What you might have missed on The Caterer this week

Slow food

This week we talked to the two friends behind pasta phenomenon Padella, which is bracing for its third London site on Carnaby Street in Soho next month. The pair look back at how they started the business, which has enjoyed enormous success from day one, as can be seen from the daily queues that form before it opens. The founders, Tim Siadatan and Jordan Frieda, had a few teething problems getting Padella off the ground, partly from an investor who advised them that there were no other pasta-only restaurants in the UK for a reason, and partly from Pret founder Julian Metcalfe, who offered up his business wisdom.

Says Frieda: “He told us the menu made him feel sick. [He said:] ‘What is this nonsense? You really love pasta and it is clearly your passion, but you don’t have the balls to just do that’.” Advice duly swallowed, the pair struck T-bone steaks and veal cutlets off the menu and settled on just pasta, which they set at a crowd-pleasingly reasonable price, even for central London. Better start queuing for their new opening now.

Happy place

A million miles from Soho is Glebe House in east Devon, where head chef David Knapman strolls to the 15-acre smallholding beyond the kitchen to collect ingredients. The chef creates a menu where a majority of the dishes are dictated by what is growing or preserved at the restaurant or nearby, and he makes his own butter, cheese and yogurt, buys lamb from a nearby farmer and makes salami for the restaurant’s staple starter from the pigs trotting about outside. 

He realises that his bucolic existence is a gift and has plans to build on it with outdoor dining and cooking on fire in the summer. He says: “It’s unique place. It’s not really a hotel, it’s a guest house and a restaurant, but it’s more than that. It almost feels like having dinner at a friend’s house who is a really good cook and has a nice wine cellar. It’s relaxed and doesn’t feel contrived.”

Details man 

We also talked to Daniel Pedreschi, executive vice-president of UK operations for the PPHE Hotel Group, about the age-old question of balancing growth with quality. As someone behind the opening of several major projects taking off this year, including 79 new subterranean rooms at Park Plaza London Victoria, he finds one way to ensure things keep improving is to celebrate the fact the business is so large, as it offers up so many opportunities for change. 

A method he has brought with him is the Six Sigma style of management, where defects are removed and processes run as perfectly as they can. He says: “When I moved to Park Plaza, I took that [Six Sigma] mentality with me. The only way you can operate a hotel of this size is through understanding and measuring every single element that is there: operational controls, guest satisfaction, guest input and team members. If you’re not measuring that and you’re not being honest with yourself, you can’t improve.”

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