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.
There is still a portion of the reeded glass that we’d installed at the front. It is a handsome piece of glazing. But it meant that no one could see in, which, if you’re a casual passerby, can be intimidating. We saw many would-be walk-ins turn and go into Piccolino next door, which is, remarkably, also still there. Many of the rest of the street’s establishments have changed since our tenure.
I settle in at the bar and order one of those negronis that remind you that the classics don’t need twisting, which in turn reminds me of our own negroni that we finished with Sichuan pepper oil.
It is early on a Tuesday evening, but it is largely empty, and there are a lot of staff. I have a stomach-lurching flashback to the sheer number of people we’d have on shift in those first weeks with nothing to do but wait for the guests we assured them were just around the corner. You do not need seven people working front of house when you only have 20 covers booked. Reality hit us in the face when the first month’s payroll was 121 per cent of turnover.
Magpie wasn’t, technically, our first closure, even if it was our first real failure. 18 months after opening Pidgin we were approached by a barber who was subletting a local bar for his salon, and wondered if we might sub-sub-let it from him during the evenings. I have never trusted anyone less in my life on first meeting them. Naturally, we said yes. No lease, no contract, just seat-of-pants stuff. We named it Enfant Terrible and it was a blast for a month, until I called him a prick and his pride – and I say this with some respect – proved to be more valuable to him than the ludicrous £400 a week we’d agreed to pay for the pleasure of flogging cocktails and toasties amid beard trimmings and coke dust.
I pop in to the site’s current and admirably long-standing iteration – a French-operated wine bar called Binch – before dinner at Teal. It’s a wine bar in Hackney, which means there are low-intervention wines and good-looking people. I earwig on the conversation of the American couple next to me. ‘I think we’re near the Spurstowe,’ she says. ‘Oh?’ he replies, indifferent. ‘Yeah, it’s kind of a Mecca for hipsters.’
Binch was a cool space then and it’s a cool space now – muted grey plastered walls and tiling and a concrete bartop offset by warm wooden stools, a reeded wooden bar front and warm candlelight. Small, discreet, intimate, permissive. In many ways, it feels like the one that got away. Shouldn’t have called the barber a prick, on reflection. When he booted us out he said he’d have rather been called a cunt, with a self-awareness he’d hitherto not displayed.
Onto Teal by Sally Abé, then, the second restaurant to follow Pidgin’s closure in 2024. On my arrival I bump into an erstwhile neighbour, who observes that it looks like it’s been airlifted in from the Fulham Road. There is certainly a sense of an intentional, even provocative, non-Hackneyite aesthetic and approach. General manager Abe Drury proudly tells me, unprompted, that ‘we don’t serve any natural or low-intervention wines’ and I think back to the almost weekly argument I’d have with a series of Pidgin managers about, perhaps, just occasionally, lobbing a wine on the list that doesn’t taste like it’s been filtered through a pig’s arsehole. The food is assuredly classical and devoid of ferments and fads, a classic British bistro with one foot in the past serving dishes like the clubland classic Locket’s savoury, and a penny lick to finish. In fact, so rooted is it in nostalgia that the woman across the bar from me asks: ‘So, like, is this a Victorian restaurant?’
The food is faultless, the service impeccable, everyone delightful and engaged. And edginess can be exhausting and performative in its own way. But I leave with a sense that the overall smoothness of the operation feels so very un-east London that I wonder why they opened here in the first place, and whether once the launch hype – and glowing reviews – fade, if the neighbourhood will be enough to keep this bird flying. Because it wasn’t for us.
We opened Sons + Daughters (S+D) in Coal Drops Yard, Kings Cross, at the end of 2019. Magpie had closed, Pidgin was ticking over, and we wanted to make some money. We needed, or thought we needed, something scalable. So, how about a sandwich shop that was cool enough to keep us interested but vanilla enough to get the average punter through the door? This is not, it transpires, the correct way to go about developing a business concept. We made it through five years in large part due to some fantastic people and, perhaps surprisingly, COVID (Granary Square was such a hub for social distancing friends and families that those two years were by far our most profitable).
It is now a Joe & The Juice. Just next door to Uniqlo. We, too, once had aspirations to be a global brand with lofty turnovers.
This was why we decided to open a second S+D – to begin ‘the rollout’. A site became available in Borough Market in summer 2022, and we jumped on it. We opened the week Elizabeth II died, a week before the Kwarteng mini-budget. This did not provide the same unexpected boost that the pandemic did, though I’m reluctant to blame the unmitigated disaster that was S+D Borough Market on Liz Truss.
As I sit at the bar in Camille, which inhabits the space once occupied by S+D, it is clear that this is not, nor ever was, the right space for an elevated sandwich shop. Just as we wrongly assumed that being by Regent Street would scoop up tourist custom at Magpie, we thought many of the thousands who passed through Borough Market would be after a good sandwich. They weren’t. They wanted to graze their way around the free samples and smoothies. And what all the non-tourists wanted was a good restaurant.
Which Camille is. The food is terrific, the service even better – the best I can remember enjoying in a while. There’s an astonishingly good crudité niçoise that, pace Magpie, is a reminder that a brilliant and original idea can still be rooted in the classics. When there’s an issue with the beef we’ve ordered there’s a refreshing transparency from the impeccable GM – ‘something has gone wrong, here’s how we propose to fix it.’ The place hums with contemporary sensibilities, without the associated ennui that can be so dementing. It’s cool to care.
And, of course, the wine is all-natural. Back when this branch of S+D was all but dead and buried, we briefly considered opening a second Pidgin in its stead, but this felt like one gamble too many. For a moment I regret this reticence. And then I remember the bittersweet relief we felt when we did, finally, knock our decade of running London restaurants on the head – the dissipation of anxiety, and the deep feelings of regret and loss being far surpassed by the catharsis of letting all that go.
I don’t want to add to the orchestra of voices bemoaning the misery of running restaurants, because there are so many wonderful things about this bizarre industry and so many tedious things about more sensible career choices. At its peak, Pidgin won a Michelin star, and the Observer Food Monthly Best Restaurant award (which currently sits in my shed, covered in bird shit). Camille just placed number 1 in Time Out’s Best 50 London Restaurants list. The highs, if you’re lucky, will outweigh the lows. But it is at the bottom of those lows where the real lessons are learned. Stick to what you’re good at. Follow your instincts. Form follows function, every time. Success is not the same as expertise. And enjoy the ride, because at some point, you’ll have to get off.
