History
Before the launch of Le Café Anglais, chef-proprietor Rowley Leigh was given the opportunity to tell the story of the restaurant's creation in The Financial Times, where he also writes the weekly food column. The resulting article appeared on the front page of the Life & Arts section on November 2nd 2007, and is reproduced below in full.
Paris, Bayswater
By Rowley Leigh, FT.com site
Published: Nov 02, 2007 v
Le Café Anglais, which will open on Thursday, has had rather a long gestation period. In the mid-1980s I worked from Monday to Friday for the Roux brothers as their head chef at Le Poulbot, a restaurant in the City of London now long gone. I loved the work and will be forever grateful for the opportunity it offered me but there were elements I found frustrating.
Le Poulbot consisted of what Albert Roux described as a "pub" upstairs - actually a simple but tremendously popular brasserie specialising in steaks, omelettes and a couple of plats du jour - and an opulently posh "fine dining" restaurant downstairs, set out in booths lined with red velvet and where my set lunch was, at £24.50, the most expensive in London. Apart from the operational difficulty of producing food at two different levels of aspiration - one always suffers, in my view, and usually the less expensive one - I yearned to bring the haute cuisine that I was practising downstairs to a wider audience.
At the weekends, I was moonlighting at 192, a fashionable bar and restaurant in Notting Hill. The chef there was my old friend from university, Alastair Little, who was becoming overwhelmed by the restaurant's success and needed a night off. After trying to run two restaurants, one at Michelin star level, with 10 staff and a traditional French front of house team, I found 192 a lot more fun. Customers used to stroll over to the kitchen door and compliment the chef. While all sorts of mayhem was being perpetrated in the restaurant, the professionalism that had been imbued in me by the Roux brothers won respect and I, in return, got a taste for this sort of café society.
Genially presiding over this west London Mecca was the patrician figure of Tony Mackintosh, who proved to be a generous and kind employer. He had bought a lot of Rhône wines in the 1970s and invited me to his farmhouse in Suffolk to help him drink them. Over magical bottles of Château Rayas and Clape Cornas I told him my dream of a large brasserie in west London and he offered to help. We looked at a few sites but then both got distracted. Mackintosh was lured into starting up the Groucho Club and, a couple of years later, the manager of 192, Simon Slater, introduced me to his partner Nick Smallwood and they persuaded me to work for them at their new restaurant in Kensington Church Street. They were going to call it Kensington Place and if I helped them start it up we would go on to do "my" restaurant a year or two later.
Time passed. I fell in love with Kensington Place and felt no reason to leave. In a sense - although I hadn't realised it at the time - this was the west London brasserie that I dreamt of, albeit in a determinedly modernist idiom. They made me a partner and the idea of doing something new was mooted and planned constantly: we looked at countless sites but, in truth, I don't think any of us wanted to leave Kensington Place.
Fast forward 19 years to 2006, and my partners had long since sold up. At long last, even I realised it was time to move on. I had looked at a few sites but it dawned on me that I needed a new partner: someone with a bit of energy who liked poring over a balance sheet; whose eyes did not glaze over when discussing break clauses in leases and who did not fall asleep in lawyers' meetings in City offices. Mackintosh had sold the Groucho Club and, among other interests, was helping a young man called Charlie McVeigh, who had had success with a Trustafarian nightclub called Woody's, with a pub and a restaurant in west London.
Coincidentally, McVeigh's mother lived about three miles from my mother-in-law on the wilds of Exmoor. He and I bumped into each other occasionally at parties and gossiped about restaurants. At one such event, a jive class at Hawkridge village hall, I was somewhat distracted and not giving my best to the spirit of the dance. I had seen a site the day before. Dominic Ford, an old golf and lunch crony, had called and told me I should look at the McDonald's in Whiteleys shopping centre, in Bayswater, where he was involved in setting up a food market. It would be an understatement to say I was sceptical. However, what I saw under the raised floor, above the lowered ceiling and beyond the twin arches was a simply stunning space. Not only was it very large, approaching 7,000 sq ft, it appeared to have a very high ceiling and to be surrounded by the most magnificent floor-to-ceiling art deco windows, which swamped the room with natural light. It was, clearly, a diamond shining in the rough and I could not wait to tell somebody about it.
I buttonholed McVeigh outside the village hall. He said he had promised his wife to have nothing to do with restaurants for at least five years. I said that I understood but would welcome his opinion. He came over to look, by which time the site was boarded up and Ronald had left the building. I talked about my vision, a wall of rotisseries, a comfortable bar, the huge room with banquettes breaking up the space and the long menu. I told him the landlord was very keen to get us on board and that they had already promised me a lift to give my customers direct access to the restaurant from street level. It did not take long before the boy was hooked. I explained what I needed from him. We decided to talk to Mackintosh.
Mackintosh did not seem very impressed. Queensway, whose cosmopolitan atmosphere I, through rose-tinted spectacles, had painted as a sort of Soho in the west, was seen by him as somewhat sleazy. We won't be in Queensway but above it, I argued. Difficult not being on the ground floor, argued Mackintosh. What a huge, wonderful room, I countered. Be a job filling it, came the reply. I thought I had lost him altogether until I noticed that at some point he had adopted the first person plural pronoun. We'll have to have a decent entrance; we'll have to get the mechanics and engineering right; we'll need to look after children and vegetarians. Underneath the Eeyorish exterior I could tell the pulses were racing: I did not dare to ask but I knew he, too, was smitten.
This was all back in the summer of 2006. In August I gave my notice at Kensington Place and went on holiday to the Dordogne. On the way we stopped to stay with some friends who had a house on the Cherbourg peninsula, and went out to a local restaurant in St-Jean-de-la-Rivière. The place was filled with large family groups and had an air of conviviality. At one end of the room was the elderly chef proprietor who was operating, like a priest at the altar, a wall of flame framed in an antique black iron framework with a decrepit and Heath Robinson-type system of gears, chains and spits. He moved chickens, ducks and ribs of beef around with a practised air and occasionally added more wood to the flames. I was spellbound.
The idea of a rotisserie-based restaurant had been marinading in my mind for a year or two. I had seen open-air rotisseries in Normandy villages and remarked on the conviviality they seemed to engender. Not only is spit-roasting the best way to roast meat but a bank of rotisseries would inject a theatrical element and offer a sense of communality that could not be replicated in the home. The chef in St-Jean-de-la-Rivière confirmed this: everyone in the restaurant seemed as mesmerised as I was, even if they were not quite so obsessive in their mental notetaking.
If the rotisserie was going to provide one theme to the restaurant, it seemed blindingly clear to me what the visual themes needed to be. The magnificent windows dictated a certain grandeur and an art deco theme throughout. I wanted to frame the windows with glamorous curtains, to seat my customers on soft leather banquettes and to introduce other elements from the grand Parisian brasseries. I needed an architect and we needed to do some research.
I had been talking to Mike Stiff of Stiff & Trevillion about an earlier project that had not come to fruition. I liked his portfolio for two reasons. He understood the organic structure of a restaurant, that it needed to be designed from the inside out and to be, paraphrasing Le Corbusier, "a machine for eating in". Although there were modernistic themes running through his work, it was clear that the thumbprint was light and that Stiff's restaurants took their identity from the buildings they were in and, above all, from the operator who had commissioned them. He had a collusive approach; this suited me well as I was determined to put my oar in.
McVeigh, Stiff and I spent two days in Paris, crawling around every brasserie and grand restaurant we could find. We burst in on the staff of Brasserie Flo, who were eating their breakfast but could not have been more welcoming. They were proud of the glorious interior and only too pleased to show it to us. We got in the way of waiters and customers alike as Le Vaudeville was getting into the throes of a busy lunchtime service. We ate greedily at Le Louchebem, the rotisserie diner in the old meat market, on oeufs en gelée, stuffed tomatoes and roast beef and ham. We took tea at Flore and Stiff sketched ideas for lights, mirrors and waiters' stations on the backs of envelopes. We ended up at midnight in La Coupole and lamented the tired condition of a great institution and the ghostly pallor cast by the late hour and unsympathetic lighting. By the time we had had a restorative lunch of oysters, herrings, choucroute and riesling at Lipp the next afternoon, we were replete.
We also needed some money. I talked to Neville Abraham. Having started at Café des Amis du Vin and run the Chez Gerard group in its heyday, Abraham is one of the doyens of the business. He and I had talked about my situation and one or two projects and he had been more than helpful. I showed him the site and he was keen. I introduced him to McVeigh and Mackintosh. We set about building a business plan. McVeigh led the charge, Mackintosh would scan pages of figures in three minutes and pick up the errors, while Abraham ran the department of lateral thinking. My brother, a lawyer, was drafted in to run the department of literal thinking.
It took until March this year to produce a business plan that satisfied us all. By that time McVeigh and I had had endless meetings with the landlords, with their lawyers, with our lawyers, with accountants and with banks. We ended up with an impressive Information Memorandum, which we then circulated among potential investors. Not much happened for a week. We showed a few people around the site and explained the transformation that was happening in Whiteleys, emphasising the unique position of having our own exclusive entrance. A couple of cheques arrived at the lawyers' office, the first coming from my old boss at Kensington Place, Nick Smallwood. The trickle became a torrent and by the time the door was closed on potential investors, we discovered that we were 50 per cent oversubscribed. It was a sad afternoon when, with an air of unreality, I wrote out cheques for half a million pounds giving my investors some of their money back.
The project was gathering momentum. Although the lease took an age to sign, the architects, Mike Stiff and Richard Blandy, were going full tilt. By now the room had been properly "defitted" and its true potential was revealed. The room divided itself comparatively easily. Ducting had to be removed and relocated down one side of the room, away from the windows, where we would accommodate the toilets, bar and kitchen. The main body of the room would remain unimpaired for the restaurant and a private dining room. We sketched in banquettes and waiter stations, graduating to elevations, finishes and intricate design details. Each week we would meet and the newest drawings would appear with the previous week's inspirations and revisions incorporated.
In March I went to an obscure industrial estate south of Paris to meet Jean-Pierre, Monsieur Rotisseur to the great chefs of Paris. We discussed my requirements and he explained the practical, aesthetic and ecological folly of trying to operate a wood-burning rotisserie. We set about designing a gas-fired unit that would service a 170-cover restaurant. The result is a magnificent black enamel altarpiece with chrome and bronze, dripping with chains and with the fire capacity of the Enola Gay.
From the menu point of view, the litany of game birds is a menu in itself: suffice it to say that if it flies, if it is shot and if it is palatable, there is little chance of it escaping this wall of flame. There will be the best Scotch beef, there will be Yorkshire veal, fat Gloucester Old Spot pork and lamb from every corner of the British Isles but it goes without saying that there must be chicken and that the chicken must be exceptional. We have taken measures to ensure that this is the case.
One or two wise voices have asked if we have used this piece of equipment before. The response, sadly, is negative but I know one thing: it is both a cooking tool and a thing of beauty and not one of my talented gang can wait to get their hands on it. The gang in question is a mixture of new and old: the hand at the tiller is Colin Westal, my apprentice at Le Poulbot in 1984, who has worked for me most of the time since.
By July, I had most of the team in place apart from the most important one, the general manager, the person that customers would entrust with their welfare, staff would respect and who would be able to curb any megalomania on the part of the chef proprietor. The sort of chap I needed would be like Graham Williams, who had steered Bibendum through a glorious decade in the 1990s, someone capable of gliding effortlessly across the pond that is a restaurant, however frantically their legs are pedalling beneath the surface. When I learnt that Williams was bored running his pub in Gloucestershire, I pounced.
If the juggernaut was slow to stir into life, by this time it had certainly gathered pace. The past three months of choosing a till system, organising computers and telephones, composing a wine list, recruiting staff, kitchen design, working out waiters' sections, toilets and lighting, selecting furniture, fabrics and finishes, sourcing ingredients, discussing PR, agreeing graphic design and the occasional lunch have gone by at lightning pace. A mere two weeks late, it looks like we are there and the result of these collective talents will be available for inspection at dress rehearsals on Thursday, prior to a full launch on November 19.
There was just one last contentious issue. Mackintosh approved everything but the name. I had thought long and hard and only Le Café Anglais appealed. The name had resonance and a noble history: Le Café Anglais was the great Parisian restaurant of the 19th century, the source of Pommes Anna and Sole Dugléré, the setting for the great Dinner of the Three Emperors, the place that served elephant during the Commune. It died in 1900, having been founded in 1815 after the battle of Waterloo.
Eventually, Mackintosh was persuaded. Perhaps he liked one description of the old Café Anglais: "A l'extérieur rien qui attire l'œil, pas de dorures éclatantes, d'éclairage éblouissant, la façade est roide et renfrognée comme une naturelle des îles Britanniques. Cependant cet établissement possède une réputation européenne." There will be nothing "roide et renfrognée" about our interior but I like the tone.
One last detail: we have got our phone number. First Waterloo, now Agincourt, and all within a few weeks of drubbing the old enemy at le rugby anglais.
info@lecafeanglais.co.uk Le Café Anglais, 8 Porchester Gardens, London W2, tel: +44 (0)20 7221 1415On the menu
If money and design were the day jobs in this period - and filing the odd column for the FT - menus were the evening work. I wrote menus for every month from July onwards as our start date kept being delayed. I wrote and rewrote, closed the file and then came back again to a new month and a new menu. It looks like we've ended up with November but certain key areas have remained constant: a long list of hors d'oeuvres, served in small portions to be shared either as starters or as little appetisers before the meal.
Dreaming up such titbits, all to be delivered at one price, is endless joy, whether it be a few pimientos de Padrón, some rabbit pâté or a rather intriguing Parmesan custard with anchovy toasts. First courses range from Arbroath smokies to a veal tartare with white truffles, and there are seven or eight fish dishes, served with sauces or absolutely plain. Then the rotisserie section takes over.