to get this restaurant up and running profitably, which is exactly what we did.
The next job was to find a name. The name Pétrus represented the very finest claret. I wrote to the owners, asking if I could use the name, and they agreed. It meant a considerable investment in the cellar: as well as all the usual bins, we decided we needed to carry one of the finest collections of this Bordeaux wine, all the way back to 1945. It made me think that what we were becoming was a purveyor of wine, rather than food. After all, you can’t charge any more than £100 per head for the menu, but there is little or no limit on what people can spend on wine.
This is a kind of kick in the bollocks for someone like me, for whom the cuisine is all important. But the business reality – whether I liked it or not – is that wine provides us with the profit we need to keep going. And I was determined to keep going. It was less than one year since I had opened Royal Hospital Road, and already I had the beginnings of a stable of restaurants, and I simply had to make them both successful.
And, on occasion, I could live with wine taking priority over the menu. One night while I was in the kitchen at Royal Hospital Road and Chris was in the office in Fulham Road, we got a call from Marcus to say that a table of six bankers had ordered £13,000 from the wine list. The feeling was electric, and the voltage increased in line with the spend. When the bill increased to £27,000, Chris started to make old man noises about credit card clearance. By the time it had reached £44,000, we made the decision to remove all food charges from the bill. After all, what was £600 in the face of this extraordinary wine spend? By noon on the following day, the news had somehow leaked, with front-page coverage in The Sydney Morning Herald and The Straits Times. It was one of the few occasions when Pétrus was on everyone’s lips.
Vanity should carry a health warning When it bites you, take action. Bleeding to death can kill you.
ROYAL HOSPITAL ROAD was paying its way. Pétrus was winning praise for Marcus Wareing’s cuisine. We were confident and on the look out for more sites, but – as it turned out – I was sleepwalking into my first failure. Good lessons are best learned early, but they are never easy, as I was about to find out in an ice-cold, down-your-neck way from a wild foray into Scotland at a time when I was still learning to walk in a business nappy.
This is a story of vanity, plain and simple. Open a couple of successful restaurants in London, and you are ready to take on the world without it ever occurring to you that there might be factors you’ve never thought about before.
As is so often the case, it began with a phone call and a proposition at the end of the line. In this case, it was Edinburgh beckoning with a prime site on the Royal Mile, and Chris was off like a gunshot. First, he checked out the proposal, talked to the finance director, who was on show-round duty, and then moved off. He was up there for the rest of the day to have a look around the Edinburgh restaurant scene before getting an early flight back to London the next morning.
The idea was to see if we could offer something to the stiff, up-your-arse society of professionals, financiers and low-spending tourists who exist side by side in the city. We knew that the Scottish Parliament would soon be opening – if someone could just control the shocking building overspends of public money and long delays – and that would mean a fucking big boost to the local restaurant trade.
But when Chris got back, he was not optimistic. He told me how the beautiful Princes Street was now a ruin, and asked what the fuck had happened there. It’s true: it’s like there’s been a hideous signage competition, with the world’s worst performers strung out in a line, and nobody seems to notice it. It’s plain fucking wicked that this has been allowed to happen. Is this the price of commerce? Business doesn’t mean instant shit in the face like this. Whoever was in charge must have been blind or an idiot. What a sad, fucking shame.
Chris looked at a hundred different menus, checked the pricing and talked to bored waiting staff. A picture began to emerge, and he already knew that Edinburgh was not for us. Edinburgh makes money and keeps it. They spend it carefully and primly on school fees at Fettes or antique fire¬ guards. There is no joy here, nothing that drives people out to get rat-arsed on a Friday in an Armani suit with a midnight call to the wife to hand supper to the dog.
There was a lovely story while Chris was up there. That evening, he got a cab over to Leith to try out Martin Wishart, who was making a name for himself in his restaurant by the quayside. As always, Chris was dressed in a suit, and having sat down, he went through the card and managed a bottle of decent claret. Having finished, he asked if he could have a look in the tiny kitchen, and Martin obliged. The following morning, Martin was on the phone to me to say that, without any doubt, he had been visited by a Michelin inspector the previous night. I was really happy for him until I asked what the inspector had drunk, and, on hearing that a bottle of claret had been downed, I questioned Martin a bit closer. There is no way that a Michelin inspector would ever do that, and neither of us was any the wiser until Chris returned and mentioned what a great dinner he had had in Leith.
It’s a different story in Glasgow, however. Everyone knows how to have a good time there, and it’s not thought irreligious to spend a few quid on proper wine. It’s a more frenetic city, full of people who have no ambition other than to live life.
Just as we were discussing all this, the phone rang from Glasgow. Someone wanted to sell a big restaurant right in the heart of the city. We both went to look, and suddenly the old excitement resurfaced. Nothing thrills like the thought of a restaurant full of good food, good service and the musical whirr of the credit card machine. A million makeover versions swamped our minds. Everyone was writing their versions of the menu, sketching designs with seating plans on the back of used envelopes. The big question was: how far was the Rangers ground from there? How would it figure on a match day? I was dreaming, and already, in my stupid eagerness, I lost the plot.
Still, before I had time to think, the whole project had sprouted wings and suddenly there were surveyors, lawyers, electricians and rodent catchers, all present to put this together and submit fancy bills for their endeavours. I was getting a bit uneasy with the people who were selling the restaurant to us. They were keen – too keen – to impress me with the size of their other operations, and then suddenly they started to talk about the crappy abstract artwork in the restaurant. They pointed out that these early works of infants at school were not included in the sale, but could be made available as a side purchase.
Here we go again, I thought. However big someone is, Rule Number One is this: if there is cash, they want it, and these greedy arseholes were about to lose a deal because they wanted a few readies on top of a shedload of money for their restaurant.
Chris and I talked about it. We were both totally pissed off that, having talked through the heads of terms, some dickhead started to murmur about a few pictures so they could screw some more money out of us. We don’t do side deals. So the deal turned stone cold, and Chris told them why. It no longer matters now, but they were totally mystified.
Then the phone rang. It was Glasgow again, and this time, One Devonshire Gardens, Glasgow’s chic West End boutique hotel. Now this was a boner, and I was up there with Chris, as keen as a setter on the scent.
The place looked right immediately: three houses joined together and filled with browns, tweeds and long, elegant drapes, and with rooms the size of snooker halls. There was a smooth life going on here, but the one thing that they didn’t have was a restaurant. Fuck me! We can arrange that. And, in doing so, fine dining would come to my home town. The more I saw of this fantastic establishment, the more I fell in love with it, and any numerical doubts faded away, along with my sense of judgement.
We went back to London, and the whole process of negotiation, lawyers and contracts started