British restaurant correspondents who have looked on enviously as
their football colleagues have filled their weekly columns detailing
the spending splurges of Russian billionaire Roman Abramovich at
Chelsea Football Club now have their own mysterious millionaire to
write about.
He is Marlon Abela, 29, who for the past five years has been buying
fine wine on a grand scale at Christie’s, Sotheby's and across Europe
and has subsequently spent several more millions on two London
restaurants, The Greenhouse and the private members’ club Morton’s
which he has recently re-opened close to one another in Mayfair. A
third, and his first Japanese restaurant, Umu, will open close by in
Bruton Place in July.
This is the British division of his restaurant company, MARC,
(Marlon Abela Restaurant Corporation). Over in the US this company has
one restaurant at the moment, Gaia (the Goddess of Mother Earth) in
Greenwich, Connecticut, but this number will definitely grow quickly if
Abela has his way. Here he and his chef, Bjorn van der Horst (formerly
with Alain Ducasse and at New York’s Picholine) have pioneered a new
style of cooking and presenting certain dishes in jars which, according
to the trustworthy reviewers I have read, definitely enhances flavours
particularly of slow cooked dishes.
If this is the beginning of a new restaurant empire then Abela is
reluctant to talk about it. When I met him at Morton’s he looked rather
anxiously at his protective PR and explained that he had been advised
against mentioning this particular phrase and that rather he wanted to
concentrate on just how fortunate his formative years had been. “ We
grew up in the south of France with a Lebanese cook and probably the
best produce in the world all around us. This is the background that
drives me today - to imbue my restaurants with the same quality and my
staff with the knowledge to deliver all this to our customers.”
Abela’s late father made his money in oil trading and foodservice
(the Albert Abela Corporation was sold by his heirs to Sodexho for
US$900 million in 1999 ) and it is this money which his son is now
putting to a more hedonistic end. But there is no doubt that his son
has particularly good taste in food and wine as well as the
appreciation that the very top tier of the restaurant business does not
generate quick returns. “ We are in this for the long term,” he
repeated more than once and quite happily as though relishing the long
sequence of tastings that this will involve him in.
There is no doubting too from an objective point of view that Arbela
has pinpointed an opportunity in the London restaurant market. Despite
the current large number of restaurant openings there has been very
little new at the top end and at the moment the usual suspects - The
Square, Le Gavroche, Locanda Locatelli, The Capital Hotel - are
extremely busy and very difficult to get into unless you are a regular
customer. Sketch, which fans of chef Pierre Gagnaire looked forward to,
has only delivered ridiculously high prices while the newly upgraded
hotel restaurants are long on formality but short on glamour.
This may of course be the case because the demand for such
restaurants is gradually disappearing as we seek more casual but still
refined arenas such as The Wolesley and Cipriani whose presence on
either side of the Arbela trio may delay his restaurant’s eventual
profitability. But having invested so heavily and with the rumours
circulating that he is looking at even more London sites, Arbela , on
the evening I met him, seemed more concerned about fine tuning the
temperamental lighting in Morton’s first floor restaurant overlooking
Berkeley Square than contemplating when or even whether a definite
return on his significant investment will materialise.
It is easy to see where the millions have been spent as both the
dining rooms at The Greenhouse and Morton’s exude comfort and luxury
without being overtly ostentatious. Service from a predominantly young
staff is formal but friendly and the style of service, without those
now out dated cloches, is absolutely correct. As much attention has
been put into hiring the right staff too with award winning sommelier
James Payne an obvious coup.
Almost everything we ate from a kitchen that was barely a month old
was very good too with dishes that comprised excellent ingredients,
originality and great flavours. Two fish starters were excellent: a
tartar of wild sea bass with Sevruga caviar and blinis and seared diver
caught Scottish scallops with an artichoke pure<acute>e. A piece
of turbot was precisely cooked with asparagus , morels and the now de
rigeur foamy sauce; a generous Perigord duck breast with spiced dahl
and a crisp samosa ; and a clever dessert offered light millefeuille
filled with either vanilla, caramel or strawberries. The onslaught of
extra dishes before and after dessert made it even more difficult to
reconcile the fact that the meal had begun with an entirely
inappropriate and amateurish deep fried ball of Brie.
The wine lists defy criticism. They combine width and depth - there
are over 2,000 different bins in each restaurant - all kept in
specially air-cooled, expensively crafted units - and they include not
just the obvious but also such hard to find wines as red burgundies
from Dugat-Py at reasonable mark-ups. A magnum of 1982 Haut-Brion which
seemed to give a great deal of pleasure to seven animated Frenchmen and
women was on the list at <sterling>1,100 less than double its
retail cost, once VAT has been removed, via www.winesearcher.com
One restaurateur friend has already calculated that the
<sterling>800 membership fee to Morton’s will be less than the
savings he will make by taking advantage of Abela’s long term buying
and friendly pricing strategies.
Abela is now concentrating all his efforts into Umu where he claims
the raw ingredients will be of the same unimpeachable quality. Here
too, another young chef, Ichiro Kubota, whose father is a highly
respected chef in Kyoto, will be given the opportunity to flourish
under the Abela patronage.
Restaurants, unlike football teams, do not compete in leagues or
knock out competitions so Abela’s millions may not make quite the same
impact as Abramovich’s. But his standards are impeccably high and his
vision admirably long term which can only be to the benefit of anyone
eating out in London.
Mortons , 28 Berkeley Square, 020-7499 0363, closed Sundays.
The Greenhouse, 27A Hay’s Mews, 020-7499 3331, closed Saturday lunch and Sunday
Gaia, 253 Greenwich Avenue, Connecticut, 203-661 3443.
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