I have known and respected French chef Claude Bosi over the past 20 years and, most importantly, invariably enjoyed all of the dishes cooked by him.
The first time was in Ludlow, Shropshire, where Bosi initially made his name with the relatively humble Hibiscus restaurant. Then I met him again as he was about to open Hibiscus on Maddox Street in London’s West End. It closed in 2016 before Bosi moved on and into Bibendum restaurant in 2017. As well as cooking there, Bosi also opened Brooklands restaurant in the new Peninsula Hotel in London and has opened two less expensive outposts: the extremely busy Joséphine Bouchon on the Fulham Road and the very closely related Joséphine Bistro on Blandford Street in Marylebone.
Of those six restaurants, he has won two Michelin stars at four of them: Hibiscus in Ludlow and Hibiscus, Bibendum and Brooklands in London. As he has recently been in the news over the closure a fortnight ago of Bibendum restaurant, Bosi seemed the ideal candidate to answer a question that has been bothering me for some time: is the two-star award in the Michelin guide the kiss of death for aspiring chefs and their restaurants? Does it signify a restaurant with three stars that had seen better days? Or is it a sign of a truly ambitious chef about to hit the big time? Was there extra pressure for chefs promoted to a two Michelin star attribution?
Bosi is definitely a round peg in a round hole. He grew up in the family restaurant just outside Lyons in France where he was heavily influenced by his Italian grandmother. ‘Over lunch we would talk about what we were going to have for dinner’, Bosi recalled when we met up recently at Joséphine Bistro, ‘a preoccupation that at first rather shocked my English wife when I took her home for the first time.’ (Not surprisingly, his wife was also working in the restaurant business when they met). Bosi’s younger brother Cedric is also in the restaurant business and together they run a couple of pubs in the UK. Equally importantly, Claude looks the part of a happy French chef with a ready smile, an ample girth and a willingness to talk.
My question about the two stars threw him a little at first but he soon replied. ‘I have never felt any extra pressure about having two stars’, he replied. ‘I obviously considered it a great compliment when I received them on each occasion. I think that actually it is far more challenging for any chef to go from one star to two stars than it is to go from two to the ultimate three stars. The inspectors have intimated to me that there are far more boxes that need to be ticked to move any restaurant from one to two than there are to move it from two to three. There are, I believe, not that many things left to take a restaurant to the ultimate three stars but that is a goal I have not quite reached. Yet.’
Asked what was behind his very surprising decision to close his two-star restaurant at Bibendum and its ground-floor Oyster Bar, Bosi responded, ‘The situation is complicated because the lease is held by members of the Conran and Hamlyn families and I do not want to jeopardise anything or antagonise anybody.’
The stylish Bibendum restaurant was opened in 1987 by the late Sir Terence Conran together with the late Paul Hamlyn in what Londoners know as the Michelin Building since it was once the London headquarters of the tyre company. It was always a thrill to walk up the stairs to the glamorous restaurant on the first floor.
It was also the first restaurant I encountered where the food element in the bill was over £100 for two! It was immensely successful, the throughput of customers enjoying the Oyster Bar on the ground floor buttressing any empty tables upstairs – although Bosi did say that this year the upstairs restaurant had seen a drop-off in numbers. Last week, the whole building looked sad. The Conran Shop on the ground floor is also closed; only the flower shop at the front is still open. Most of the lights in the building are off.
Bosi explained, ‘Although this is a building that looks wonderful from the outside and from the interior if you are a customer, what the restaurant trade refers to as “back of house” was inadequate and getting worse. The kitchen staff needed a lot more space; the restaurant staff were having to store tables in the flower shop, and because it had originally been built as Michelin House, it included a tyre-fitting bay and a place where motorists could plan their journeys. The services [for a restaurant] were inadequate. The one downpipe for the lavatories and kitchen would overflow from time to time and the electricity supply was never sufficient. We tried to negotiate but sadly that failed and when it did I had no option but to close. It’s a beautiful building and one that needs to be looked after.
‘That’s the thing’, he continued, ‘if you’re a chef, when you get up in the morning, you need to be focused on cooking, on preparing the best ingredients to the best of your ability, and on looking after your guests. You don’t want to be distracted by matters that really most chefs are simply not trained to deal with. It doesn’t do your brain or your heart any favours.’
Bosi attributes the success of his restaurant group to the team he works with. ‘There is Francesco Dibenedetto, the executive chef at Brooklands, and the highly experienced André Garrett, who is now culinary director of the two Joséphine bistros, who run what are busy kitchens on a day-to-day basis. Our budget for last Saturday in Marylebone was 300 customers over breakfast, lunch and dinner, and they served more than 400! And then we are lucky enough to have Will Smith as our general manager, a man who can keep us all in check, as well as all our customers, while keeping a permanent smile on his face.’ Bosi ended with a smile of his own.
So what of the future for Bosi? ‘I don’t think that there will be any more Joséphine Bistros for a while’, Bosi said. ‘Both are extremely busy and I would like that to continue of course and also to allow Garrett to settle in comfortably. The kitchens are not enormous in either restaurant so the process of being set up for breakfast, then a busy lunch and then an even busier dinner service requires a lot of organisation. But we will keep pushing at Brooklands where the hotel is extremely supportive and there is a chance that we could secure that third star.’
With that Bosi drained his espresso, we shook hands, said our farewells and he was off.
Brooklands by Claude Bosi The Peninsula, 1 Grosvenor Place, London SW1X 7HJ; tel: +44 (0)208 138 6888
Joséphine Bouchon 314A Fulham Road, London SW10 9QH; tel: +44 (0)20 7052 4662
Joséphine Bistro 6–8 Blandford St, London W1U 4AU
Every Sunday, Nick writes about restaurants. To stay abreast of his reviews, sign up for our weekly newsletter.
