Protest

Protest is in the news a lot at the moment. Maybe it’s Just Stop Oil -  those ‘privileged do-gooders, nothing better to do, holding up society for a cause they’ll never be alive to see the benefits of’. Or Anti-Ulez - ‘selfish polluting motorists, objecting to their personal freedoms being limited’.

All very good for news headlines. But does protest ever achieve anything?

In 2016, late summer, around 8pm, I was alerted to get to our Soho restaurant immediately, there was trouble outside. We were being attacked by a mob. 

I arrived to find a group of 15-20 people, shouting, using loudhailers and generally causing mayhem.

It was anti foie gras protestors. They were determined to highlight what they saw as a terrible injustice by bringing our business to a standstill.

Back then we were still a traditional French restaurant, serving every possible facet of the French 'cuisine traditionelle' - basically everything that was expected of us. The morals and ethics surrounding any of these ingredients didn’t concern us. As far as we were concerned we had sourced everything from suppliers who were being monitored by someone official. The government. Red tractor. EU. Whoever. 

Not our problem.

Our job was to convert all these things into delicious morsels and serve them to our customers, happy to have all the gruesome details of their production curtained off. That is the role of a chef.

All of a sudden, these very graphic details were being thrust, loudly and vividly, in our customers eyes and ears.

The next day, as the dust settled, we all began to work out how we were going to ignore it, move on and carry on as we were. 

How dare they disrupt our business.

But we all knew we were lying to ourselves. We were living in denial.

Alexis (Gauthier) was already there, early in the morning. He had written to the organisation involved, and then called the organiser. Calmly they had spoken about it. 

Around 11.30am a meeting was called. We all gathered to listen to what we were going to do.

Very calmly, Alexis began speaking about the events and going through the process of how we protected our guests, our building, health & safety, official procedure and everything else. How what had happened was not normal and how we had all acted well, the business had not really suffered. If we carry on as normal and take necessary steps this will not affect us in the future.

But there was a strange calmness to his voice. As if what he was saying was just a script. Like autopilot. 

Finally he began to speak about the event itself. 

“You know this is absolutely the most irritating thing to happen to a business. We do everything. The effort we put in. The preparation. The hours. The sweat. The staff. The design. The marketing. Everything. We pay our taxes. We pay our rent. For then, for some people to have the arrogance and entitlement, that they think it is perfectly ok to come and block this. Disrupt our business. For me this is abhorrent.”

Everybody nodded and agreed. And then he looked up.

“But you know what? They're right”

“They are right because we ARE hurting someone. We are hurting these animals. By doing what we are doing we are supporting a terrible industry, one which inflicts unimaginable pain and suffering on these creatures”

That day, it was announced that foie gras was being removed from the menu for good. Not only that, we were to begin our journey to be a completely animal free restaurant.

I’m happy to say that in January 2020, we served the very last animal product on our menu at Gauthier Soho. We have been vegan ever since. We’ve gained far more new customers than we lost, and we’ve been lucky enough to open two new vegan restaurants since then.

We are the living proof that protest does work. Protest comes in many forms, and usually the protest which gets up people’s noses the most is the protest in which your personal life is disrupted, for a supposed ‘benefit’ which has no direct impact on the lives of people doing the protesting. Also the protest which makes people look at themselves in the mirror, and be honest about their own habits and the way they choose to live. 

It’s often an uncomfortable truth.

Step into their shoes

As a militant anti ’no-shows’ campaigner, it is easy to sit at the restaurant coal face and present the blame for chaotic or cancelled reservations on lazy, selfish customers. Excuse me as I hoist my banner. How dare they treat us so badly! Deposits! In fact, pay for everything upfront! Etc etc.

Some events recently have made me see things differently.  
A week or so ago I had to host a party of delegates from overseas for a week, booking London restaurants three times a day and attending many of the occasions.
What fun I thought, me, being the man-about-town old pro of the central London dining scene. 'How hard can that be?' I thought, and set about arranging tables all over town. 

It all began very well, sending the party to their requested flash old-school Mayfair Chinese on their first night. So far so good. On the second night, a table was ready, but the party changed their minds and requested something different. No problem! Gritting my teeth and hastily rearranging, narrowly escaping a gigantic deposit penalty.

A lunch booking for 6 was all going to plan, albeit pushed back an hour. No problem, replied the restaurant. waiting patiently for our 1pm booking, nervously double checking the table, and empty seats, imagine my industry veteran horror when the party arrived not as 6, but 9 of them. Step in, amazing restaurant staff, who just dealt with it.

On the penultimate night, a booking of 7 was planned, then cancelled at 11.30am on the day. I was so mortified about causing the restaurant bother I decided to go to there in person, apologise and beg forgiveness. They were incredibly gracious. (TIP: if possible, always go in person if you want forgiveness and to avoid a massive credit card bill)

Suddenly something felt very strange indeed. For the first time in a while I found myself seeing the restaurant booking process from the customer’s point of view. Going out to eat is NOT like going to a show or a football match. Don't use this comparison. It is an organic, fluid, ever changing organism which changes all the time. 

It’s not easy, things happen, groups build, shrink, people change their minds. 

I've learned two main things: Number one, is that to be really successful at hospitality you need to be exactly this: hospitable - not just after a perfect guest has pre-paid and sat down, but hospitable to the ebb and flow and fragility of guest life, especially in a buzzing city such as ours. 

Number two, is that London restaurants are absolutely brilliant.

ps, I never want to open a booking platform again.

Thank you to all the amazing restaurants and staff involved, Circolo Popolare, Speedboat Bar, Nobu, Yauatcha, 123V, Groucho Club, Roka.

The perfect vegan hamburger

I’m a terrible cook. I love restaurants but I have to admit find ‘food’ a bit boring. I never watch food TV or read food books. I cook about 5 things and I’ve little interest in learning new things. In my old life I would go to the best restaurants I could but I would always order the 50 year old classics as I knew I loved them and I could happily wolf them down and continue talking to my friends, which is what restaurants are really about. These days I work for one of the world’s greatest vegan chefs, so, to sort of quote Jules Winnfield, ‘that pretty much makes me a vegan too’. 
Vegan food it turns out, is different. There aren’t any classics yet. It’s all new. It’s like in the 1970s when they invented the synthesiser. Music completely changed. But I leave the invention to the professionals. I just want to eat the normal things I like, like hamburgers. Now I have to eat them vegan, I’m going to do everything I can to make sure the burger is exactly like the old one.
So this year I tried just about every patty, bun, cheese, onion combinations. Went down the relish route (don’t). Tried the sauces. Did the Mac sauce (good but over eggs the pudding somewhat). Finally I struck gold with the finest most perfect hamburger combination there is. And this is how you make it.

Ingredients

• Beyond meat patty
• Cheap processed squishy buns - I’ve found Warburtons the best
• Violife vegan cheese slice 
• Large brown onion
• Gherkin
• Iceberg lettuce
• Heinz ketchup
• French's American Mustard
• flora plant spread
• olive oil
• Vegan Aromat
• Maldon Salt

Patty

I don’t want to hear any more about vegan processed food. If you’ve ever eaten a digestive biscuit, or a Pringle, then you’ve eaten the most ultra processed food ever invented. Meat itself is processed food, it is second hand protein, processed into flesh cells by the digestion system of an animal, after eating plants. Meat from another carnivore is unpalatable, very difficult to digest, and far lower in nutrition. It's third hand protein. This is why we almost exclusively eat herbivores. Protein all comes from plants in the first place.
So ultra-processed Beyond Meat is the best patty for me. If it’s ok for Honest Burger and Neat Burger, it’s ok for me. It has the right texture, it looks and feels just like a normal burger. No horrible mushroom or soy flavours overpowering it. It’s basically mushy peas on steroids. I’m looking forward to trying Neil Rankin's Simplicity inventions, which ridiculously I haven't yet, and also and I'm excited about Dave Ahern's VeganPunk brand. Obviously I'm hoping Impossible will arrive soon, which ironically is a possible Brexit dividend, after the meat-loving EU blocked its sale because of some obscure ingredient upsetting some European beef farmers by making it taste too similar to real meat. 

Bun

Very important. This most be a squishy, soft small bap, smooth texture, which collapses to mush in touch with water. Forget any artisanal buns or brioche, almost always too heavy or rich. I’ve found Warburtons pretty good. As AA Gill (I think) once said about bread for a bacon sandwich ’it should be like biting through a cloud’. 

Onion

Also very important. Onion is really the key ingredient, so much so that without raw onion, this hamburger shouldn’t be attempted. Has to be the large strong brown onions that make you cry. Don’t use shallots or red onion. If you’re feeling really bold, and your onion is big enough, slice an entire onion into one single slab covering the entire burger, In-N-Out style.

Method

Take the patty and squash it into mince, take half, season with vegan Aromat then reform it to a rough flat lump. The more gnarly the better. you should new have quite a thin patty, think McDonalds hamburger. Place on a baking tray in a hot oven. After 5-6 mins turn over. After 10 mins add a slice of violife cheese slice. Remove when edges are quite dark brown. you don’t want rare at all for this.
Take the bun and place both halves in a hot pan of Flora plant and olive oil. Fry very gently and quickly until browned but not burnt.
Place the lettuce on the bun using only the really crunchy inside bits not the floppy outside bits. Then the patty, then the onion. Add 3 thin gherkin slices. Add equal doses of yellow mustard & ketchup.
Serve with McCain oven french fries, sprinkled with Maldon Salt. These are the best fries I've found.
To complete the whole dry veganuary shizzle, pair with a bottle of Vandestreek Playground IPA (thanks for the tip @chrispople) it really is head & shoulders above most other no alcohol beers I’ve tried.

For more grown-up vegan food, you can get a Gauthier vegan box delivered nationwide, if I may say so myself they are superb and very inventive, completely changing each week.

Happy Veganuary!

A flabby, groaning monster

'The government doesn't like us, we don't care'

In late 2019, the UK hospitality industry was complaining like never before. Rent, no-shows, staff shortages, business rates, Brexit, all threatened to destroy it. We were all two services away from bankruptcy. Then the pandemic happened. Everything changed. So why are we desperate to go back to our old problems?

In the mid 90s, another industry - music - was ticking along nicely when a certain service called Napster arrived. The cash tap had been abruptly turned off. Napster smashed the triangle of balls open, the industry ran around like an exposed rats nest battling and denying it will change, it took people to court and tried to sue individuals for downloading stuff. Now, 20 years on, every single song released is easily available, for free, instantly and legally, with higher quality and convenient platforms paid for with subscription. This would have been simply seen in absolute horror at the time, and impossible. But it wasn’t. The industry has changed completely, the monetisation now comes from different channels.

Similar things have happened over the years. Newspapers, TV, retail, car hire, taxis, all sorts of industries have been agitated or disrupted beyond recognition. The UK seaside resort was almost killed off by the arrival of the package holiday in the 1950s, traditional furniture shops blown away by Habitat and then Ikea flatpack, themselves now at the mercy of a made.com model with cheaper and cheaper imitations of just about anything available instantly from places afar. 

Restaurants are not immune to change. We are not a given. We are not an essential service, although we’ve become so bloated and ubiquitous we’ve come to expect restaurants to play a daily and affordable part in our lives. For years, we were an industry of immigrants, conveniently servicing the growing market of leisure and theatre goers and shoppers in large cities. The sideshow to the main event, like food stands at festivals. 

Is our restaurant industry even Britain's to claim? We’ve created in our heads some kind of rose-tinted idea of ‘hospitality’ as some sort of 'British' thing. Going to restaurants at every opportunity is supposedly now a British way of life which must be protected at all costs. We’ve tried to adopt the spirit as our own, but instead of the grinning immigrants quietly scratching a living, our home grown efforts are privileged and equity funded and the well-tuned mission statements often come across as patronising and fake. Let's face it, Britain was never historically a nation of hospitality. It’s not in our nature. The subservience and thick skin required to get by as a long-term successful restaurateur doesn't sit well with 'Great Britain'. 

We've nicked it from the foreigners. Sorry but it's true. This is perhaps why this Conservative government treats the industry with such apparent indifference. We colonised it, imported it, used it, abused it, redesigned it, grown it out of all proportion, cashed in on it, but we are the creators of our own ogre. It's a flabby, groaning monster of concepts and pastiches which is unsustainable. We’ve got high on our own supply.

This pandemic has whipped the clothes off this industry and revealed some naked truths. Firstly, we’ve been taking all this for granted for way too long. Secondly, there are far too many restaurants (I think some of the problem we have it that they are all so good. Seriously. When was the last time you went to a bad restaurant? It’s impossible. The food, the service, the design is all amazing, even at chain, high street level). And thirdly, human beings are changing their habits. 

With the pandemic, many of us have found a good way to stay connected with our customers is via digital with food delivery and everything else. I see this as the Napster moment of our industry. We’ve had it great but now it makes less and less sense to focus on physical locations apart from perhaps for credential. The household in Belgravia, Bradford or Bognor can now order in with the same ease from the greatest restaurants in the land. It’s a great leveller, but also a great isolator. Whereas once you might have been able to secure a customer base by having a great location, this isn’t the great business guarantee it once was. 

Local, stay at home, work at home is in my opinion here to stay. People have seen the great change in their habits, and the world hasn’t ended. They might want to leave the house and get on a train, go shopping, go to a restaurant, but they don’t need to. We think it’s carved in stone as a human habit but it’s not. I think we need to stop pining for some kind of invented memory. We also tend to forget that just before the pandemic, the industry was moaning almost non stop about soaring rent, no-shows, employee rights, tipping policies, staff shortages, customer shortages, low corporate spend, Brexit etc. In late 2019, it was supposedly a death wish to open a restaurant. 

I am not depressed about this. Maybe surprisingly I am upbeat. I see a bright future, if we are willing to remodel ourselves and adapt to our customers’ new expectations.

Will restaurants become greater digital presences in our lives, as lifestyle brands you attach yourself to, each one a component to your personal brand?

Will restaurant brands (or platforms) morph into something more like TV subscription channels and replace conventional food purchasing habits like local delivery? 

Subscribing to your chosen restaurants could be like having accounts with Netflix, Disney and Apple, each delivering streams of physical food/wine and digital presence too, with content and media packed in.

Lots already happens. There are chains supplying the family Friday night pizza, tuning your order every week based on your history, but could you go woke with a platform championing outlying independents with a blue tick from some kind of cultural appropriation watchdog, like an authenticity filter? 

Data collection can move to another level for physical business too. Will memberships grow and tune themselves to habits? Will dishes all be pre-ordered, with dietary requirements and menu preferences logged with kitchens automatically through your account? Will the walk-in vanish? 

The lines between restaurant and food shop are becoming blurred. Will supermarkets still dominate in 5 years? Will walk-in supermarkets even exist? Will someone create a platform to pick and mix restaurant goods and services within the weekly shop? 

Let’s be nimble, let’s be agile. This government clearly doesn’t care about us, it seems our customers do. But they also want us to adapt and service their lives in a 21st century fashion.  

One thing is certain, the old model might be there in spirit but it will never be the same.

Know your market

Katherine Hepburn's Smythson Address book, image from revivingcharm.com 

I used to work in antiques valuations in London’s best known auction district - Lots Road in Chelsea. It's the street to go for auctions.


In the 1990s a large and well known auctioneers, Bonham's, had a large and successful saleroom on the street. At some point, the company decided to have a huge expansion, and within it, revamp their entire telephone system to a more modern and sophisticated system.

One of the small problems was, the saleroom telephone number would have to be changed. Now all calls would be directed to a central number and redirected to all the different branches. This would streamline the customer service process and make it all much more efficient. Bonhams were expanding hugely, concentrating on the global markets and advertising internationally.

The thing is, in the 1990s, people still wrote down telephone numbers in address books and kept them for years, especially wealthy aristocrats living in Chelsea & Belgravia wanting to sell their dusty old Louis XV Canapés and Chippendale Commodes.

Most people selling at auction would rarely visit the auction themselves. A valuer would visit their home, inspect the items, write down all the details, a van would collect the goods, and then once sold, the vendor would receive a nice cheque. So they had absolutely no idea what happened to the items once they left their house.

On Lots Road there were also some tiny, independent auctions on the street.
One such business, Francis Smith's, saw they had changed their number, called BT and managed to request the old number Bonham's had discarded, for his own number.

Whenever the phone rang he would answer: “Good afternoon, Saleroom?”

And the customer might reply “Oh hello, is that Bonham’s?”

And he would reply assuringly “You’re speaking to the saleroom on Lots Road”

And then using his natural charm and patter he would arrange a valuation visit to their house and the customer was his. I think most of them might have been completely unaware it was a different auction until after the sale had happened and the cheque arrived.

Bonham's must have lost thousands of pounds in sales over the years.

They hadn’t really thought about how lots of their customers actually contacted them.

They assumed everyone read the expensive glossy magazine advertising.

In reality many of them simply opened their dog-eared address book.

What I love about the story is it’s a classic David and Goliath tale. The tiny independent seeing a chance and having a little victory over the big powerful corporate.

Cheeky perhaps, but clever, and quickly seizing an opportunity.

It’s also a great example of how if you know your market, and you know how your customers actually operate, you can be very smart.

Life’s a pitch.

When I worked in advertising I learned a bit about winning new clients.

When an advertising agency wants to win new business, it usually has to pitch.

They don’t like to, and the bigger and more established and famous they are, the more aloof and grumpy about this they get.

They think ‘we shouldn’t need to do this, our reputation should be enough’.

But they understand that this is just how it works.

What they never assume is potential business is always theirs.

When they get an invitation to pitch, they throw everything they have, pulling in every resource to produce a sparkling presentation that will seduce the potential client into going forward with them, rather than the other two or three agencies with their hats in the ring.

Sometimes, I see restaurant bookings no differently.

We are looking for new customers, to form a long term relationship with.

Each restaurant customer is a client. They are making a decision about where to go for dinner.

Offering restaurants a chance to win their business.

Now, an annoying habit of customers is often they still haven’t made up their mind until the day but they don’t want to narrow their choices.

So they book a number of places in advance, with the intention of making their final decision nearer the time.

Frustrating, bad manners, but this is just how it is.

So at this moment, when a booking is made, rather than just taking it as confirmed, I like to consider ourselves being invited to pitch, up against the best other restaurants in the business.

We are down to the last three or four.

We need to win that pitch.

So after receiving a booking, now is the time to produce our best work, in order to make sure that booking remains ours and goes ahead.

We ask them as many details as possible. The more familiar you get, the more comfortable they feel. We call them. We ask them about the booking, about any celebrations, making them feel ‘oh, they really care about our party’.
We send them information about the restaurant, and invite requests for particular dietary requirements, allergies, even likes and dislikes.

Often, we sell the restaurant even more after the booking than before.

Hopefully, when the time comes to make that final decision, we’ve done the most to convince them that ours is the best of the bunch.

(Hopefully they’ll also politely call the others in good time to cancel, but that’s a question of manners.)

A booking shouldn’t be taken for granted as confirmed business.

It’s an invitation to pitch, and it's our job to win the pitch.

The Shock Of The New

In 1987, Rupert Murdoch’s News International bought a tiny newspaper called Today.

Today was by many accounts a terrible newspaper, but it was interesting because it did something nobody believed possible, it pioneered computer photo-typesetting, a process which enabled full colour photographs to be printed as standard in daily newspapers. 

The colour pictures were eye-catching, modern, a vision of the future. 

But they were not very good quality. The colours often blurred over the edges and detail was lost.

They were broadly mocked by the media, which in turn meant they were mocked by the public. 

It even warranted its own ‘Spitting Image’ sketch on TV, where they purposely misaligned the colours to make fun of the fledgling technology.

‘It’ll never catch on!’ ‘Better stay the old way!’ ‘Nothing wrong with black & white’ etc etc was heard all round.

Well, Rupert Murdoch may be many things, but he certainly isn’t stupid. He invested in the technology early, tested it, ironed out the problems and pretty soon he had rolled it out across all his titles with complete success.

Colour newspapers are ubiquitous now, and all the naysayers look a bit silly.

So what was driving this revolt? In my opinion it is a very simple human emotion: the fear of the unknown.

Recently, there has been huge investment in food companies producing ‘fake meat’ substitutes, which correspond to increasing awareness of environmental issues, animal welfare and people’s changing lifestyle choices.

Burgers seem to be leading the wave, with a handful of companies producing more and more convincing patties. I’ve tried as many as I can, and I’ll be the first to admit probably 85% are pretty dire. But 15% are really, staggeringly sometimes, good. The Honest burger ‘plant’ for example is currently in my opinion the best in the UK, a really convincing burger which I’ve had repeatedly. 

My attitude is this - if this is what they can do after 4 or 5 years trying, imagine what we can do in 10-20 years?

Yet every food critic or writer I’ve read appears to guffaw at it, farmers whine about the death of the countryside as we know it, and BTL comments and social media is full of steak-boasting NRA style posts declaring ‘you’ll have to rip that T-bone out of my cold dead hand’. 

A mixture of sneering distain for anything which upsets the applecart, and the same ‘harrumphing’ but-slightly-frightened tone of voice you might hear from a jazz aficionado music critic in the 1970s reviewing the first Kraftwerk concert. 

It’s the gammon Brexiteers of the food world. Only the ‘bloody immigrants’ are not foreign people, but new food technology.

The same harrowed cries are becoming familiar. ‘But it’s all processed junk!’ Well unless you’re some kind of arse-clinching natural food bore, we all eat processed junk every day. Biscuit, chocolate bar, sausage, anyone? Any high street burger is processed junk. It’s cheap, tasty and fun which is why people buy it. Now vegans will buy it too.

‘It’s all a conspiracy by big business!’ Really? Well colour me shocked at this revelation. Because meat and dairy wouldn’t dream of being involved with ‘big business’.

And then the slightly bonkers counter-evidence is trotted out. ‘But if you don’t eat meat, all the cows and pigs will be wiped out’  Erm, this might come as a shock but they were going to be killed anyway. 

The worst however has to be the patronising middle-class recipe advice no vegan ever asked for: ‘Why not eat a piece of charred broccoli with chili, tahini and fresh lime?’ Because nobody goes to McDonald’s for a small plates sharing concept cheffy wankfest, that’s why.

Just like colour newspapers in the 1980s, companies like Beyond Meat, Impossible, Linda McCartney, Cauldron etc are trying to make something completely new. And just like colour newspapers in the 1980s, it’s being sneered at by the old guard. Well, give it 20 years and who knows, it might just be the norm.

The world is getting itself together for a change. I say give it a chance, Boomers.