I opened a restaurant more or less by accident. Over the course of the five years I’d spent operating a supper club out of my Holloway flat – a semi-legal means of supplementing a food writing career – my stock answer when someone asked if I’d open a restaurant was: I can’t think of anything worse.
And then one day, inspired in part by a TV series presented by the late Russell Norman, and in part by my pal and soon-to-be business partner Sam’s excitable obsession with a vibey and creative American food scene, I decided opening a restaurant was exactly what I wanted to do.
This is how in mid-2015, with little real-world hospitality experience, Sam and I opened Pidgin in Hackney at perhaps the apex of London’s restaurant boom. Critics liked it. The public showed up. We weren’t making any money, but surely that was just a matter of time. Let’s open another, we thought, without pausing to consider whether success was the same thing as expertise. One in central London. One with some lunch trade. One with more than ten tables. One where we’ll pick up walk-ins. One with over six times the rent we’re paying in London Fields – £20,000 a year for the postage stamp that was Pidgin. The site that would become Magpie and bring with it a great deal of sorrow, was £125,000.
For reasons not entirely clear to me – perhaps the inundation of operators flooding social media with diatribes on how running restaurants is harder than ever – I recently found myself wondering how our successors were doing in those sites we found so hard to make work. What were they doing? What were they doing well? Which of our mistakes were they avoiding, and which, perhaps, were they repeating?
I start this self-lacerating walkabout in the West End, passing the pub where we drank with our now dead manager, past the Pret where we bought breakfast for tearfully grateful builders who’d worked all night to hit a fanciful completion date. Across Regent Street and down Heddon Street. This is where the end began.
Magpie’s death was the hardest, saddest and most baffling of the five. At the time, it felt like you had to be doing something unique for anyone to pay attention. So we served small plates from a trolley, dim sum style. The trolley weighed a ton and sounded like an anchor being let out into deep water as its metal wheels scraped across the concrete floor. We abandoned the anchor within six months, though not before it had been derided by several critics. Magpie wasn’t bad, it just wasn’t good enough. It’s especially true now, but even ten years ago, you couldn’t afford to get off to anything but a racing start in central London. When you’re raiding your personal savings to make payroll at the end of the first month, something has gone terribly wrong.
All of this simmers in my skull as I approach Daka Daka, the third – fourth, even – concept to follow our ejection from 10 Heddon Street in 2019. Fallow was there briefly, before the larger site, hair plugs and YouTubing came. Various other pop-ups followed. The landlord – the Crown Estate – was seemingly aware this particular site wasn’t built for longevity.
Not until, as I discover on arrival, the basement had been knocked through, providing much-needed additional covers and storage. In our day, we’d paid £100 a month for a foul lock-up in Soho. Once we’d closed, it transpired that front of house used it to store a quite baffling excess of cleaning products and Christmas decorations – we were not strong on this kind of detail.
