The Galvin brothers reflect

It is always fun eating in any restaurant with a chef. Watching Chris Galvin neatly dissect a piece of grilled bread topped with anchovies into three, and then doing the same with a whole John Dory at Brat restaurant in London, was fascinating. As was watching his brother, Jeff, another chef, stir together a pot full of grilled squid and sobrasada rice (pictured below). ‘Extremely tasty’ was his description of our meal, along with the undeniable fact that all the dishes in our lunch were ‘very wine-friendly’.

This meal was a rerun of a lunch that took place just over 20 years ago after the brothers Galvin had invited me to lunch. The location of that first lunch was my old restaurant, L’Escargot, where Chris had cooked in the late 1980s and Jeff had been head chef from 2000 to 2005, after I’d sold it.

Their reason for that first lunch was because they had decided that the time was right for them to open their own restaurant and they believed that they had found the ideal location at 66 Baker Street. The site, which had already been converted into a restaurant, came with one major concern that, quite rightly, bothered them a great deal. It had traded for seven months as Anda, an Italian restaurant conceived of by the almost magically successful restaurateur Alan Yau before it closed. Was the location doomed to failure, they wanted to know, and what did I think of their chances of success?

I encouraged them to go ahead. Very few locations are doomed, I argued, and I knew that they would put their heart and soul – as well as a combination of their highly accomplished knowledge of French cooking – into making this restaurant a great success. Galvin Bistrot de Luxe was born in 2005. (It closed in 2018, after 12 years of successful trading, when the landlords tried to triple the rent. It sat empty for the next seven years.)

This second lunch occurred in the week in which the Galvins celebrated their twentieth anniversary as chef-proprietors with a dinner at Galvin La Chapelle restaurant. Time may have had some small effects but I found their enthusiasm for cooking, for looking after their customers, for the ingredients they handle, and for their profession which they have collectively been in for an astonishing 90 years, completely undimmed.

Today, the brothers can be found in one of three kitchens: at the Michelin-starred Galvin La Chapelle, close to London’s Liverpool Street station; at the bistrot and wine bar next door; or at the Green Man, a pub with a large restaurant attached just outside Chelmsford, Essex.

At their height, the brothers were responsible for 14 restaurants as distinctive as Galvin at Windows in the Hilton on Park Lane (with another Michelin star); a café in Harrods; a restaurant in the Athenaeum hotel; a couple of restaurants in Edinburgh and two more restaurants in Dubai, in an era when they employed over 800 staff. Today, that number is just over 100.

Their collective approach to caring for what they cook and how their customers are looked after was fixed from an early age. ‘Our grandmother always had a stew on the stove’, Chris explained. ‘We are a big family, with 46 cousins and a large garden full of vegetables and fruit which she taught us how to pick.’ After their father left home when Chris was 15 and Jeff was only four, Chris sought employment and knocked on the door of a restaurant whose chef was Antony Worrall Thompson and for whose restaurant in New York he went on to cook in 1986.

When I asked Chris whether his father’s departure had a detrimental effect on the three brothers (David is in between Chris and Jeff), Chris replied honestly, ‘Yes, but for our mother (who died last year aged 92). And I think it determined my outlook on life, which is to work hard and be kind.’

Chris was heavily influenced by chefs such as Martin Lam and Paul Gayler at the Lanesborough Hotel before opening Orrery restaurant for the late restaurateur Sir Terence Conran and then opening The Wolseley. Jeff, who had excelled at maths under Miss Barker, a teacher he recalled with affection, had fallen under the aegis initially of the late Nico Ladenis followed by long stints for Marco Pierre White, beginning at The Oak Room in Le Meridien hotel before moving on to L’Escargot.

The timing of the brothers’ culinary education explains their unstinting faithfulness to French food. Every single Galvin menu since they started cooking together is a combination of the best of that season’s ingredients cooked in the French tradition. When a French teacher at the Felsted School in Essex asked him why he cooked in such a distinctly French manner, Chris’s response was, ‘When I started in hotel kitchens in London in the 1980s, that was the only style of cooking that was then being taught.’

I wondered whether the fact that both brothers had become chefs had been an obstacle. Would it have been better had one of them become a restaurateur? ‘I don’t believe so’, replied Chris. ‘I think we complement each other.’ And have they ever quarrelled? ‘I don’t believe so’, came Jeff’s response. And how would they feel about starting all over again today as chefs? ‘I think the market is obviously far more crowded today than it was even 20 years ago. But I would like the challenge immensely’, said Chris, despite today being 68, Jeff a young 57. ‘And cost prices and menu prices have changed a great deal, too. Look at this menu: £180 for a 1.8-kilogram turbot! I’m sure this will feed quite a few, but it’s a lot of money.’ 

Their careers have undoubtedly been helped greatly by the fact that since the outset, each brother has owned a third of their restaurants with the remaining third owned by Ken Sanker, a paternalistic financier. Chris described Sanker as their ‘moral compass’ and explained how they had followed his advice since the beginning. ‘“Begin inexpensively”, he would say, and then as we accumulated, we ploughed all the profits back into the business’, Chris remembered. ‘He’s been a fantastic source of external advice and I will never forget one saying of his: “Don’t tell me about the losers, about the restaurants that have closed. I just want to hear about those that are successful.”’

Jeff also had recollections of the early days of Bistrot de Luxe. ‘It involved about forty nights when we slept on the banquettes in the restaurant and never went home. We used to do everything, including the washing up. And then early in the morning we would head off to the markets, a role that today is fulfilled by David, our brother. I have even put on a bow tie to work in front of house.’

It has been a great help that as well as being formally educated in cooking French food, they each have a deep love of the French brasserie and all that this phrase conjures up. ‘We both love the rawness of a brasserie, its complete lack of pretension.’ The talk then turned to Paris and to the market at Rungis which they continue to visit a couple of times a year just to see what is coming into season. Their latest recommendation was for Brasserie Lazare, where Eric Frechon, who once held three Michelin stars at Paris’s Hotel Bristol, is today in charge of the kitchens.

Towards the end of lunch, the brothers turned philosophical. ‘The restaurant business is a fantastic business when you think of all that it has survived over the past 20 years: recessions, the Gulf War, COVID, the Ukraine war … and today more people are fascinated by going out to eat in restaurants than ever before. It has been very good to us and to our children, collectively five sons and one daughter, who have all worked in one of our restaurants at some stage.’

Both brothers seem keen on leaving a legacy over and above their restaurants. Chris is a visiting professor at Birkbeck at the University of London where the night before he had given a lecture on creative concepts. And both were delighted when our Brazilian waiter, having asked whether we were in the restaurant business and learning of the brothers’ surname, responded that he had had his first date with his partner at Galvin Bistrot & Bar.

But there is always the present, and after Chris had ordered the burnt cheesecake-and-apricot dessert and we had all enjoyed it, he said to his brother, ‘You know how they cook these? First in the wood-fired oven, then in the Rational [oven]. It’s terrific – and who doesn’t like custard?’, he finished with a smile.

For details of all the Galvins’ restaurants, go to www.galvinrestaurants.com.

Every Sunday, Nick writes about restaurants. To stay abreast of his reviews, sign up for our weekly newsletter.

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Nick Lander