* * * * *

Undertaking these interviews, I always like to ask the chefs what advice they would give to their younger self. Russell’s answer to this, which relates to the opening of Sienna, is profound:

It would be to have the confidence to not start too small, that would be one of the really big learning points from what we did. If you are going to do it, start with something that is growable. The big mistake we made was thinking if it was successful we will expand, without actually thinking that through to the next step: if it is successful and we want to expand, how are we going to do that? We didn’t take our thinking forward enough through the chain. I would look at things now and say ‘what’s your exit plan?’ and that’s the last thing that you are thinking about when you are in the excitement of starting a new business and as a chef you’re thinking about the shiny new cookers and pans, you’re not thinking ‘12 years down the line what am I going to do when my lease runs out?’ whereas you should be.

For those who weren’t lucky enough to visit Russell’s restaurant Sienna, while hugely critically acclaimed (including of course its Michelin star), there was no denying it was small, seating just 14 covers in a space (including the kitchen) of just 400 square feet.

The reason for this out-turn will be familiar to any chef who is looking to start their own restaurant: finding the right space at the right price is incredibly difficult. In order to find the site, you need to be free to do the viewing so you are not working full time which in turn eats into your finance. So you have the choice of going back to full time employment or taking what’s available. There are no easy answers here.

The size issue would impact in all sorts of ways:

Walk-ins at lunch time could be a disaster for us. You’ve just had a delivery, you’ve got a saddle of venison, you don’t have a cold room so you can’t put the venison in the cold room, it’s too big to go in your fridge – you have to butcher that so it will go in the fridge. So you’ve got nobody booked for lunch, you’ve got a saddle of venison that you are half way through butchering and six people walk in the door…. You need the money, you want the customers but part of you is thinking, what am I supposed to do? And that impacts on the customer service because you’ve got to pack up and clear up before you can set up for lunch.

But what really grabbed my attention in Russell’s first statement was his use of the words ‘exit plan’ because this is something that is seldom thought about (or even known about) in those early years, and then later on, you are in a position where you can exert much less influence over it, so it is important. It brought to mind an interview I had seen with Heston Blumenthal in The Independent back in 2010 where Heston recalls a conversation with Thomas Keller:

We were having coffee and Thomas goes to me ‘Hey Heston, what’s your exit strategy?’ And I kind of coughed and went: ‘What?’”
“He said: ‘what have you got as an exit strategy.. I said: ‘Hmm, I don’t know what you’re talking about.’
“He’s got a batch of funders, who are all from the financial world and they were all going to him about ‘your name is linked to your restaurants and they’ve got value but what happens when your knees start to go?’

I assume that if back in 2010 Heston did not know what an ‘exit strategy’ was, he is not alone among chefs. With Russell and Keller then making the same point, you really have to pay attention.

Another great learning lesson from Russell is to acknowledge the challenges but to achieve excellence working around them. When it came to the wine list for example, Russell observes:

Elena [Russell’s wife and business partner who ran FOH] would pour you a glass of wine when you ordered a bottle but then she would leave the bottle on the table for you to help yourself. Good wine service when it is done perfectly is amazing, but you need some resources to be able to deliver that really well, but with five tables and three of us working there, you were never going to be able to do that… [but what we did do] was to make the wine list deliver within its confines. We ended up with 50 wines on the list when we finished but we worked really hard to make sure they were 50 really good wines that offered great value for money… [at Sienna] you could drink some really nice stuff for good prices.

If premium wines sales are not available to support the profit margins on food, what was Russell’s approach to menus?

Whenever you cook, you might think that you are working without confines but you always are from one source or another. I think you have to design menus based on what the customers are prepared to spend, what equipment you’ve got, what space you’ve got, what your suppliers can deliver when you need them to deliver it, and what your staff are capable of cooking. So I used to try to take all those things into account on our menu.

Taking a step back from this to consider the bigger picture, what were his aims at Sienna?

Cooking for me has always been about making people happy, you want to put a smile on people’s faces, and you can’t do that on your own, it is a team effort, and you need front of house on your side.

Russell also offers a brave view of the success formula for a restaurant, one which is a rare admission for a chef:

Producing perfect plates of food isn’t necessarily conducive to great service. And as I’ve gone through my career and owning my own restaurant, Elena and I would have said that the food was the third most important thing [in a restaurant], and that’s hard for a chef to say.

So what fills the one and two spots?

One is the meeting and greeting, and two is the ambience, and the food is third. You ask most customers and they will tell you the opposite, they’ll say the food is the most important thing, but I think realistically, and maybe it’s not the same at the absolute rarefied three-star level, but at neighbourhood restaurants, small restaurants, it’s about the whole package, not just the food.

With the lease expiring on Sienna, Russell decided to have a change of tack and has opened his consultancy business Creative about Cuisine. Looking back, is it the Michelin star that he’s most proud of from his time?

In one sense. The Michelin star wasn’t something we set out to achieve… I suppose the things I am most proud of are that we went out on a high. We ran the business for 12 years and we had some great accolades when we finished, we had a great team… I think the things you are proud of is looking at where people have gone on to.

And finally, which bit of it all did Russell enjoy the most?

The buzz of a good service, that feeling that you cooked to the best of your ability, the team has worked really well together, the front of house and kitchen have really been on form… there’s nothing like the high you get from that.
​
Even breaking this interview into two parts, I could not cover all the wisdom Russell had to offer and a few more snippets will appear elsewhere on this website over time. Russell is an amazing chef, a great ambassador for the modern hospitality industry and hugely insightful across so many aspects of the industry. I always enjoy talking to him, and learning from him and I would like to thank him for his time in giving this interview.  

For recipes, blog posts, details of Russell's consultancy and more head to his website: creativeaboutcuisine.com
​

* * * * *

​There is something about L’Enclume and the village of Cartmel that seems to suit Simon’s food and vision, I ask Simon whether L’Enclume as we know it today was always the intention:

[L’Enclume] didn’t happen overnight. There were lots of opportunities that came and went. We were looking at projects from the New Forest in Hampshire along to Brighton in West Sussex, these were projects that almost materialised, but for one reason or another, they didn’t. But during my time looking, someone found me, and it was purely by luck that the two guys that owned the freehold to L’Enclume at the time got in touch with someone who knew me. They wanted to lease it as a restaurant (it used to be an antiques shop), they equipped it and refurbished it to a certain standard ready to be a restaurant with rooms, seven bedrooms, [but] couldn’t find anyone mad enough [to occupy it].

Simon here is referring to the fact that the area was then recovering from the foot and mouth outbreak resulting in the immediate surround being somewhat depressed. With another project falling through, Simon decided to travel up from his home near Brighton to have a look, and after a little convincing by the owners, Simon saw the potential:

I stood in the garden, the garden backed onto a river, and I looked back at the building, and I just sort of had to have a vision... just imagine what it could be like. The rooms were very important... because this had to be a destination restaurant. And I just remember a restaurant I used to work at with Jean-Christophe Novelli in the New Forrest called Gordleton Mill, and it reminded me of that and I thought if I could make it half as good as what that was, then this should work.

Simon decided to take a risk. Indeed, the willingness to embrace uncertainty is a key characteristic of successful people, and what should be understood is that changing the location of his intended restaurant from the south coast to Cumbria is simply a change of tactic but not a change of strategy.

In addition, moving north provided a financial benefit:

They [the sellers] outlined a deal which was quite attractive, it was a deal that I would never have been able to get with an establishment of this quality in the South at all, I would have had to borrow a hell of a lot of money or having some severe investment, or both, and both are chains around your wrist. So it was a very attractive deal [allowing it to be] my restaurant. They [the sellers] would help me get to opening without having to borrow shit loads of money.

This is a super-powerful point Simon makes here, giving away equity in your business is giving away ownership for the life of that business, so you really have to be sure that makes sense for you and is always best avoided if possible. Bank (or other) debt meanwhile is a financial burden at the very start when things are already at their most difficult.

Like many a restaurant, the early days were difficult despite all the hard work. Perseverance and belief are necessary to sustain the effort through this period as well as addressing the question, ‘what do we need to do to improve the situation.’ Simon comments on that difficult period:

There was just me and Leo (who Aulis is named after) in the kitchen, his girlfriend as the housekeeper/washer-upper at night, and we had two in the restaurant, Steven and Jamie and that was it. We opened and we were lucky to do any covers in the week, we might stretch it to a dozen on a Friday or Saturday night. We were unsure if this was ever going to get off the ground, but we just thought to hell with it, let’s take a punt and we sold everything, we had, we had to sell our house, our car, stereo, everything we owned just to plough in to keep it going. And thankfully, we employed a London PR, it takes a while for the PR bandwagon to start rolling, and it did. I always remember the first major thing we were in, it was in The Sunday Times Travel Supplement and it was the 20 Best Places to Go Next Year, and we were one of them. That was it, the phone started ringing, and then it led to something else, and something else, and before we knew it we were away.

But as the empty restaurant became a full restaurant, a new set of pressures emerged:

We were trying to feed a busy restaurant and we only had a kitchen one quarter of the size now with the wash up, so it was 40-50 covers, lunch and dinner every day in a tiny tiny kitchen starting work from half past six in the morning to midnight. It was six days a week as well. It took its toll on me, it really did, it was a very very tough time. But you have to go through those tough times.

So where did Simon draw the strength to push on?

It was a quest to make it, to try and be one of the best, or the very best you can do. It’s a very subjective industry: you’re someone’s best, you’re someone’s most rubbish. So we don’t take anything for granted, we don’t take ourselves too seriously. What we do is what we do and hopefully most people like it... you’ve got to be quite thick skinned.

Simon has also sought to keep a focus on what’s important in the business so that, for example, he is no longer involved with the restaurant in Manchester that was The French:

Nothing would please me more than to be behind the pass at L’Enclume all week; there again, nothing would please me more that to be behind the pass at Fera all week. So it’s with a heavy heart that I have to split myself in two. Manchester has gone now, taking that commitment away, purely because of that fact. I do make my restaurants quite personal, I am not a chef that opens restaurants and then you might see them once a month, I’m very hands on. So you won’t see me opening restaurants all over the world and building a bigger portfolio, we’ve actually reduced our restaurants because we thought, ‘sod that, that’s not me.’ I want quality things that are going to be remembered and I want to be there when they achieve the things that they do.

It’s an interesting and integral part of Simon’s vision, building things for the future and building things to last, in turn, creating leadership in the industry and eventually leaving a legacy. Again, it comes down to values guiding you in what you do and how you do it.

One thing that I believe has made a huge difference to the restaurant group is David Simms joining the group as Group Managing Director. I am a huge fan generally of taking time to reflect and asking yourself if your infrastructure has kept up with your success? If the answer is no, it’s easy to feel overwhelmed. Simon considers his recent experiences:

[that multiple restaurants lead to] a complicated life is probably an understatement, I was getting more and more bogged down. You open more restaurants, you see the financial rewards of it, it’s exciting, it’s a challenge, you’re establishing a new product. I enjoy creating things like that, I enjoy the buzz and getting them open, and getting them established, that’s great. But when that’s all over, then it’s down to the mundane running of them. Running the restaurants and trying to be creative about what goes on the menu is pretty much darn impossible for a small team to handle, so as the restaurants have grown the team has obviously got bigger and bigger and the appointment of Dave, the MD was probably fundamental in getting my mind back to where it should be because I was getting pretty bogged down with stuff.

This is a great move employing David and having known Simon for some years, I’ve never seen him look so well as he does now or have so much energy. But I’m interested in how this works, the split between Simon and Dave.

The great thing about Dave is that he’s got a very good chef’s pedigree as well... but as the MD he’s basically controlling the financial purse strings now. He’s got all the financials controlled, he takes a lot of decisions out of my lap. So he has a chef’s pedigree and he’s still got a chef’s hat on even though he’s controlling it, (laughs) but he does it in a more sensible manner than I do. Now we can really concentrate on the customer side of things with the confidence that the systems we have in place are second to none and it takes so much pressure off our employees.

So Simon’s role?

My role now is... I write the menus, the final menu choice is with me, I don’t always come up with the menu choice but I might tweak it a little bit or I might just leave it alone, but I’m agreeing what the menus are, all the service techniques are run by me, basically, everything that you can see, anything that customer can see comes by me. That’s the same between L’enclume and Fera.

Again, I think this move really emphasises that every chef, every manager and every owner has to recognise that there is only one him/her and so has to decide ‘how best do I use my time?’ Spending time on decisions that someone else can make for you (and possibly make better and quicker than you can) is a lost opportunity to add more to the business where you yourself are most valuable.

After all the hard work, the sacrifices made, the trophy cabinet now looks pretty good, but how does Simon view his achievement and what’s he most proud of?

The thing about L’Enclume is, when we opened it was just about L’Enclume but over the years, now, it’s about the whole package, it’s not just L’Enclume anymore, Cartmel has changed, that’s probably been for me my biggest achievement to see Cartmel develop in to the busy bustling place that was on The New York Times’ list Top 52 Places to Go in 2014.

It's hard not to disagree that that’s a remarkable achievement: Cartmel ranked 44th on that, listed above Nepal (45th), Vienna (46th) and Niagara Falls (52nd).

Simon is fascinating, and with so much insight on business, food and life, it’s a shame to bring things to a close, but before I do I wanted to touch upon something which we had seen that night at L’Enclume, which was a party enjoying a special birthday celebration and who were so excited to be eating Simon’s food, a typical scene no doubt at L’Enclume. Simon has never lost sight of the fact that his restaurant and his food should bring people joy, as he notes what makes him happy:

Seeing a full restaurant, busy, buzzy, people with smiles on their faces, enjoying their evening, just having a great time, that’s what we’re in the job for, to provide service which hopefully no one else can provide and give them those memories and enjoyment.

I find it inspirational that a restaurant like L’Enclume seeks as its mission to provide not just the best food you can imagine, but also lasting memories.

And that concludes. I would again like to thank Simon not only for his time, but also for sharing so much with such honesty. Simon is without doubt one of the all-time greats of the British culinary scene and L’Enclume is, as I noted after my last visit, truly a world class restaurant staffed by a world class team.

Ondine has won many awards including the AA Scottish Restaurant of the Year and Chef of the Year. I would like to say a huge thank you to Roy for all his generosity and spending time with me for this article.

* * * * *

As a customer sitting in Ondine restaurant, you’ll notice that both the restaurant and the staff look pristine. You’ll notice too that the menu is full of things you want to eat and when the food arrives you’ll further notice that the quality of the product is outstanding. But what you’ll also observe is that the restaurant is buzzing with life and laughter and never a hushed temple of reverence, and that’s the way Roy has always wanted it. Roy reflects on what Ondine has become for both him, and the customer:

If somebody had of told me [when I opened Ondine] that in seven years’ time, you’re going to have 18 dishes on your menu that you can’t take off, I would have laughed. But we have 18 dishes on our menu now that just don’t come off, simply because I listen to what customers have to say. We wanted a room that buzzed, I wanted atmosphere, I wanted to encourage the guys that it’s okay to have another bottle of wine, it’s alright to laugh and enjoy yourself, and also my team can enjoy it and laugh as well.

And of restaurants that have become temples to food, ‘stuffy’ restaurants where customers feel a need to talk in whispers…

…they’re one step closer to your funeral, they’re that sombre, and it’s all about cleverness [in cooking technique] whereas I wanted the cleverness to be done by the fisherman who caught this amazing fish that I clearly didn’t want to fuck around with, I wanted to serve it and I wanted them [his customers] to feel they got something that was completely unadulterated with its pureness; its prime, its fresh so my emphasis went on one or two or three components and it all goes back to the [Mark] Hix days and Rick [Stein] days of two or three components perfectly done.

Roy, like all the chefs that I have interviewed, has a clear philosophy of what he wants to cook and how the restaurant should run, and as Roy talks through his journey, the influence of those chefs that he worked under, and the lessons he took from them reveal themselves in all aspects of the chef that Roy is today.

Roy started his life in professional kitchens at the age of 17:

I started at the Caledonian Hotel [in Edinburgh]. I just remember a few of my mates were leaving school, and I was at a school where you weren’t put through for university, you were to become a tradesman, so you’d be joiners, labourers, and I was set to be a joiner but knowing that it wasn’t for me, it was just what you were going to do. And a couple of my friends were working part time at what is now the Marriott hotel on the Glasgow Road and I though this cheffing work just keeps coming up, and it’s very agreeable. And my late father took me fishing so I was always around fish, catching fish and it’s like what do you do with them after that: you’re cooking them, you’re boning them, so I had a feeling for it, but I didn’t know what the feeling really was, it was just something I enjoyed.

Critically then, Roy opted not to undertake the path that had been chosen for him, joinery, but instead to do what he felt with some gut level instinct to be right for him. Time and time again when you hear the stories of successful people, ‘trust your gut’ is a recurring theme. But it wasn’t all moonlight and roses from day one, and while Roy instantly felt of life in the kitchen, ‘this is for me, this is it,’ Roy also admits:

I found it really hard at first, the first two years, I just really didn’t know why I was there, you believe that you are there for the right reasons, but starting breakfast shifts at half past three in the morning, so you’re getting up at half past two, working until half past two or three o’clock in the afternoon, and your other friends are off at the weekends and you’re working at the weekends, it’s like, ‘have I made the right choice?’ But then I started to learn a lot from the chefs around me and started to believe that this was for me.

A young Roy then demonstrated the hard work and perseverance needed to get through those early days, necessary values to acquire since the reality is that those traits are at almost all times necessary to be successful. The literature is full of it: for almost all people, across almost all endeavours, be it business, sport or even a hobby, hard work and perseverance are the critical characteristics that allow the possibility of achievement, trumping even natural talent.

At the Caledonian, Roy’s first Head Chef was Alan Hill, a legend of the Scottish hospitality scene, and currently director of food and beverage at Gleneagles hotel. What are Roy’s memories of Alan:

I kind of feared him, but I really respected him… Alan was the old style man manager, and I get him now more than I did then. [With the old school style] you were never close with the chef, he was very distant… say on a Friday he would show me how to open a scallop when I was first training, and he would show me how to slice smoked salmon the following week, but it would happen, then there would be a gap, then it would happen.

And the values?

It’s hard to put into a couple of words, or a sentence even, but I think what it was, was to do everything right. So your shoes were polished, it’s important to be clean, you’re always cleanly shaven in the kitchen, the chefs, discipline in your containers, your storage, everything is on a regimented line, it was proper army hardcore. At The Savoy [where Roy later went with Alan] from the neck scarves being tied to the hats being immaculate. And I always remember looking at his handwriting, it was perfect… but what it gave you then was that this is a profession, and seeing him run the Gleneagles hotel now, he’s a professional.

And in Alan getting his people, including Roy, to where he needed then to be, it was very much like boot camp:

I think what he did was at one point he broke me down... they break you down and build you back up to where they want you to be, and I think that was what he did when I was at The Savoy. It was almost to breaking point, I was going to walk out, but he then built me back up and gave me a little bit of warmth and then your belief was with him. They break you down to build you up to who they want you to become in their group.

Alan seems to have judged it brilliantly, and while this might seem a tough approach, former US Army four star General Colin Powell considers it a kindness in his book on leadership:

Taking care of employees is perhaps the best form of kindness. When young soldiers go to basic training they meet a drill sergeant, who seems to be their worst nightmare. He shouts at them relentlessly, he intimidates them, he makes them miserable. They are terrified. But all that changes. Their fear and initial hatred turn into something else by the end of basic training. The sergeant has been with them every step of the way: teaching, cajoling, enforcing, bringing out of them strength and confidence they didn’t know they had. At the end, all they want is for their performance to please him. When they graduate, they leave with an emotional bond and a remembrance they will never forget.

Back to Roy’s story. When Alan left the Caledonian, Jeff Bland, now of The Balmoral, took over as Executive Chef. He had a very different style to Alan, which delivered a huge benefit to Roy in showcasing a different angle on how to manage people:

Jeff was a brilliant man manager, very inspiring, so there was two styles (Alan and Jeff) and they both stuck with me… Jeff would stand with you and turn potatoes, and ask you how you were doing and who’s your favourite football team, and are you going out tonight? It was getting you on the journey with him… with Jeff, he just had a really nice way about him.

Jeff very much achieved emotional buy in through a strong personal bond with his chefs. And how does that impact Roy now?

What I try to do with my team is, looking at what they did with me, I try to take the values which I liked from their management style, and that has an influence now. And the other chefs I’ve worked with as well had a huge impact…

So Roy in some ways is a blend of the best things that he saw in all of those styles of all those chefs he worked with. As the old saying goes, experience is the best teacher and Roy was ‘lucky’ to have experienced a wide variety of brilliant chefs each with their own unique style to contribute to Roy’s development.

But it’s not all about Head Chefs, and another aspect dating from the time at The Caledonian that was influential on Roy was his relationship with the chef de parties who again contributed to Roy’s development:

I was actually following chef de parties as well [as Head Chefs], great guys like Raymond Capaldi, a brilliant chef, he really looked after me as a young lad, and Lawrence Robertson who was another brilliant chef de partie at the Cally [Caledonian]. He went to The Savoy and became a sous chef down there, so I was around my food heroes at the time, these guys were my inspiration, and they would put an arm around you and look after you.

I really like the idea here that you draw inspiration not just from the Head Chef, but from where-ever it is offered, and where-ever you can find it. And I like even more that it emphasises that you don’t need to be the head man to show leadership: everybody at any level of the hierarchy can show leadership, and Roy’s story here shows how meaningful that leadership can be to those around you. Roy had said to me earlier in the day that chef de parties were back in the day his rock stars, a huge statement.

Inspiration is so important and it’s a recurring theme of not only my conversation with Roy but every chef that I have talked to so far. But while anyone can and should provide it in the team, the Head Chef nevertheless holds a special place, as Roy notes:

Inspiration, it’s so important, it’s why you’re there. I think 70% of the time it has to come from you, you have to inspire yourself, but that big 30% comes from the guy that stands in there tonight [heading the kitchen], he’s very important, and his mood is very important, because if he’s going to be a fucker, then everybody is feeling low. If he’s in a good mood and a good place, the restaurant is in a good place, so the waitress is coming out smiling, not crying, not nervous, not upset.

Back again to happy food.

​* In part 2 of this interview, we discuss two other key influences on Roy: Mark Hix and Rick Stein, as well as the late AA Gill’s unfavourable review of Ondine.

Simon is truly one of the greats of British cooking and it was a privilege to talk to him about what has driven that success. 

* * * * *

For five years, L’Enclume has achieved a perfect 10 in The Good Food Guide and I hope to get under the skin of how Simon’s achieved that. But to understand L’Enclume now, Simon takes me back to why and how L’Enclume with its current offering came into existence.   

I had disappointments in my career in employment where I had always chosen the wrong employer – they could probably say the same about me – but I never quite found that person to share my vision and what I wanted to do, so I suppose I have got my last employer to thank for me never ever wanting to work for anyone ever again… I needed to found my own restaurant to find my own destiny.

The other chefs interviewed thus far for my website have generally found an employer who imprinted upon them early a strong influence which stayed with them spiritually through their career, but in Simon’s case, it is the very absence of finding that person which pushed him towards opening his own restaurant. For me, this once again comes down to ideas around values, with values being the sense of ‘how we achieve our goals’. Coherent values between the individual and the employer are essential, with the implication that if your current employer doesn’t provide a strong fit with your own core values, you should move on. Simon lived that principle and the only way for his vision to come to life was to go it alone, and that means L'Enclume was always destined to be a properly unique restaurant, the product of Simon's singular vision.

Of course, the food becoming what it is today was very much a journey in its own right and initially, the influences of your previous situations still dominate:

In the early years I had this thought of how I wanted the food to be. In my last work of employment, we were cooking ‘London food’… Marco had left a legacy, very modern, polished, French cuisine done in a very London way… but I wasn’t part of that [movement]… I wanted to do something a bit different to that.

And then [in my last job] Frederick my sous-chef won the Roux Scholarship and went to work for Pierre Gagnaire for 3 months as part of his prize, and he was phoning up every day to tell me about all these techniques and equipment he was using and it was like, ‘wow, that sounds amazing, I must go there.’ Incredible creativity and something that just blew my mind.

About the same time, I had a guy come to work for me, a mate who had been working for Marc Veryat at la Ferme de mon Pere and he had been there for three months and he [Veryat] uses a lot of Alpine wild herbs and flowers in his cookery, very avant garde cooking techniques, really wacky and that just blew my mind, the pair of them, but especially Marc Veryat, I just wanted to do something like that, and it was just by chance that I ended up in England’s answer to the Alps.

It’s notable here that Simon connected with values of Gagnaire and Veryat without having cooked there or eaten there but it helped give further form to Simon’s vision and what he wanted to achieve at his own restaurant. But you can’t just transition immediately.

You can’t go from cooking a typical London menu to this whole new world so for this first six, seven months it was what I knew and carry on with that sort of style while we were busy getting ready for our first tasting menu.

At this time, a further feature that has become somewhat synonymous with Simon also made its first appearance:

We had an organic farm up the road which I approached: can you grow me things like good King Henry, winter savoury and sweet cicely, which I found out you can get in the wild everywhere now, but they’d grow these little things that I had seen that you couldn’t get anywhere else so it took about seven or eight months before the start of the first show of style that I anticipated for the business, it wasn’t overnight, it took a while to come up with it all.

Also associated with Simon is technology and kitchen gadgets that look straight out of a science lab, but he’s not in fact overly techy, just curious:

We’re not splitting atoms or anything like that… there is an element of science to it but it does look a lot more scientific than what it really is. Yeah, a rotary evaporator does look very impressive but it’s a very simple concept and most of the techniques we use are just basically as simple as trying to do things at low temperature. That’s it really, that’s the secret, that’s the secret of flavour, the secret of freshness, the secret of nutrients – don’t destroy them with heat, which obviously as a chef we are used to doing.

But again, common among leading chefs is a willingness to experiment and take a few risks:

I think I saw a demonstration once of a rotary evaporator and I thought, that’s an interesting concept, let’s buy one and I had no idea how to use it, and if I can learn how to use it, it’s pretty simple really.

But Simon is perhaps being overly modest here because the scale of R&D at L’Enclume is one of the key differentiators, in that they are not trying to build a better mousetrap, they are doing something totally different altogether:

That’s what L’Enclume has always been about, it’s been in the forefront and doing new things, and setting trends, techniques and menus. To be able to do that you need time, that comes back to the team and I trust them implicitly to be in the kitchens preparing all the recipes that are created, only for me to plate them during the important time during service but it gives me time in those [other] periods to work with the development boys to give them those recipes.

While Simon’s food was developing into his own, early on his management style was very much anchored in the practices of his former employers, coupled with the fact that resources in the beginning, both staffing and money, were tight:

There have been times when I’ve been driving myself completely mad and [been in] dark places, it’s not been all moonlight and roses, Penny [Simon’s wife and business partner] will tell you that. She was fundamental to the business in the early days… and she hated working for me, I was a complete bastard, but that was mainly because I had a vision, I wanted to get there, and nothing was going to get in my way, nothing at all, and my attitude to get there was probably down to the people I worked for, the violent, political kitchens that I had worked in and I just thought that was the way and that was the easiest way of getting there.

This notion comes up again and again, that is, the younger staff absorb and adopt the culture that is created by the senior team and then often carry that over with them when they themselves become senior. Managers constantly need to be aware that the behaviours they demonstrate to their staff will become the cultural norm across all employees – so we’re back to the values thing. But Simon has now been able to leave these behaviours behind:

In the past four or five years… I have considerably mellowed, probably due to the fact that I am not in the restaurants all the time… I’ve taken a different view of things. I realise that [in these past four or five years] we’ve achieved a hell of a lot more doing things nicely than you could ever do when you’re this crazy obsessed person.

Not least, Simon now has a much larger responsibility, being not just his restaurant workforce but his ‘Cartmel family’ of staff. Accordingly, it’s a very different message that Simon now pushes down to his kitchen teams:

It’s not all about cooking talent anymore, it’s about being a nice person and doing the right thing and treating people the right way. You’ve got to learn those things first, learn life before you try to be a head chef. I mean I am a father to about 70 people in Cartmel, that’s what it feels like, I have all their problems on my shoulder. If I am not a nice person, they’re not going to feel wanted are they?

Talking of the character of chefs, I ask if chefs really are the new rock stars?

I think it has gone a bit too far as well to be honest… you’re chefs, get behind the stove and cook a meal for people… sometimes they take themselves a bit too seriously. At the end of the day we are cooks and there to provide enjoyment for people. If you do good food, do good tasty food, and you’re sensible about it, that’s all the world changing you need to do. We follow our principles; the evidence is there on a plate. We do it, day in day out.


* Part 2 of this interview focussing on the business aspects of Simon’s restaurant group will be published shortly.

Russell made a huge contribution to the south-west of England's food scene with Sienna and is hugely insightful on many aspects of the catering world. A big thank you from me to Russell for spending time with me for this interview.

* * * * *

Russell was 27 when he entered the world of professional cooking, which is hugely late compared with most other successful chefs, but his time doing other things, most notably running his own fishing tackle business prior to making the transition, furnished him with skill sets that would prove incredibly valuable in due course and are not always taught (or appreciated as needed by young chefs) in the kitchen. Russell:

The difference because I was 27 when I started, so I was nearly 30 by the time I took my first Head Chef’s job, [is that] I had a good understanding of the business side of the job, and being a Head Chef is probably 20% cooking and 80% everything else.

But even here we might note that that’s still an impressive rise through the ranks, from entering professional cooking to Head Chef in a little over two years. A number of factors were behind this, not least bringing a mature set of values to the job, passion and a desire to learn, with his first job in the industry offering scope to really learn the skills that he needed to learn. Also, possessing a longer term plan – having come from self-employment, Russell knew that he in time wanted to open his own restaurant. But while it is important to ‘keep your eyes on the prize’, with no professional cooking experience, Russell had no choice other than to start this new chapter at the bottom.

In conversation with chefs, both for publication on this website and more broadly, most recount the importance of their first real job and their first Head Chef in shaping their industry views. In Russell’s case, his first situation was as a commis chef at the Alverton Manor in Truro, which despite his lack of experience, he was accepted for after a working trial in which he prepped the veg for a wedding. Russell describes the job as ‘an utter baptism of fire’. So what is it that stayed with him from that period? I ask Russell if the kitchen was well run:

It was, but two sides to it, as far as the actual cooking, the kitchen practices, the craft skills, learning about stock rotation, how to run a section, all the practical things, very good. Immaculate food hygiene standards, everything very precise, done to recipes using great ingredients. On a management level, the chef had a temper, he cared passionately about what he was doing, but he wasn’t tolerant of other people’s inadequacies I suppose.

The issue of developed craft skills is a core part of Russell’s own success and later when asked what advice he would give young chefs, ‘learn your craft properly’ is central to his reply. Russell explains what he means:

 [I was] very lucky from the practical point of view that it was a busy hotel, so you’ve got to do large volumes of things, so a typical Friday at the Alverton on the larder section when I was running it, you would have 60 whole chickens delivered which need boning out for supremes for the wedding for 120 tomorrow, thighs and drumsticks and three different marinades for the buffet the following night and carcasses for stock. And if you’re boning out 60 chickens every week you get quite good at it. Colin the Head Chef there was a brilliant craftsman and I learned so much there on the craft side, how to bone out a saddle of lamb, how to tie meat, all your basic knife skills, classic sauce bases, that sort of thing… everything was done properly.

When I ask the contribution to success of natural talent, hard work or acquired skills, Russell suggests:

I think it’s a mix of all of it but I think that hard work is the thing that for me predominates. Obviously you have to have basic skills, I think you’ve got to have passion for it, you’ve got to enjoy it, because you wouldn’t be able to sustain the hard work necessary if you weren’t getting a buzz out of it.

In our ‘short-cut world’ hard work as the core of success is so often forgotten, but as sports psychologist Jim Afremow says in his book, A Champion’s Mind:

Hard work always beats talent when talent doesn’t work hard

And former Manchester United manager Sir Alex Ferguson notes:

If I had to choose between someone who had great talent but was short on grit and desire, and another player who was good but had great determination and drive, I would always prefer the latter. The former might work well for a brief period, but they never have the staying power that gives a great club stability and consistency.

Russell continues in a similar vein:

I’ve seen it in young chefs that don’t really want it, they think they do maybe but they haven’t got that interest in food, they haven’t got the curiosity or the desire to try new things. And you know there’s not going to be enough to sustain them through the really difficult pressures that the job brings.

Another aspect that I believe as to why the Alverton Manor was such a good first industry job for Russell is that there was significant overlap in core values. On the general leadership blog I’ve talked about how the mission is what you want to achieve and the values are how you work every day to achieve it. I ask Russell about his values as a chef, and whether he took his values with him to the Alverton or acquired them while there:

Partly taking stuff into the job: a desire to do things right, for things to be organised, not to let people down, to deliver what you say you are going to deliver and do it on time, all those kind of things were there, very much reinforced by the time at the Alverton.

I’ve further suggested elsewhere on this website that if you don’t share the values of your employer that you should consider working elsewhere because it will otherwise be a constant source of conflict benefitting no-one. Russell would bump into this at his next job, a hotel in Falmouth offering top rates of pay. Russell notes:

I made the mistake of taking the job without doing a working trial, it was the only catering job I had not been asked to do a working trial for and I think if I had it would have opened my eyes and I would have said no, this isn’t for me... hygiene was one of the things I really struggled with there because it had been so meticulous at the Alverton… it was pretty obvious fairly early on, probably within 24 hours that I had made a mistake.

Double three-star chef Thomas Keller who states 12 values on his website lists both integrity (perform our work selflessly, honestly and caringly) and respect (show respect for our peers, our industry and our guests) among them. How could any chef of quality not embrace these ideas? Accordingly, despite the substantially higher wage, this clash of values led Russell to leave soon after joining, thereby preserving his own integrity and underlining the fact that your core values should always be non-negotiable.

When I started doing these interviews, I had expected to find overlap between highly successful chefs/restaurants and highly successful teams in other fields also such as in sports or big business, but I hadn’t quite expected to find so much overlap. Russell’s thoughts on building a solid foundation for success, which might be summarised as: learn your craft, work hard, have passion and be patient, are absolutely echoed in building teams as big as Manchester United and FTSE 100 companies. As inventor Sir James Dyson noted:

In the digital age of ‘overnight’ success stories such as Facebook, the hard slog is easily overlooked.

This is reiterated by Russell when asked to consider advice that he would give a young chef entering the industry?

Don’t be in too much of a hurry to get to the top, I think it’s really important to learn the craft skills properly, for me that’s so vital because it’s like anything, if the craft of what you do becomes instinctive and you don’t have to think about it, that frees you up to think about other stuff. So learn the job properly, you don’t want to be in the position where you’re a head chef and you’re struggling to bone out the chicken. And do it because you’re passionate about it.
 

* Russell’s success at his Michelin starred restaurant Sienna is the subject of a second article to be published soon.
 
For recipes, blog posts, details of Russell's consultancy and more head to his website: creativeaboutcuisine.com

I always find Mickael's energy so positive and it was a pleasure talking to him for this interview for which he has my grateful thanks.

* * * * *

Mickael worked at Coq d’Argent (CdA) for 15 years and during his tenure there, it flourished. It was the place to eat in the City and the food there was, in my view, comfortably at the one Michelin star level. But what was so impressive about Mickael’s achievement is that CdA, being in the Conran/D&D stable, is a mega-restaurant.  The restaurant seats 140, the brasserie a further 100 or so, there’s a huge outside terrace that is rammed whenever the sun shines and on its busiest ever day, Mickael and his team served 637 covers. If you need a case study on how to manage a restaurant monster, a peek inside CdA is surely it.

Military analogies come up at several points in my conversation with Mickael because first and foremost, such a large kitchen needs regimental discipline as a buffer to the ever present risk of chaos. In addition, there needs to be a clear structure to the operation and of course, clear lines of communication. What’s more, with a large brigade of young chefs, add to the mix elements of helping these mostly young men develop emotionally as well as technically. It’s a big ask and not for the faint-hearted.

Mickael himself entered cooking at an early age, and was working in a professional kitchen age 15 doing a 12 hour daily shift. He had focus and passion - this was not a job he simply drifted into - and worked hard at every position that came his way. He also took every opportunity afforded to him and landed his first Head Chef job aged just 24. What, I ask him, did he know about management at that point?

‘Nothing, absolutely nothing’ he says, ‘I didn’t even know what an invoice looked like. The only time I saw an invoice was when I was checking the food coming in.’
He had of course managed people, and had been significantly influenced by Head Chefs he had worked under, most notably Peter Kromberg of the InterContinental Park Lane, now sadly deceased, but a father type figure in the restaurant in his time:

His office was always open for example and that’s something I’ve kept up, an open office, people can come in and out whenever and that’s something I’ve learned from chefs like Peter, very nice, friendly. I find that stress in the kitchen is quite high and to work with people like this settles the team and a lot of his chefs had been with him a long time, and that’s the style I really learned and wanted to carry on.

When running CdA then, Mickael saw his role in the kitchen as:

Trying to be there for people, and trying to relieve the pressure from wherever it was felt, not worrying about getting my hands dirty, and to be part of the team as well as their boss.

But there’s an important point to make on what he says here about being part of the team. Within the work environment, this gets things done and shows that you’re all moving to the same goal, a unifying force, whereas outside of work, Mickael generally would not socialise with the staff. This is right in my view, for a leader needs to be separate from those he leads providing benefits for his authority, keeping an ability to exercise discipline and one might argue also, retain a little mystery to his persona.

But to avoid chaos in a kitchen of this size, structures have to be in place, and staff members know exactly what is expected of them. Mickael describes the what is expected of his kitchen team:

Your mise en place, which is getting your food ready, pre-cutting, blanching vegetables and all the little bits you do before the actual cooking of a dish have to be done by 11 o’clock. And then you need to spend between 11 and 11:30 what I call setting up your section. Even if your mis en place is not ready you stop at 11 o’clock and set up your section. From 11:30 you have food, you then spend the rest of your time doing your mis en place so that when the first check comes in you have an organised clean surrounding. Clear surrounding means clear thinking in the kitchen I feel. If you start the service and you’ve got crap everywhere, it’s literally impossible to cope, you cannot find anything and it’s a sort of panic state. If a knife is supposed to be on the right, it’s on the right.

And when the service is on, you focus and do the job, you are at that point like a well-trained army:

It’s all about discipline, you communicate to your staff, they listen and do [what you say], and if they have any questions they can ask that later. During service it has got to be the case because you can’t have questions in the middle of service because it creates the wrong atmosphere. It’s all about, for now, just do this, for this three hours of the day that you just do as I tell you, and that’s it, and it’s a great environment to actually work in, and it’s not nasty in any way, it’s just discipline and after service we can look into ‘we could have done this better, we could have done that better’ and we can talk about it later. But there’s no point starting a discussion in the middle of service.

Working in a restaurant this size, informal feedback sessions might be useful but it’s not enough and again, some structure needs to be in place to ensure nothing is missed. Mickael would sit down daily or every other day with the senior team, and Friday afternoons with the whole kitchen team, and on Monday with the restaurant management. I wholly concur that these are necessary in any organisation that’s serious about performance, and I think that Mickael really gets the point of how these meeting should be:

It’s not about pointing out what you did wrong or what you did right, it’s about finding out what we did good and what we did bad and move on and learn and do better.

I’m reminded of a story by Ross Brawn, the Formula 1 engineer and team principal who was invited by the NHS to give his insight into what an emergency operation team in A&E could learn from a motor racing team. Brawn was invited to a simulation of an emergency operation on a critically injured patient and he recalled:

What really struck home was that after everything was finished, I said to the staff that were there, ‘when do you hold your debrief to decide what worked well, what didn’t, what problems you have and what you need to do?’ They said they didn’t have debriefs. I said, ‘But surely you must get together and discuss things?’ ‘Only if the patient dies.’

In a large kitchen, it would also be all too easy for things to get a little bit frantic when things go wrong. I ask Mickael, does he sometimes lose his temper?

I’m pretty good… [you must not] stress your staff out, if you make an issue of it, it stresses them more out… you could [shout at your staff] but what did you gain? Will you get more respect? It stresses me out to shout at people. If they’ve done it three times in a row I’m going to sit them down and say c’mon, you need focus here, but you take them aside and you tell them to focus one on one, it’s a lot more effective than grilling them in front of the whole kitchen. That’s pointless.

If you do want to upset Mickael, the quickest way to do that is to be late. I agree with Mickael on this, lateness is disrespectful to those who do make it on time. Young chefs have been known to party through the night but if you work for Mickael, best make it in on time the following day.

I want people to start at a certain time. For respect to the rest of the team, respect to themselves and the job. I am happy for them to finish a bit earlier… as long as the job is done they can go, but everybody has to start at the same time.

Fall foul of this and you might find yourself peeling 600lbs of potatoes, or spending a shift on the pot wash, or even being sent home. In any organisation, but especially one that needs to function smoothly between interconnected staff members like a kitchen, without discipline you have chaos. Top rated football manager Sir Alex Ferguson in his memoirs notes:

I placed discipline above all else and it might have cost us several titles. If I had to repeat things, I’d do precisely the same, because one you bid goodbye to discipline you say goodbye to success and set the stage for anarchy.

Discipline then, as seen by the likes of Ferguson, is the bedrock of success. In the case of CdA, the benefit accrues not only to the restaurant in any one service, but also gives the young chefs exactly what they need to grow into the people they need to become tomorrow. It returns to Mickael’s own experience, both in terms of his background, his experience of Kromberg’s paternalism, and a natural deep rooted empathy for his staff:

I’ve always looked after my staff… it’s where I want to be, I quite like it [being a paternal figure]… sometimes it’s a little bit stressful… it’s amazing the amount of social work I’ve done for a lot of them but I help a lot of young kids, because when I arrived in London I didn’t have that help, I arrived at 17 years old with fifty quid in my pocket, a job, no place to stay. With the background I had it was okay because I had that background, hardcore, hardworking, focussed but a lot of them are moving to London, they don’t have any family, they are only making a few friends from work so work becomes their family and I help them in any way I can settle into the job. The reward you get, the long term reward is amazing.

It’s little wonder that Mickael now has a network of hundreds of chefs around the world who know and acknowledge that he gave them the foundation to be not just the chefs they are today, but the people they are today. What’s more, they too are likely to carry that legacy on to their own teams.

I’ve never stopped being impressed with how great restaurants deliver amazing quality food, service after service, day after day. But in many respects, Coq d’Argent held a special place for me because on its biggest busiest days, it challenged its chefs with one of the most demanding services you could imagine. As customers, we enjoy the food, we might even reflect on the chefs who made it for us, the technical skill behind it and their passion for cooking, but rarely do we reflect on the fact that at this level, the chef’s passion for his staff sits on equal terms to all of those other factors.

I ask Mickael, can you be a great chef and not care passionately for people also?

Maybe, yes… if you like working on your own.
 

* Part 2 on my interview with Mickael will be published shortly.

Visit Mickael's website: mickaelweiss.com

I would like to thank Michael for (as always) his generous hospitality and being additionally generous with his time for this interview.

* * * * *

Counting both The Three Chimneys and now Loch Bay, I have eaten meals at Michael’s restaurants over half a dozen times now and I have fabulous memories of his food. But even more than that, what stands out with Michael for me is the warmth of his hospitality. Unsurprisingly then, as soon as Michael and I start talking restaurants, the conversation is not about the kitchen, but the customer. Michael explains:

If you are going to invite people to your restaurant, you genuinely want them to be there, and if you can convey that, then that’s step one. From the customer’s point of view you want to feel as if, ‘hi, I’m coming to your restaurant, I obviously want to have a good time, do you want me to be here?’ [is answered by] ‘Yeah, we’re absolutely delighted you’re here’. Everyone’s happy then and that sets the tone. 

And there has to be a sincerity to it. As Michael goes on to say:

The customer is now more informed, more educated, got more choice, there’s much more quality out there, they’re going to tell straight away whether or not you’re being genuine right? So you have to be genuine, you have to believe in it, you have to be passionate to be able to do that and that’s what I think is most important.

Michael is also keenly aware that each customer who comes through the door is a new opportunity, and that might be a new opportunity to form a new relationship, a new opportunity to create a regular, or simply a new opportunity to have that customer become an ambassador for your restaurant by telling all their friends what a great time they had with you.

Connecting with people successfully has been at the root of Michael’s success I feel as much as his technical ability in the kitchen. Not untypically, the origin of this relates to his own time as a young chef when he came down to London just 19 years old.

His first job was at Le Gavroche at the time when Michel Roux Jnr had just taken over, but Le Gavroche didn’t then provide the environment Michael needed:

It didn’t really work out for me… I was green, very very green, coming from here and going down there and I was just completely out my depth, I couldn’t get my head around it at the time.

With the self-awareness to understand that the situation was not right for him at Le Gavroche, an opportunity arose for Michael to work under Jeremy Lee, who at that time was Head Chef at Alistair Little and had previously worked with Simon Hopkinson at Bibendum also. Michael would work with Jeremy for the next 4 years. Michael describes Jeremy and his influence:

Sincerity. He was genuine, from a leader and from a management point of view, Jeremy always led from the front… I think he saw in me that I was genuinely wanting to cook, and learn to cook, and was passionate about food and restaurants, having a passion about restaurant life and all the things that entails. He had all that. So it was his passion, genuine passion that inspired me and still does.

And as Jeremy himself has said, a happy kitchen makes happy food. Michael continues:

What I couldn’t find at Le Gavroche, because it was establishment, I needed a lot of attention because I was so green, I was quite demanding and saying look, I need help here, you need to help me, but he [Jeremy] was able to do that, he invested his time in me.

That Jeremy was willing to invest in him has been a critical influence for Michael since and in turn, he seeks to invest in the young chefs in his kitchen. As Michael now sees Jeremy’s mentoring of him as a young chef:

It’s a reference point for me on a daily basis.

Spend time with Michael in the kitchen and that vibe is very much apparent. This approach for me resonates with the best qualities of not just good managers but good leaders and it is interesting to note that Sir Alex Ferguson, former Manchester United manager, says in his book Leading that:

It is so much easier to produce a consistent high level of performance when you nourish youngsters, help them develop and provide a pathway to success.

Michael himself recounts a story of a young chef who discovered that not all head chefs can deliver on leadership regardless of the quality of their cooking:

I had a chef once who worked for me and then he went to work for someone else, this was a really young keen chef, very driven and single minded in his ambition, and then he came back and I said what didn’t work out for you? And he said, coined it in the phrase that ‘well you want a chef who you’d go to war with, to lead you into battle’, that was his description. And the chef that he was working for wasn’t that so he didn’t feel inspired, and there wasn’t an emotional investment.

For anyone who thinks that they are too busy for leadership or that there’s no real return on the investment since staff have to do what you say anyway, it’s demonstrable that the reward to Michael’s business has been huge. London restaurants like to complain how they have difficulty getting staff but consider this: the Isle of Skye has a population of around 10,000 people, which compares to my own borough in London, Tower Hamlets, which has a population of 284,000. How then do you attract (and keep) staff who have the talents to cook at a Michelin starred level?

First and foremost, the team that I had established in Glasgow [where he opened restaurants prior to moving to Skye] wanted to come and work with me again. So even then, that investment I had made which I had been taught by Jeremy – be a good person, honest and compassionate as possible – was paying off.

When those behaviours become ingrained, you don’t doubt them or the results. For those who are concerned that the investment might go to waste, Michael suggests:

I think it [the payback from caring for your staff] will always happen if it is genuine, because I never forgot how I felt when I needed to be understood and I didn’t even understand myself, and I needed someone with more experience in the industry to help me. And then that’s invaluable and then you think ‘thank you’ and you become loyal to that person.

The result was that he took three staff with him to Skye from Glasgow including Kevin McLean who was Michael’s head chef at The Three Chimneys, staying with Michael there for 10 years, eventually resigning at the same time as Michael. But even with that support from his Glasgow days, staffing is ‘a huge logistics problem in this part of the world’ and investment in the staff is one way to relieve some of that pressure.

Michael’s cooking achievement has been well recognised with accolades such as a Michelin star and his achievement as a main course banquet winner on Great British Menu. But what I first saw as his warming hospitality I now understand to be part of a larger skill set around connecting with people, and his talent in doing this is as impressive as what he delivers up on the plate. Michael provides his team with genuine leadership, offering his staff respect, guidance, empathy, a road map to success and natural authority (as well of course brilliant technical skill). Every leader should ask himself/herself from time to time, why should anyone want to be led by me? In Michael’s case, the answer is clear – he wins over hearts and minds to achieve the essential emotion buy-in. Derived from inspirational leadership provided to him by Jeremy Lee at a time when he needed that, these values have centred Michael’s core belief:

If you don’t have staff, then you don’t have a business.

 
* Part 2 of my interview with Michael Smith talking about the business of restaurants and opening Loch Bay will be published shortly.

Visit Loch Bay's website

* * * * *

You don’t have to chat with Dave Strauss for very long to understand that the Goodman Group is not like other restaurant groups. Often, Goodman seem to break most of the traditional rules of management, but that’s not a problem, because behind the willingness to let some things go, things like EBITDA targets, there’s an unparalleled desire to make their customers happy. Great food served with genuine passion is the very DNA of Goodman and the idea is ever-present throughout our discussion.

In management speak, even if Dave might not say it in these terms, pleasing customers can be considered Goodman’s objective, and the strategy to achieve this is to serve the best possible food and combine this with the best possible service. Few would doubt that they do both especially well. Dave even suggests that he, and his front of house colleagues, are ‘addicted to pleasing people’.

I ask Dave whether it was the Day 1 goal to be the best steak restaurant in London:

Not at the beginning, at the beginning, I don’t think we really did, but I was working with John [Cadieux, Goodman Exec Chef]… so it was that combination of the right people in the right time… and the more John got into the meat part, the more I realised that if I could keep up with him with the front of house, there was an opportunity to open up something that on its day is as good as anywhere.

From my perspective, most important thing here is that John’s love of food and Dave’s desire to deliver service are heartfelt, not manufactured, not a marketing ploy. Customers can sense when it’s genuine and mostly respond in kind.

Dave recalls how in the early days, pre-shift meetings allowed him to push that enthusiasm to the rest of the front of house team, maybe centred around a great piece of Belted Galloway they had in that day which their customers might enjoy. Dave says:

At Goodman, when we opened up, we genuinely cared that people came in and had a better time at Goodman than any other restaurant, that they really liked us… we had a lot of personality

What is also fascinating is to compare the management approach to Goodman (top end, exclusive) with that of Burger & Lobster (mass market). The approach is the same for both because the vision remains the same at both: if the customer feels that you care, they will come back. Dave Strauss:

When we did Burger & Lobster, it was just simply that yes, we’re going to do something for 20 quid, but we really care that it’s good and when you come in we really care that you have a good time and that you feel as if... all of us care. I find it easier to focus on that [caring about the customer] than [pristine staff] uniforms.

But this in turn leads on to another key question: how do you hire the right people who share your values? Hiring, as all restaurants know, has become more difficult but Dave notes that in the early days:

We used to put an ad on Gumtree, we’d get 200 responses and get one good person out of it

But how do you know among the 200 who that one good person is, how do you decide? This is not so easy to answer, with Dave suggesting ‘you’ve got an idea of what you are looking for’ and an element of, you know it when you see it. Being a manager is, after all, to be a people person.

But being a customer of Goodman, having known Dave for some time and talking to him that day, I can’t help but feel that hiring the right people is about finding good enough people who have potential and knowing that the Goodman culture will significantly influence their development over time. Don’t then underestimate the culture, and of course, the culture comes from where? The owners and the senior managers.

One of my enduring impressions of Dave as a leader is a visit I made to Zelman Meats in Soho back in January 2016, and on walking through the door, discovering that Dave was taking customer orders and serving food. Remarkable. It’s part of his philosophy on what leadership is:

It's a good example, you don’t ask people to do something that they either can’t imagine you doing or you couldn’t do really well yourself.

And when I met him for this interview, he was due to pull a shift on the floor of Burger & Lobster that evening. It is central to my thinking on leadership that people in organisations look to those in charge to understand how to behave, and that leaders, through their behaviours rather than their words underwrite the code of ethics which permeates down through the organisation. Spending time on the floor then for Dave carries at least three major benefits i) allowing him a genuine insight into what is happening with the customers of the business, ii) allowing him to understand the challenges faced by his staff on a day to day basis in delivering the product, and iii) setting an example, with staff seeing that he is neither remote nor above pitching in with the hard work of dealing with customers.

And that Dave loves the business becomes a force multiplier across the group. In turn, when I speak to Goodman staff about Dave, there’s respect, and even love, a reflection of the respect that Dave has in turn shown them. Dave’s values have become his staff’s values. I ask Dave about this and specifically how he trains the next generation of managers. Getting to know Goodman’s quirks, I’m unsurprised that there is no specific training for the individual restaurant managers, after all, they’ve grown up with the Goodman values, they have become the people they need to be, and Dave’s door is always open should they need his guidance.

A further outcome of these values and the culture within Goodman is that the staff turnover is lower than elsewhere. Again, multiple benefits accrue, and as Dave says, you really don’t want to hit the busy Christmas period with an all new team. And with staff hiring becoming more difficult, it’s one less headache.

As a director of the group, Dave in turn is accountable to ‘the boss’, being the restaurant owner Mikhail ‘Mischa’ Zelman and it is Mischa that allows Dave the latitude to run the business in this unique fashion. Mischa as owner of course sets the tone that drives Goodman's core values and central to that is the importance of the customer experience which Mischa cares deeply about. Whereas one might reasonably expect there to be financial targets, year on year growth and actual versus budget discussions, these do not appear to be part of the Goodman mindset, so the vision (or mission of pleasing the customer) is never compromised by the financials.

But with no targets, how do they know if they’ve had a good year, and hitting targets can often bring with it a sense of achievement for staff? The achievement comes through their market position:

We set ourselves kind of targets, but it’s really more about, we’re very proud to be thought of with Hawksmoor as the best steakhouse in London and we’d be really upset if we weren’t.

Without doubt then, Goodman is a remarkable organisation and copying its formula would be next to impossible for 99.9% of rivals. What has made it successful it seems are core values centred around the importance of the customer experience, shared between Mischa the owner, Dave as Director of Operations, and now the whole staff, with financials playing second fiddle. It’s a rare concession from an owner, and contrasts with so many other eateries that are now owned by Private Equity firms focussed on ROE and an exit strategy. And to find a director of Dave Strauss’ managerial ability and ‘addiction to pleasing people’ to run the group is equally rare.

From a leadership perspective, Dave’s integrity and passion have long since made him a hospitality icon. He acknowledges great managers that he’s worked for in the past, the lessons he’s learned from them and the desire and hope that he’s made them proud, which I am sure he has. Those ideas seem to be passing down to his protégés too, and as seen with all great managers, Dave has gifted a legacy to those who have grown under his wing. It’s worth noting that he shares this ideal with another industry icon, Thomas Keller who lists on his website ‘Legacy’ as a core value for him and his staff and describes the ambition to:

Establish a benefit to the guest, the restaurant or the company that outlives us.

Dave considers himself lucky in his job and he exemplifies the idea that each of us should find something we love doing. Giving the last words to Dave:

The thought that it’s just a job to someone, well you can’t think about it, otherwise you’d just, you know, you would…