At seven o’clock on a Tuesday evening, Sune restaurant by the canal in nether Hackney, East London, was as busy as any good London restaurant. The place was crowded, almost full. The clientele were mostly young couples, one with a dog. They all seemed extremely happy and the noise level was rising quickly.
At the far end of the room, unusually by the front door, is an open kitchen – at which it is possible to say hello and goodbye to the chefs – with two aisles leading through the room. Most unusually, both owners of the restaurant approached our table, one down each aisle, at the same time.
From the left appeared smiling Honey Spencer, 37, and from the right her husband Charlie Sims, 35. They are the parents of five-year-old Leonard, and of Ernest, to be born sometime in March, and are fellow restaurateurs in this 15-month-old enterprise.
Readers may recognise Spencer’s name from Tam’s enthusiastic review of her book, Natural Wine, No Drama. Some may have come across Spencer and Sims during their extensive past experience in restaurants which include Sager + Wilde and Palomar in London, Noma in Copenhagen and Jamie Oliver’s Fifteen, where they first met.
They appeared a little nervous – perhaps natural when meeting a table comprised of JR and another female MW – but that nervousness vanished when they heard that we were thirsty. My thirst was temporarily assuaged by a glass of sherry while my companions discussed the list of hand-picked minimal-intervention wines. In the end, with Spencer’s help, we ordered a bottle of Schödl’s 2023 Free Your Mind, a skin-fermented blend of Grüner Veltliner, Scheurebe and Gelber Muskateller from Austria that we didn’t particularly enjoy. Perhaps our minds were not free enough. More satisfying was António Madeira’s excellent white Dão, one of Julia’s wines of the week.
We very much enjoyed the food. The menu is not that novel or groundbreaking but all that we ate was extremely well executed. We began with fleshy Carlingford oysters with a pomelo vinaigrette before moving on to plates of burrata, anchovies, super-satisfying little cushions of bread with horseradish cream and chives, squid skewers and a beef tartare. I enjoyed a piece of pollock with some grilled potatoes and we finished with their own delicious, almost oversize, chocolate truffles. I paid my bill of £370 for the three of us with a great deal of satisfaction.
My professional curiosity was piqued. Husband-and-wife combinations are not that common in the restaurant business. There is, of course, the model of the French chef and his wife out front; perhaps of a chef and a sommelier; but a married couple working together in the same role in a relatively small restaurant is far from common. This Spencer-and-Sims partnership seemed to me to be a first, so a week later I sat down between the two of them at 64 Goodge Street.
They seemed to be normal, loving, considerate human beings, with Sims’ mother a successful cafe owner in Portsmouth for 20 years and Spencer’s mother a talented domestic cook. While Sims began in hospitality at 16, Spencer studied marketing at university before they joined Jamie Oliver’s Fifteen and then set their hearts on a few years in Australia.
But in 2014 two Danish women began talking to Spencer about natural wine, its pleasures and the fact that it had ‘captured’ Copenhagen. She was intrigued and, although they had Australian visas, they headed to Denmark, where they ended up both working for the world-famous Noma and being taken on the restaurant’s forays to Mexico and Australia. They fell under the spell of Noma’s wine mentor, Sune Rosforth, after whom they named their restaurant.
When I asked them why they returned to London, they both laughed. ‘It was too wonderful’, Spencer admitted, ‘and besides, we missed the hustle of London.’ They found an apartment near Victoria Park, which acts as a reserve wine cellar, and then found what was to become Sune.
The building has had a chequered past. It was a bike shop before becoming a Japanese fusion restaurant. The couple renewed the kitchen. Floorboards, originally in the Burton’s factory in Leeds, were installed, and for nine months a collection of chefs’ trousers kept the drafts out of the upper windows.
‘Michael Robins has been head chef since we opened’, Sims told me, ‘and has done a great job, but he will be moving on soon and his place will be taken by Frank Guest, who has cooked at 10 William St, one of our favourite restaurants in Sydney. Because we are both front-of-house there have been more issues in the kitchen [than on the floor] but its location by the front door has often enabled us to rectify these. Chefs seem to only want to stay for six to nine months before moving on whereas there is the same front-of-house team since we opened.’
How is life as a married couple of restaurateurs, I asked? The response was immediate and effusive. ‘We love it’, Spencer replied immediately. ‘Working for yourself is amazing, it's a bit like sky diving. And when the room is full and you’re in charge, together, and you have set the lighting and the music to your level, and the cocktails are being mixed and people are looking at your wine list, there is not a better profession in the world. Personally and physically, the work suits me. I find sitting still extremely difficult and I never enjoyed working from nine to five.’
And does your accountant agree, I asked somewhat brutally? ‘That is more depressing’, she admitted, ‘to see the monthly net profit, having worked so hard for what seemed like significant sales. But the restaurant has never made a loss in any month since we opened and this January was very good. Those who gave up drinking for the month were, I think, the less committed drinkers and the average spend has been high. We normally sell 24 bottles of house wine a month and this January we only sold two, which is encouraging.
‘The one area that we could improve significantly would be our weekday lunches where we have initiated a fixed-price menu but that hasn’t proved too popular yet. When we're in a position to develop the space facing onto the canal, then this will improve. Sunday lunch is already extremely busy.’
Sims concluded, ‘Our labour costs, front of house, are high but they are manageable, so that if we could find something else, another income stream to add to the current one, then we would all be happy.’
In my book The Art of the Restaurateur, I end by saying that the three essential criteria for a successful restaurateur are ‘ a love of food, of wine, and of your fellow human beings’. Spencer and Sims appear to have all three – in spades.
Sune 129A Pritchard’s Road, London E2 9AP; tel: +44 (0)20 4568 6675. Closed Monday, and Tuesday lunch.
Photos courtesy of Sune.
Every Sunday, Nick writes about restaurants. To stay abreast of his reviews, sign up for our weekly newsletter.
