‘Stuff happens’, Donald Rumsfeld’s rather imprecise comment on the Iraq War, is also an apt summary of daily life in the restaurant business. Deliveries go astray; reservation lines go down and the gas or electricity, when they go off, will always do so just before service.
Then there is the unimaginable. In Manhattan Danny Meyer, whose Union Square Café celebrates its twentieth birthday later this month, will never forget the sickening feeling when he put his hand on to a party wall last year only to feel the wall buckle in front of him. His neighbours had been watering their overheated air chilling units to keep them functioning during the long, hot summer and this caused the wall to eventually soften sufficiently for him to be forced to close his restaurant for three weeks. I got off more lightly in my career as a restaurateur when just at the start of an extremely busy evening my most experienced kitchen porter inadvertently mixed two incompatible cleaning chemicals sending thick clouds of smoke across the kitchen and, thanks to the dumb waiters, up to the restaurant. Happily, the fire station was close by.
David Moore, of the two star Michelin Pied à Terre in central London, cannot recall the precise response he gave when his mobile went off at 8.30 on the morning of Monday 15 nov 04 as he was about to start a wine tasting deep in a Burgundy cellar and a member of his kitchen brigade alerted him to the fact that there were currently three fire engines outside his restaurant and a lot of smoke inside. “I was in a daze. Somebody kindly drove me to Dijon and it was a long, lonely train ride home with only a bottle of champagne and a large plate of oysters by the Gare du Nord as consolation, a kind of last supper,” Moore explained.
He arrived back at 6pm to find a loss adjustor handing over his business card to Shane Osborne, his chef and business partner, whose services were immediately requested the following morning when the local District Surveyor slapped a dangerous building order on what remained of their former restaurant (the precise cause is still unclear but faulty wiring in an electrical appliance is suspected). Moore set about notifying his customers and the restaurant guides hoping that he would be back in business in six months but in fact it was ten and a half months before the kitchen cooked its first dinner on 01 oct this year.
“The surveyor’s report was the best thing that could have happened because it meant that the landlord’s insurance paid for the new structure. But although we had full business interruption cover we quickly discovered that we were to be the victims of our own success. 2004 had been our best trading year and between September and October our monthly turnover had gone up from £140,000 to £165,000 but we hadn’t increased the sums insured accordingly. So our insurance company did pay up but only 80p in the pound and we, because we didn’t have sufficient cover, have had to find the rest. Fortunately, I hadn’t spent the last couple of years’ reserves on too many good wines,” Moore added, although their wine list remains one of the capital’s most intriguing.
The fire has proved expensive financially as Moore and Osborne kept 15 of their 30 staff on full pay to ensure that their regular customers return to familiar faces and standards. There have been physical costs too – Moore confesses to a small beer gut as a result of too many meetings with the builders in The Northumberland Arms across the road. But the fire has allowed them to restructure their business. Extra shares have been issued to make Australian- born Osborne an equal partner with Moore; the number of seats has been significantly reduced from 50 to 40 as they seek to distinguish themselves from the growing number of good restaurants nearby; a private room for 12 has been moved to the top floor and linked by a high speed, heated lift to the basement kitchen, and there is more room for the staff.
But talking separately to Moore and Osborne I found there still seemed to be some discrepancy in their specific goals. In his domain, the restaurant, Moore expressed his goal of striving for that elusive third Michelin star while downstairs in his gleaming new £115,000 kitchen Osborne was more circumspect, “I am finding that the older I get, the simpler I want my food to be. What we have done over the closure has been to look at exactly what we can get out of this narrow building on six floors. Now I and the rest of our team have to deliver, to maximise the whole experience for our customers.”
Osborne’s cooking may be simpler but it is certainly far from simple, although he does happily eschew the current craze for foams and mousses. An initial lunch, very good value with two courses from the a la carte menu at £24.50 encompassed several, fanned slices of peppered tuna which took on the outline of the Sydney Opera House and breasts of roast quail with choucroute and a Scotch egg whose centre was a precisely-boiled quail’s egg. Dinner got off to a cracking start with an oxtail and shallot soup and a caramelised veal sweetbread with an almond sauce and this tempo was maintained with an intricate dish of rabbit that incorporated its saddle, kidney and rack and an Anjou pigeon whose breasts had been sautéed while the legs were steamed, all on a lush beetroot purée.
Pied à Terre has always been a bit of a tiny slice of a building, hidden in an increasingly busy street and it is a pleasure to welcome it back in its even more highly polished state although I did leave with a couple of reservations about the unnecessary background music in general and the absence of a fairly light dessert in particular. But as I left the restaurant I got talking to a table of three regular customers, one of whom, a publican from North London, had taken Moore out for what he described as a ‘boozy lunch’ to commiserate with him after the fire. I asked them whether they were pleased with the re-opening and re-design. “Extremely pleased,” was the reply given unanimously but briefly before they turned their attention back to the cheeseboard.
Pied à Terre, 34 Charlotte Street, London W1T 2NH tel 0207636 1178
Closed Saturday lunch and Sunday. Dinner £45 for two courses without wine.
