Welcome to the gastrodome
Conran Restaurants' gastronomic Towers of Babel - Mezzo, Quaglino's, Le Pont de la Tour, Blueprint Café, Butler's Wharf Chop House and Cantina Del Ponte - have punctured the English habit of mannerly dining.
Packed, they vibrate to the din of chatter mixed with the rattle of cutlery on plates, while grown-ups relive the insouciance of school dinners. They fulfil a deep-rooted urge in some individuals to lose themselves in a crowd, an indoor equivalent to walking down Oxford Street on the Saturday before Christmas.
They're heady experiences, but if the food ever failed to deliver or went wide of the public's expectations, the towers would come tumbling down. That they're fuller and more fashionable than on their opening days (Le Pont de la Tour's restaurant and grill at Butler's Wharf was averaging 4,000 covers per week last summer) testifies to their creators' genius.
Joel Kissin and Sir Terence Conran know what middle London likes eating and how much it will pay for it. Their partnership stems from an earlier Conran brainchild, Bibendum. A separate entity outside the group, it led the reaction against nouvelle cuisine in the late 1980s while retaining a strong loyalty to the cuisine of the Parisian boulevard brasseries. In chef-director Simon Hopkinson's hands, plateau de fruits de mer and steak au poivre became campaign banners for cuisine sans frills.
The pedigrees of chefs inside the chain show how influential the Hopkinson connection has been. David Burke, Le Pont de la Tour's kitchen supremo, arrived freshly from Bibendum. So too did the Blueprint Café's Jeremy Lee. Mark O'Brien at the Cantina, Henrick Iversen in the Chop House and Martin Webb, who launched Quaglino's, worked for Burke. Paul Wilson, who replaced Webb, was promoted from senior sous chef, and John Torode, who opened Mezzo, was another Quag' baby.
Internal promotion soaking down through the system isn't merely the obvious solution, it's probably the only solution, because few professionals have the experience of controlling rapid customer turnover, potentially overpowering numbers and high-quality cooking from an extensive menu.
Burke illustrates the difficulty. "I don't have 20 chefs cooking for 40 people," he says, "I've got 30 cooking for 4,000, but I still produce good food."
Torode recalled the extreme pressure which sous chefs had to endure when he was learning the ropes at Quaglino's: "I blacked out twice. Everybody has a certain ability, and that can only be stretched to a certain point before you need help."
If the frenetic, boiler-room atmosphere of the kitchens is a constant feature of big brasseries, the individual concepts and their prices vary. Each chef plans and prices his own menus.
Mezzo has two distinct dining zones. Upstairs, it presents sophisticated south-east Asian street food such as Thai salads and curries, Malay sambals, noodles and sticky rice puddings with palm sugar. Downstairs, Australian Torode has grilled snapper with chilli and tamarind, scallop and nori spring rolls and saddle of lamb, aubergine tortellini and olive oil.
Quaglino's lifted the layout and presentation of its carte from Lipp, a famous brasserie on Paris's Boulevard St Germain, but there the resemblance ends. London Evening Standard food critic Fay Maschler hit the mark when she wrote that the London restaurant had risen above the temptation to mark time and dish up merely competent, easy-to-prepare food.
Many of the 50-odd menu items - such as dressed crab with mirin and soy, spiced pumpkin tart with tabbouleh, and roast rabbit, leeks and mustard sauce - leave the kind of dishes served by its French equivalent trailing in its wake.
Despite servicing a more expensive restaurant plus a bar-grill, Burke's kitchen does less mise-en-place than Mezzo, buying in strip-loins, for instance, instead of boning out sirloins itself. It does, however, make its own chips, whereas Paul Wilson confesses to buying more than a tonne from McCain's each week.
His batch-sizes would seem familiar to many contract caterers: 75kg pesto, 125kg house dressing, 35kg ginger and soy marinade for spiced pork belly. For a restaurant charging around £35 for a meal, these volumes are staggering.
To give some notion of the scale, Conran Restaurants has grown from nothing to 2,000 seats in five years. It turns over more than £35m. Mezzo alone spends £3.1m on food purchasing. It sells as many as 2,000 meals per day. The average spend ranges from top London rates at Le Pont de la Tour's restaurant (£60-plus) down to £16 for a typical two-course lunch and a drink, upstairs in Mezzo. The current prix fixe at Quaglino's is £14.50.
By growing so quickly, Conran Restaurants has attracted backbiting from rival restaurateurs, who accuse the chain of sucking up the pick of young talent in the capital. It's a charge to which Kissin responds wryly: "It's rich when you create 850 new jobs and are criticised for it."
Rumour has it that Conran pays better rates than many of its competitors. The truth is that it pays comparable basic wages. But it breaks with tradition in paying staff for five straight shifts plus overtime for any others they may work. This defies the unwritten convention that employers can make junior chefs and waiters work all hours when the restaurant is busy, for no extra wages.
Conran has a very practical reason for rewarding its personnel. The level of business through a shift means that quiet spells are rare. Commis and chefs de partie have to respond to stress over several hours. Kissin confesses that he can't keep staff as long or treat them as well as he would like. Without the financial incentives, many juniors would be tempted to move on even faster.
To minimise the birth pangs of each new operation, he has learnt to bear the costs of overmanning during the critical first months. "What we do," he says, "is have more staff at the outset while things are coming under control, and then cut back."
The trick in the kitchen, he says, is to ensure that no chef is responsible for more than three or four dishes. In front of house, floor waiters never leave their stations to collect food. They beam orders directly to the kitchen via an EPoS system and wait for runners to deliver them.
Conran didn't invent London brasseries - the credit for that goes to Messrs Langan, Caine and Shepherd. What he did was poach the concept of large Parisian restaurants, evolve it and dress it with his own stylistic flair. Kissin willingly acknowledges that he spied on celebrated establishments such as Lipp and the Coupole. "I sat by myself in these brasseries for weeks," he says, "making notes of everything, including details such as how the waiter held his tray. I went back of house. But in the end, what we've tried to imitate is the atmosphere."
Far smaller than London, central Paris supports many more restaurants of all kinds, so theoretically the danger of swamping the market with gastrodomes on this side of the Channel is slight, but Conran and Kissin plan only one more mega-eaterie, the Bluebird in London's King's Road.
Instead, they will switch emphasis and set up a string of smaller bistro operations called Zinc (after the French slang for a bar counter). The difference goes beyond size and theme. With his major businesses to date, Conran has preferred to adapt the theme to the site, working on the assumption that it is impossible to develop an idea until the space for developing it is known. The new formula will hinge more on the food and wine than dramatic setting.
Both Le Pont de la Tour and Quaglino's took off when Britain was floundering in the slough of recession. Both made their customers feel good. They, Mezzo and any future restaurants will last as long as they appeal to their local constituency. That may well be for another 100 years. After all, some of Paris's most fashionable brasseries have enjoyed uninterrupted success since the Franco-Prussian war of 1871.
