AFTER A PAINFUL EXIT FROM THE HOSPITALITY GROUP THAT FOR DECADES DEFINED STYLISH EATING OUT IN LONDON, BRITAIN’S MOST FÊTED RESTAURATEUR RETURNS TO THE FRAY WITH THREE NEW OPENINGS IN 2024
HE REMEMBERS A TIME IN FRANCE in the 1980s, turning up on a Monday lunchtime at a restaurant a well- connected Parisian friend had recommended, south of Avignon. The place was closed. “We told them our friend’s name and they said, ‘Oh! You must come back tomorrow.’ And we said, ‘We can’t, we have to leave.’ And they said, ‘Well, join us then.’ This was their day off. This was their family meal. And we sat with them. And they produced pâtés and stuffed mussels. They cooked lamb in the wood-fired oven. They brought out freshly made goat’s cheese. And rosé wine. And the mistral was getting up. And it taught me so much about the difference between the French and English approach.” The generosity, the conviviality, the warmth. He hasn’t forgotten it.
He remembers, many times, going to Paris alone, eating in the great brasseries. “La Coupole, Bofinger. There was another one up near Pigalle, which I loved. To sit in those restaurants, and even Terminus Nord. Just to sit there. Or to be on Saint- Germain, in Café Flore, or Deux Magots, or Brasserie Lipp.” These places were transforming for him. They informed everything he has done.
He remembers another time in Paris, arriving at a hotel on Saint- Germain in the early afternoon, “thinking, ‘We’ve got a big dinner later, let’s go and grab a salad at Flore.’
“We walked in, and we said, ‘Can we have a table for two?’ And the guy said, ‘Bien sur.’ And he was about to turn away and then he rolls his eyes and says, ‘Fumer ou non-fumer?’ Because they’d just changed the law, you had to have a nosmoking section. So we say, ‘non-fumer’, we go in and you have those tables that are so tightly packed together that you can’t get in unless you pull the table right out and I went in and sat on the banquette and he was pushing the table back in and my wife was sitting down and I looked to my left and these two people here, very close, were smoking, and I looked to my right and the two people there were smoking and I looked up at him and raised my hands as if to say, ‘?’ And he says, ‘Oh.’ And he reaches into his pocket and pulls out a no smoking sign and places it on our table. It was that sort of confidence. I thought, ‘Yes!’”
He admires this still. The insouciance of it. The panache.
He remembers another time, sitting by himself in a restaurant in Budapest as a violinist went around the tables, “the kitschiest thing, tears str
