Radio active

We open the Finchley Road restaurant on a Monday, so I have to leave home at 3.30am. I return to my home and wife in Haworth, West Yorkshire, every weekend for a reality check. It means there are no strains about me working late during the week and I rarely take work home.

I drive down the M1, tuning in to 95.8FM Capital Radio near Luton, and arrive at my Leicester Square office at 6.30am. We're above the Leicester Square Radio Café and below the radio station. The operations team are already in, and I speak to them.

I pop in to see Capital Gold's breakfast-show host Mike Osmond to check arrangements are OK for his broadcast later in the day at Finchley Road.

By 7.30am it feels like lunchtime and I pick up some breakfast - cereal - from the canteen. At 8am I'm on the Jubilee Line tube to Finchley Road.

On arriving at the new restaurant I sit down with the operations team and run through their final training day, held the day before, during which invited guests came to eat at the restaurant. The main gripe seemed to be cold food. It transpires that an air vent in the kitchen has been installed in the wrong place and the builders have to resite it.

A delivery of burger buns arrives and they have to be rejected for being too flat. The baker gets fraught, and we reorder. I then trundle off to Sainsbury's to empty its freezer of vanilla ice-cream, as we have been short-changed on our delivery.

At 10.30am I hold a briefing for the 35 kitchen and front of house staff on duty. This is kicked off with a dance routine to Aretha Franklin's Think - everyone takes part, including me. All the staff know about six routines to the latest hits, which they perform periodically throughout the day - it raises the energy level and the customers love it. We're a restaurant with a theme, not a themed restaurant, and our theme is entertainment.

We open the doors at 12 noon to 30 customers waiting outside. We welcome them in and make a big fuss, giving away T-shirts and sweat shirts. Most of them are locals who've never been to the Leicester Square restaurant, which is good news for us.

I chat to the DJ, Dean Martin, who won our Search for a Star competition in the summer and is enjoying the first day of his prize - a full-time contract with Capital Radio Restaurants.

By 1.30pm the restaurant is 75% full - very encouraging. I walk around tables and chat to customers. The staff seem very calm, there is no nervousness or panics - our training seems to have paid off.

I leave Finchley Road at 3pm to go to our Havana restaurant in the Fulham Road to welcome Julia Harrington as the restaurant's new general manager. She started off with us as a trainee manager, so it is a big day for her. We have a quick cup of coffee and I'm back at Finchley Road by 5pm.

I check in the kitchen. The air vents have been dealt with and the food is now being served hot. New burger buns have arrived, but there's still work to be done on them.

I then get to eat something for the first time since breakfast, when I sit down with the training manager and we do a waiter test and a product test. We order an onion tower (a stack of onion rings), shrimp gumbo, Thai grilled salmon, Radio Café fish and chips (a mix of cod and salmon with a dip), and Belgian waffles with sizzling bananas.

By 8pm the restaurant is 100% full and the volume of business is so great that it's starting to catch up with us. Everyone is waiting at tables, including me. Again it's a good chance to chat to customers - their main complaint is that they can't see the stage where the dancing is, and service is a bit slow.

At 10pm - cinema closing time - we get another wave of customers. Energy levels are very high.

The last customers depart at 11.15pm and I say a big thanks to the team. It's been a great day. We served 718 covers - 50 more than when we opened the Radio Café in Leicester Square and 100 more than at the opening in Southampton.

I go off to bed, knowing that I'll be back in my office tomorrow morning by 6am.