At the end of a disappointing lunch at Marceline, a recently opened and rather quiet French brasserie in London’s business district Canary Wharf, I had my bill (£118.13 for two) and my credit card ready. But we were unable to attract the attention of anyone with the crucial card machine.
One of the three staff was talking to another table. A second was wiping down tabletops. And a third was busy looking at her screen. I finally had to get up and walk over to her, but not before my guest pronounced, ‘I wish all my staff were here to see this. It’s an object lesson in how not to run a restaurant.’
My guest spoke with some authority. He is Will Smith, 56, who has spent the past 35 years in hospitality since an initial apprenticeship with Swallow Hotels and a word of warning from his mother who had also worked in hospitality. ‘It’s very hard work with very long hours’, Smith recalled her saying but it does not seem to have put him off.
Smith, born in Gloucestershire, moved initially from the Balmoral Hotel, where a busy Saturday night saw 50 customers, to L’Odéon on Regent Street (now Hawksmoor) where his initial ‘quiet’ Monday lunch was for 90. There he met Anthony Demetre, the highly talented chef, and they hit it off professionally, before moving on to Putney Bridge restaurant together. They then went on to open Arbutus in Soho; Wild Honey in Mayfair; before taking on the far-too-big space which they ran as Les Deux Salons near Charing Cross. Issues with their financial backers followed and Smith then disappeared from London completely.
Fortunately he did not leave hospitality. Smith followed his Scottish-born wife Lynn, a primary-school teacher, to a restaurant-with-rooms close to Loch Lomond and opened the Sugar Boat, named after a wreck nearby. There he tried to replicate some of the complex dishes for which Arbutus had been so well known but that was not to be. ‘We have had to bring it down several notches. Now it is extremely successful’, Smith explained about his restaurant that is now less ‘fancy’.
Then last March Smith returned to London, leaving his Scottish restaurant in the capable hands of a manageress, now a shareholder who is also a convert to hospitality. He was to become the general manager of Joséphine Bouchon, opened by chef Claude Bosi and his wife Lucy.
When recently I walked into the smart corner site on Fulham Road, there was Smith, waiting at the reception. He does not seem to have changed. He was wearing a smart cardigan and an open-necked shirt; his smile was constant. For the next 90 minutes he was everywhere: escorting guests to their table; squeezing past tables to assist the commis waiters bringing up trays of food from the basement kitchen; and quietly surveying the dining room, which seats 60, as the lunch service began to be slightly less busy.
Despite this calm exterior, Smith, once we had ordered, confessed to feeling under the cosh. ‘When Claude first contacted me a year ago when he heard that I was considering moving back to London, one of the first things we discussed was the restaurant’s opening hours. Claude is a terrific chef and he has an excellent focus on his customers and the economics of a restaurant but it was me who said that if we are paying rent 24/7 then we better be open for every lunch and dinner service. I had no idea that the response would be as enthusiastic as it has been and this means that we are serving about 1,200 customers a week. That leaves me with a lot of shifts to fill’, he finished ruefully.
The food and the service at Joséphine are definitely in vogue. The food is solid, traditional lyonnaise in style. I enjoyed quenelle de brochet and skate with a caper sauce (above), my host a salade lyonnaise and brill with a sauce vierge. With this I made the great mistake of ordering a dish of gratin dauphinoise for the two of us. This (below) was as good as any I have ever encountered but contained so much cream that I had to pass on anything sweet to follow.
The service was friendly and attentive while the walls of the dining room showed that somebody had had a great deal of fun visiting the antique shops and vide-greniers of France.
The wine list is excellent, predominantly French. On my return at dinner we drank a bottle of 2022 Fleurie from Julien Sunier for £81 under the watchful eye of their Italian sommelier Paolo Tabacchi. (The lunch bill for two had come to £156.40, the dinner bill was £205.33.) JR especially recommends the French onion soup.
That London today has added Joséphine Bouchon to a rapidly growing list of friendly restaurants with good-quality cooking, enjoyable wine lists and relaxed service is in small way due to the opening back in 2006 by Demetre and Smith of Arbutus in Soho which in an FT article in later 2006 I described as serving ‘great-value, strong flavoured cooking and a cracking wine list’. How, I asked Smith, had Arbutus’ ethos come about?
‘The idea was quite simple’, came Smith’s response. ‘One evening Anthony Demetre and I went out to eat at Pétrus when Marcus Wareing was cooking there and I can remember saying to Anthony that the food was excellent but I’m sure would be even more widely appreciated if it didn’t come with all the unnecessary paraphernalia and nobody felt that to get in you had to dress up. So that was what we aimed for at Arbutus and we set something much bigger in motion, I believe.
‘There has been one significant change over this period too’, Smith mused, ‘the practice of customers ordering dishes to share. Two or three starters between four and say three main courses with some sides. It has taken me quite a while to get used to this notion – I am not a sharer, personally – but I think it has broadened the skills range necessary, something else for a good waiter to be adept at.’
It is this ever-expanding range of skills, and their ultra-flexible nature, which has met in Smith’s nature a fellow soulmate. ‘Even after 30 odd years in this business I still get tense before a busy service, but the nature of the work and its demands, continues to appeal. I am not great on my own but put me in as part of a team and I believe I am a different person. There’s a dopamine rush from seeing people enjoying themselves. Plus there’s the physical exertion. On a busy day, with lunch and dinner I can notch up 15 to 20 thousand steps.’
And all this in an industry that has changed enormously for the better since 2022 in the aftermath of COVID. ‘Bullying is a thing of the past. Staff now are far too valuable to offend. Pay rates are higher and nobody has to work the crazy long hours that were the norm when I started. The opportunities for travel overseas are amazing. Nor is age a limiting factor. Nobody’, concluded Smith with a wide smile, ‘is ever going to tell me when to retire.’
Joséphine Bouchon 315 Fulham Road, London SW10 9QH; tel: +44 (0)20 7052 4662
Every Sunday, Nick writes about restaurants. To stay abreast of his reviews, sign up for our weekly newsletter.
