East meets Westminster
Granita, the restaurant with the best claim to be the spiritual home of the modern Labour party, was sold this month. Its new owner is a Turkish immigrant who started his life in restaurants working for no wages and living in a toilet. David Harris went to meet him.
When Hüseyin Özer bought Granita this month, he was getting more than just a restaurant, he was acquiring a piece of political history. Were there to be a prize for Most Significant Political Event to Take Place in a Restaurant, then this London eating place would have been a serious contender in the 1990s. It was here that Tony Blair and Gordon Brown were said to have sealed the leadership deal that resulted in New Labour, an agreement that cemented the most important British political alliance of the past decade. If shabby-turned-smart Islington was the cultural home of Blair's re-cast Labour party, then Granita, with its modern European cooking, well-priced Chardonnay and middle-class tables chattering about politics, was its hallmark restaurant.
For former owner Vicky Leffman, the worldwide publicity generated by what became known as the Treaty of Granita could not have been bought. Search the Internet for Blair + Brown + Granita and you will find references to hundreds of articles in newspapers and magazines.
Curiously, the Turkish immigrant Özer seems much more appreciative of the recent history of the restaurant than Leffman, who left Granita with few regrets and no intention to continue working in catering. Was she pleased that he planned to keep the name and make minimal changes to the restaurant she created 10 years ago? "It's up to him, he can do what he likes with it," she said in a recent interview. Does she remember the history-making dinner of Blair and Brown? "Very well, but it doesn't seem to have done them much good now, does it? I've had them all in here, Left and Right, and as long as they spend their money I don't care."
In contrast, Özer admits that he bought Granita partly because it is "an institution" and because Leffman had created such a fine neighbourhood restaurant.
"It's elegant, I love it. Why would I change it? I don't really see it as mine to change, I've been given custody of it and it would be letting down the customers to change it too much," he says.
For Özer, buying the New Labour shrine for an undisclosed sum is the latest chapter in a life in restaurants that began early. Brought up in the Black Sea village of Tokat, he came from a broken home and ran away to Ankara, aged just 11, having borrowed 20 lire from his mother's partner, a paltry amount of money that just covered the one-way bus fare. "Nobody wanted me," he remembers, with a smile that removes any idea of self-pity. In Ankara he remembers it being difficult to get work "because people would not give a job to a child", but found employment in a succession of restaurants because there he could be sure of getting some food, if not always wages. He first lived in a toilet, then in a coal shed, and finally scraped enough money together to rent a room in a family house. His jobs in the early years included pizza delivery (on foot) and, when he became a teenager, a commis waiter in a succession of restaurants, first in Ankara and then in Istanbul.
"I became a restaurateur because I was hungry. I needed food," Özer says.
One his proudest early memories is that he repaid the loan of the bus fare to Ankara within six months, giving his mother's partner double the money "because I didn't like him".
Özer regularly claims he does not care about money, in which case not caring about money must be a very good way of making a lot of it. His Sofra restaurant group now takes £7m a year for its distinctive version of Turkish cooking, while projected turnover for 2002, with Granita, is £9.5m.
Özer bought Granita for several reasons. First, he admires it as a restaurant. Second, like many restaurateurs in London, he wants to add more neighbourhood restaurants to his group - an opening in St John's Wood is among several planned over the coming year. And he has great admiration for Britain.
His love affair with this country started when he used some of his first wages to replace his lack of education in 1960s Ankara with private English lessons. After doing his national service early in Turkey (by way of a forged birth certificate), he went back to working in Istanbul restaurants and then decided that the best place to come to learn English was London.
"Everybody in Turkey said I should go to Germany to earn money, but I wanted to come to England. I don't know why but I wanted to come here. I think I must have been British in a previous life," he says.
That was in 1975. He stayed, of course, and naturally started working as a kebab chef. First he cooked in the Doner Bar in Shepherds Market, then went into partnership in Andy's Kebabs in Chiswick, increasing the takings 10-fold. He made enough money to buy a four-year lease on the old Shepherds Market shop in 1981 for £7,500 and the first Sofra came into being.
Progress was slow at first - he had to lock the door to keep out the prostitutes and the drunks - and he was slow to label his cooking Turkish.
"Now I can call it Turkish proudly," he says. "At first I had to say Middle Eastern."
Business expansion did not come quickly and it was several years before he opened more restaurants. When he had a financial disaster in the early 1990s, with what he will only now call "internal problems", he had to sell several Sofra Cafes and effectively start over.
The purchase of Granita is a good indication of how far this resilient restaurateur has recovered from those difficulties. Things are looking good for Sofra this year, with a series of openings planned in London, including one in Exmouth Market, another on the site of Dome in Upper Street, and the St John's Wood site. ™zer is also finalising a deal for the first Sofra in the UK outside London, in Cheltenham, Gloucestershire.
Granita itself will not be changed too much, in line with Özer's view that the name and the nature of the place is worth preserving. He plans to open it for breakfast, and perhaps to put some cushions on the chairs in the famously austere dining room, but little else will change. Some dishes may be added to the modern European menu, but the spirit will remain, he says.
The only question now is whether Labour's power brokers will be sealing any more political deals there.
Granita
127 Upper Street,
London N1 1QP
Tel: 020 7226 3222
Owner: Hüseyin Özer
Proposed investment: £50k
Seats: 80
Staff: 30
Sofra Restaurants Group
Owner: Hüseyin Özer
Turnover 2001: £7m
Projected turnover 2002: £9.5m
Profit on turnover: 23%
Owned restaurants in the UK: three Sofra in London (Mayfair, Covent Garden, Oxford Street); one Özer in London (Regents Street); Granita (Upper Street, Islington)
Owned restaurants abroad:Özer in Ankara, Sofras in Helsinki, Istanbul and Ankara
