Anybody who is interested in opening a restaurant, anywhere, would be well advised to read the email which Gavin Rankin, the man who opened Bellamy’s restaurant on the popular Mayfair mews Bruton Place almost 20 years ago, sent out at 16.42 on Friday 7 June this year. The relevant bit of his email is reproduced below.*
There is one important fact missing, however, from this account, which explains Rankin’s success, and that of Didier Garnier, his fellow restaurateur and the owner of the equally admirable Le Colombier in London’s Chelsea to whom Rankin refers in the email. It’s simply the number of years Rankin and Garnier have spent perfecting their art.
Rankin is 67 and has spent the past 40 years in the hospitality business epitomising the art of the restaurateur. Always smartly dressed in shirt, tie and jacket complete with pocket handkerchief and, invariably, a smile bordering on a grin, Rankin exudes charm and bonhomie. But Bellamy’s is far from a one-man show. He is the first to acknowledge that running any restaurant successfully is first and foremost the result of nurturing ‘one big, happy family’.
Rankin began as a caviar salesman before being instructed by the Paris-based Caviar Kaspia to open a restaurant on the site that would later become Bellamy’s. Five years later he was poached by the late Mark Birley – ‘a man with a laser-beam eye for detail’, according to Rankin whose restaurant’s bar is overlooked by a picture of Birley (left of Rankin in our main image) – to be the managing director of his group of private clubs, Annabel’s, Harry’s Bar and George. Eleven years later, in late 2004, having recruited Stéphane Pacoud, then the sous chef at Annabel’s, and Luigi Burgio, the club’s barman, Rankin opened Bellamy’s, the name borrowed from Evelyn Waugh’s Sword of Honour trilogy.
Not a great deal seems to have changed over the past couple of decades. You no longer enter the restaurant through a shop, but through a busy ‘oyster bar’ (albeit with a far more extensive menu than that name implies) during the day which becomes a cocktail bar in the evening. There are posters of the good life everywhere (Rankin is in partnership with Simon Berry, ex Berry Bros & Rudd, in a small poster business). The lighting is low, everywhere is a feeling of subdued, very British, elegance.
Our party of six, which included four Americans, was seated at a comfortable round table and handed the menu (which changes with the season but precisely when is becoming increasingly difficult to pinpoint, according to Rankin) with the wine list on the reverse. The menu manages to be both clear and colourful, broken down into green type at the top for vegetarian dishes, black and red for most others, including a £38 three-course table d’hôte menu, and finishing with a range of fish and meat courses, and vegetable dishes which included the highly seasonal broad beans, carefully shelled, pictured below with the Dover sole and pommes vapeur behind.
It was a few days afterwards when I finally realised what a fabulous document this menu is, and how vastly different it is from most other London menus. It is vast by comparison: no fixed-price tasting menu, no mixture of just six starters and six main courses, and many a classic dish. Not a tweezered arrangement in sight. This is a truly comprehensive menu that allows the customer full rein: there is even a choice within the table d’hôte!
The dishes range from a chilled avocado and crab soup via an iced lobster souffle and fish fingers to a salad of calf’s trotters. For main courses there is beetroot tartare, monkfish ‘à la planche’, Dover sole, picatta of veal and entrecôte of Baynards Park beef with pommes frites. And all at reasonable prices, even allowing for the £3 per person cover charge. There is no dish over the £40 mark, as is all too common in many London restaurants in much less expensive neighbourhoods than Bellamy’s. Our bill for six came to £975 including a bottle of Domaine Émilian Gillet’s 2021 Viré-Clessé (£80) and two 2016s: a Chassagne-Montrachet La Platière from Domaine des Terres de Velle (£165) and a rather delicious Dame de Montrose St-Estèphe (£125).
I was able to choose three dishes which I could remember enjoying for the very first time in my life. Devilled whitebait (deep-fried sprats) with a tartare sauce I first enjoyed on the Isle of Man as a golf-playing teenager. Calves’ liver was the dish I used to cook when supervising the brasserie section of L’Escargot in the 1980s. And îles flottantes, my favourite French dessert, I was introduced to in a restaurant in St-Brieuc, Brittany in the 1970s. I will happily return for the omelette Basquaise or ravioles du Royans, a cheesy Dauphiné speciality.
It was this sense of nostalgia that made me choose the îles flottantes above but I could have chosen any of the eight listed, a list that manages to combine the comforting with the stimulating. The creamy salted caramel ice cream was a superlative rendition of this now-common dessert. Most unusual is what is described as Marina’s chocolate cake, made by Gavin Rankin’s 92-year-old mother who manages to bake 10 cakes a week to the same moist, high standard.
The wine list has changed in detail if not in principle. ‘It is entirely French’, Rankin explained, ‘with the addition of the Klein Constantia [Vin de Constance] from South Africa I still buy from seven suppliers’. There are fewer bargains on the list than in 2005 when I first reviewed Bellamy’s (Ch Trotanoy 1983 was £78; Ch Cheval Blanc 1982 a ‘steal’ at £650). After our dinner for six, Rankin pointed out that wine prices have risen considerably, and that consumers are becoming much more budget-conscious. ‘Increasingly, we are finding that customers are reading the wine list from right to left, from the price to the wine.’
Another trend Rankin has noticed is the unpredictability of demand as customers book later and later. ‘Gone are the days when I would be chatting to a fellow restaurateur and we would be bullshitting one another about the hundreds of customers we had served the previous evening’, he commented. In particular he pointed the finger of blame on the late Tory government who have alienated the wealthy by failing to repeal VAT exemption on the restaurant industry and imposing the inconveniences of Brexit on it while ignoring its benefits and financial contributions.
These are Gavin Rankin’s private opinions. Professionally, he will not be deterred from his goal of running a restaurant that he loves. From serving the style of food and wine that he and his team have now defined as quintessentially their own. And in a manner that is increasingly rare: of quiet service that is smooth and drama-free. Another 20 years for Bellamy’s, please.
Bellamy’s 18 Bruton Place, London W1J 6LY; tel: +44 020 7491 2727. Closed Saturdays and Sundays
*Gavin Rankin's most recent newsletter
I recently lunched with my great friend Didier Garnier who owns the splendid Le Colombier restaurant in Dovehouse Street, Chelsea. Our philosophies are firmly aligned, and we expanded on these – not in some dreary nostalgic recollection of days past, but rather on how we feel about today and tomorrow.
We both agree that to avoid sameness, menus should reflect the seasons to allow for the arrival of asparagus, lamb, oysters, lobster, grouse, partridge, melon, fraises des bois, tomatoes, mushrooms and truffles although not, sadly, any longer for gulls’ eggs which were supplied under licence. (Anyone visiting Britain’s coasts would be amazed to learn that black-headed gulls are an endangered species – more like endangering). For the rest we just need really good ingredients. A lot easier before the flat-earthers took us into Brexit but we do what we can.
Didier and I are both the ‘responsables’ of single establishments in which we try to keep alive the principle of ‘le patron mange ici’ thereby ensuring a constant presence. The sincere welcome, uncluttered by bossy girls with clipboards and tight smiles, is crucial and without it there is no soul and nobody is proud – like an empty house. Or a chain restaurant. We both dislike places that greet people with ‘hello guys’ which does not say much for any woman you might be with. We do like quick, efficient, service by willing, silent staff who top our wine glasses up – but do not fill them – and anticipate what may be needed. We like a drink on our arrival to appear within five minutes, or less, of being ordered. We do not like to be asked if everything is alright. We do not like music (except in bars) which, generally, is played only in pursuit of some ersatz atmosphere. Nobody is ever going to say let’s go to Bellamy’s and listen to some fab background music.
We have no time for places seemingly run by accountants obsessed by percentages, whose automotive reaction to any difficulty is an immediate increase in price rather than a closer examination of fixed costs. Restaurants have become way too expensive, and Didier often drinks water when out rather than buy wines which can start at an offensive £70. We both have wine lists which we compose with great care, from various sources, with house wines at around £30 and no snooty sommeliers upselling like crazy. Besides, everybody reads wine lists from right to left. They say to themselves ‘OK, this is my budget, so what have they got, plus or minus a few quid?’
We also take great pride in our staff, who are the lifeblood of our businesses, and are both blessed with managers who are gifted at forming teams that all seem to like each other. Mine celebrate each other’s birthdays and regularly socialise as a group. Some have worked in restaurants for years, others less so, but all are invested.
And, most of all, we love our customers. Bellamy’s is twenty years old this year and has only survived due to the kindness and generosity of our regulars who kept us going in the bad days of lockdown, as well as in times of greater merriment. Some have been with us since the beginning of our journey, some, at the insistence of nature, are no longer with us, and some are still to join. We shall be finding various ways in the coming months to celebrate our China Anniversary and do hope that as many of you as possible will be able to join us. Above all, we never forget, to quote Tancredi, ‘Everything must change for everything to remain the same’ - so we have got bigger ice cubes and repainted the outside.
All of us, including Chef Stéphane; Manager Luigi; Assistant Managers Eyub and Cosmin; and Cheryl, Queen of the Oyster Bar; much look forward to welcoming you back soon.
Every Sunday, Nick writes about restaurants. To stay abreast of his reviews, sign up for our weekly newsletter.
