Celebrating the art and work of those who can stand the heat in the kitchen

Saturday, February 09, 2013

The Art of the Restaurateur
Nicholas Lander
Phaidon, £29.95

You have to be supremely generous, to give yourself twice a day when the guests arrive, and to imbue your staff with your motivation, philosophy, and sense of personality.

There’s no doubting Nicholas Lander’s foodie credentials. A former restaurateur (he owned and ran Soho’s legendary L’Escargot in its glory days of the 1980s) this Cambridge University and Manchester Business School graduate is a global authority on the restaurant industry, contributes to Conde Nast Traveller and BA Business Life Magazine and has, since 1989, written The Financial Times hugely popular and influential weekly restaurant column. He also happens to be married to internationally renowned wine critic and author Jancis Robinson OBE who advises no less a personage than HM Queen Elizabeth on her wine cellar. So it’s fair to say he knows his stuff.

But despite — or perhaps because of — his vast knowledge and experience, Lander shares the belief of multi-Michelin starred Jean-Claude Vrinat, that the qualities demanded of a restaurateur can be distilled in a single sentence: “A love of food, a love of wine and a love of one’s fellow human beings.”

And these qualities abound in his fascinating book which takes readers behind the scenes of some of the world’s best eateries, and celebrates the complex but largely unsung art of the restaurateur. Lander attributes his love of food, cooking and hospitality to his Jewish home in Manchester where his mother always managed to have more than enough to feed all callers, however many and however hungry. His interest in restaurants was sparked by his father, a navigator during the World War II, who believed passionately that life was for living and that restaurants were an essential part of life.

And it seems the restaurateurs featured in Lander’s book share this view — even if their chosen career path might seldom prove lucrative. Because, according to Lander, the basic economic principle governing restaurants is that the gross profit is inversely proportional to the quality of the food served: in other words, the better the food, the wine and the service, the tighter the margins and the lower the financial reward to the restaurateur.

Not that Lander himself was troubled by such details when at the tender age of 29, and with “a superabundance of naivety and absolutely no professional experience” he took a 25-year lease on one of London’s oldest and most iconic restaurants: in June 1981, L’Escargot opened for business.

But even before then, the stress of such a mammoth undertaking was taking a toll on his health, and in the month preceding the restaurant opening Lander suffered the first of a series of grand-mal epileptic fits. Then there was the basement kitchen, condemned on 44 counts by Westminster Council; the lifts, temperamental, expensive to maintain and liable to get stuck at the most inopportune times; unforeseen costs which pushed the project significantly over budget; and the not inconsiderable matter of the builders going into receivership a month prior to the opening, thereby locking Lander out of his own restaurant.

But there were compensations too, most notably on the occasion of his wedding in October 1981 to Robinson, when guests drank L’Escargot’s entire stock of Bruno Paillard 1973 Champagne — “for some time afterwards it seemed worth opening the restaurant just for that party,” he quips.

Lander quickly learned that motivating staff is crucial to the success of a restaurant, a belief shared by Enrico Bernardo of the celebrated Parisian Il Vino restaurant and wine bar, one of 20 restaurateurs interviewed by Lander for his book.

“You have to be supremely generous, to give yourself twice a day when the guests arrive, and to imbue your staff with your motivation, philosophy, and sense of personality,” says this Michelin-starred chef who in 2004, at the age of 27 became the youngest ever “Best Sommelier in the World” as awarded by Association de la Sommellerie Internationale.

Mark Sainsbury (of supermarket dynasty fame) also shares the view that staff morale is central to the success of a restaurant. While working his way up the gastronomic ladder, Sainsbury came to understand the importance of getting down and dirty on the job: “The only way to acquire the authority to ensure others do the dirty jobs properly, such as washing the floors or the toilets, is to have done them yourself.” So says the man behind urban dining legends such as London’s Moro restaurant, Bistrot Bruno Loubet and the Zetter Hotel and Townhouse.

Indeed for all their acclaim, the restaurateurs featured in Lander’s book seem a remarkably practical and down-to-earth bunch — perhaps because, of its very nature, the job itself is so hands-on.

Lander relates how, while running a Parisian restaurant, La Ferme Irlandaise in the early 1980s, Myrtle Allen of Ballymaloe regularly set off on the night ferry with a suitcase full of Irish porridge oats, flour, potatoes and lobsters.

But the demands of the job continued to take its toll on Lander’s health and in 1988 he sold up. Shortly afterwards, on the strength of an unsolicited restaurant review submitted to the Financial Times, he was offered the position of resident reviewer.

Since then Lander has dined in some of the world’s best restaurants and rubbed shoulders with their most illustrious clientele. In a field replete with opportunists who seek notoriety by dissing the best efforts of hard-working chefs and restaurateurs, Lander has earned the respect of his peers with his work commended as “avuncular, objective, quite scholarly and investigative.”

Certainly the title of his book perfectly encapsulates his take on the role of the restaurateur: properly executed, it is indeed an art form.

To buy this book click here.

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