of events that resulted in his exit.
A combination of factors — Brexit, increases in overheads and a decrease in consumer spending (the so-called “casual dining crunch” that was headline news even before the pandemic), as well as Polpo’s galloping expansion — ultimately forced the business into receivership.
“Polpo failed for a number of reasons,” Norman says now. “There was a discrepancy between my ex-business partner’s vision for the company and mine. It was a great relationship for a very long time, but then we parted ways in terms of philosophy and strategy. I became very disillusioned. And then, Covid.”
Norman opened the first Polpo, on Beak Street in Soho, in 2009, with his then-best friend, Richard Beatty, as his partner. Norman was the ideas man, the creative force, and the face of the operation; Beatty handled the business side. Polpo was an instant hit, and enormously influential. Today, the idea of a no-reservations restaurant serving small plates intended for sharing, in artfully distressed surroundings indebted to the hip eateries of New York, seems wearyingly commonplace. Fourteen years ago, Polpo was bold and exciting.
More Polpos followed across the capital, as well as further afield: Bristol, Brighton. Also in London, Norman and Beatty opened a pub, Ape & Bird, on a busy corner of Cambridge Circus; Mishkin’s, a New York-style, Jewish-ish deli in Covent Garden; an Italian-American bar, Spuntino, based on the tin-roofed, chipped-tile joints of Brooklyn, just off Shaftesbury Avenue (and also, incongruously, at Heathrow Terminal 3); Polpetto, above the French House pub an
