The unreliable filter of fond memories
FOR me, at any rate, this past 12 months have included enveloping periods of immense sentimentality.
To begin with, the first restaurant that I ever managed closed its doors and pupated into something unrecognisable. Then, the first restaurant that I ever built from a hole in the ground with my own money was sold. And finally, the second restaurant that I managed held a "Last Supper" party and weeks later became just a hole in the ground.
As I walked down the steps of Havana in Hanover Square, London, I realised it was the end of an era. For the past 20 years I had known it as the Chicago Pizza Pie Factory, the creation of the late Bob Payton. Now, Capital Radio Restaurants, a chrysalis of Bob's My Kinda Town company, has transmogrified that nearly hallowed space into a Cuban nightclub-cum-restaurant.
A more radical change would be hard to imagine. Nothing was the same - not the décor, not the structure, and certainly not the spirit. Yet, it couldn't have fooled me had I walked around it blindfolded. I knew every inch.
My raucous noise at the opening party was not enough to suppress the emotions which, despite my best efforts, kept bubbling to the surface. By my second beer I was on the verge of crying into it. Not until a few months later was I fully able to understand how an unsentimental type like myself could have succumbed to such mawkishness.
The mystery of my behaviour that night became even more of a puzzle since I didn't experience anything similar after I sold Smollensky's Balloon in London's Dover Street. That restaurant had been part of my family's life for 13 years. It had served about two-and-a-half million meals, kept me off the streets and my kids in education, employed (I guess) thousands of staff and provided loads of fun - a really good run as restaurants go.
Not a single tear
So, why didn't I, why couldn't I, shed a single tear at its passing? Not even crocodile tears for the benefit of my friends who worried about how I might be feeling. Nothing, nothing, nothing.
Some months later an invitation arrived to the closing party of the Chicago Rib Shack, organised by ex-My Kinda Town employees. What a party! What a turnout! There probably isn't another restaurant company in England that could have generated so many successful and committed people from its past to attend its funeral.
This time, the tears welled up when two non-English-speaking Vietnamese refugee brothers that I had hired in 1980 emerged from the kitchen to a standing ovation. Eighteen years on, they were still there doing the same job with the same passion and commitment.
I still remember my thoughts the day Bob and I signed the 19-year lease. I was thinking that 19 years was a lifetime away. Yet, £50m in sales later, there I sat in one of the Rib Shack's venerable booths, wondering where the time had gone.
I couldn't figure it out. Why had I felt more nostalgia for these two restaurants than I had for my own "flesh and blood", so to speak? I had a theory. Perhaps it was like your first love, something you would never ever forget no matter how long you lived. Later ones might be more enduring, fulfilling, but your first will forever be etched on your brain in minute detail.
But then a wise friend added something to my theory. He thought that, when you work for someone else, you don't ever have to take your problems home with you, so you can take pleasure in remembering only the best bits. But, when you work for yourself, the most memorable bits are the worst bits, the things that tend to keep you awake at nights with worry. So, when they go, the capacity for nostalgia goes with them.
I'm not sure he's right, but it's an interesting thought.
Enough of that, the future beckons.
For the best part of 1998, the restaurant market in major cities and large towns "buzzed with the excitement of new outlets opening and the launch of budding new brands". Christie & Co, in its Business Review 1998, says that the number of properties coming to the market and the volume of viewings and inspections remained strong, but there were signs that offers were becoming more conservative.
The most notable deals of the year occurred, unusually, at the upper end of the market, when mussels group Belgo acquired three Mogens Tholstrup restaurants for £9.3m, followed closely by the purchase of the Ivy, Le Caprice and Sheekeys for £13m.
Biggest deal
However, the biggest deal of the year was US chain Starbucks' £50.8m acquisition of the Seattle Coffee Company, underlying the growth in popularity of coffee houses. Restaurant chain Groupe Chez Gérard was quick to capitalise on the trend, with its £7.26m acquisition in June of the Richoux Café Restaurant Group, most famous for its chain of coffee shops.
On the independent side, Christie & Co sold a wide variety of businesses through its 14 offices, such as the Waterfront restaurant in Leith, Edinburgh, which was sold for £830,000 to the Sir John Fitzgerald Group, and Jaspers at Kew Green, London, which was sold for £1.55m to Bass. n
Michael Gottlieb is president of the Restaurant Association, and proprietor of Smollensky's on the Strand and Café Spice restaurants and Pencom (Service That Sells) UK
