Restaurant Babylon

by Imogen Edwards-Jones

  He takes us down some thin, narrow stairs, past the toilets and into the basement kitchen. It is a minute, airless dungeon. How they manage to get any food out of here is a miracle. It doesn’t look as if there’s a plate lift either, so I presume anything that comes out of here has to be hand-carried up the stairs. It must be so hot during service, sweat flying all over the place. The white walls shine with grease and the equipment is all very much past its sell-by date – as, I imagine, are half the ingredients in the fridges. The surfaces themselves are relatively clean; someone is trying to look after the place, but just one look at the back and I can see the seals on the fridges are gone and I’d lay money on the ancient extractor fan not working. In short, you’d have to be insane to cook or indeed eat here.

  ‘It needs a little updating,’ says Phil, nodding his way around the room. ‘A few bits, a few bobs. A refit here, there. But can’t you just smell the potential?’

  What I can actually smell is rancid cooking fat, along with all that potential, but still, for some reason my heart is beating. I don’t know why I am so excited. The place is a hell-hole. But it is a hell-hole in an excellent location.

  Back out in the street in the blinking bright sunshine, Phil gives me one of those hearty slaps on the back that forces me two steps forward.

  ‘So? So? So?’ he asks.

  ‘So it looks interesting.’

  ‘So it’s fucking great, isn’t it?’ He grins.

  ‘So it’s good.’

  ‘It’s more than good, it’s fucking good.’

  ‘So who else have you shown it to?’

  ‘Russell Norman’s had a sniff but it’s too small for him.’ He pauses. ‘And I’ve mentioned it to Big Pete.’

  ‘What? The Big Pete?’ My heart sinks.

  ‘There’s only one,’ he says, opening the door to his BMW.

  ‘Yes, and he’s a complete shit.’

  4–5 p.m.

  Big Pete is one of the less savoury characters on the restaurant scene. I’ve heard some fairly unpleasant things about him and I really don’t fancy him in my orbit. He is an investor, a backer of restaurants who likes to follow his money about and get involved. I think he is lured by the glamour and fancies himself as a player, a culinary Charlie Big Potatoes, but in reality he’s a boorish thug no one likes.

  I remember hearing something about him kicking some young guys out of the bar they were renting from him a couple of years ago now. Apparently they were having some problems with their services – the power and the water kept cutting out, two things which are just a little crucial if you are trying to run a place. Anyway, they complained to Big Pete who did nothing; they asked again and again and he continued to do nothing. In the end they said they would withhold their rent, they’d place it in a holding account, so he could see they had it, but they wouldn’t release it to him, until he’d fixed the water and the electricity. When they came to open up the bar on Monday morning, they found the locks had been changed on the building and all their stuff was chucked out in the street, being picked over by passers-by. When my friend complained to Big Pete, telling him that perhaps he was being a little harsh, Pete looked him in the eye and said: ‘When you see a cockroach you stamp on it; when you see it wriggle, you stamp on it harder still.’

  I shiver. I am not sure any place is worth going head to head with Big Pete. But it is a good spot, right in the heart of Covent Garden, which is as rare as rocking horse shit. There’s something about it that’s piqued my interest.

  ‘I do like it,’ I say to Phil as he drops me off outside Le Bar. ‘Let me think about it.’

  ‘Don’t think too long,’ he says, clicking his teeth and giving me a wink. ‘You know what they say about the early bird.’ I smile. ‘Laters,’ he says before shooting me with his right index finger. He pops on his mirrored shades, pumps up Kiss FM and roars off down the street.

  I am just about to walk into another meeting I’ve got at Le Bar when I am engulfed in a cloud of dope smoke. I check my watch, it’s just gone four – it’s spliff o’clock outside L’Italiano and indeed half the cafés and bistros in town. If you walk around Charlotte Street and parts of Soho at this time of day you’ll find most of the kitchen staff on their break and the mews and alleyways will reek with the heady sweet smell of hydroponic skunk.

  I remember when I was a lot younger I’d combine my spliff break with a couple of lagers down the pub. It was never worth going home for the hour or so we got off, and we’d all go to the pub, have a drink, shovel in a couple of packets of crisps, and then crawl back to the kitchen coalface. Quite how I managed to get through another six hours of work I don’t know. The dope wasn’t quite as strong as it is now, that’s for sure. The stuff they smoke out the back of L’Italiano always smells lethal. I remember one restaurant I worked in where we’d all gather outside the kitchen door and skin up. Unfortunately, one afternoon there was something wrong with the extractor fan and the wind blew all our smoke back inside the kitchen. The head chef came steaming out. He’d been given the blow-back of a lifetime and was furious. Thankfully the whole of his brigade was puffing away on the stoop so he couldn’t fire the lot of us at once.

  ‘Christ,’ I say, walking into Le Bar. ‘I am practically high on next door’s supply.’

  ‘Not the L’Italiano stoners again?’ Adam grins. ‘It gets so bad during the summer I have to close the window in the office at the back, otherwise come four thirty in the afternoon I can barely see straight.’ He laughs. I am not sure whether Martina from Drinks Inc believes him either, but she smiles and laughs along anyway. ‘You remember Martina,’ he says.

  I can’t imagine many people forget Martina. She is gorgeous, clever, smart and gives away lots of free money and booze. No one forgets that delightful combination in a hurry.

  ‘Hi,’ she says, getting out of her seat, running her hands through a mass of thick, dark curls. I had forgotten quite how pretty she is. ‘Happy Christmas – well, nearly!’ She laughs. She has a trace of a Spanish accent, which makes everything she says sound sexy.

  ‘Happy Christmas to you!’ I hear myself laughing like a fool. I’m supposed to be negotiating with her; I had better get a grip.

  Martina works in the drinks business for a small but perfectly formed company called Drinks Inc who specialize in bespoke vodka, gin and rum. Drinks Inc is part of the massive UK alcohol industry, and when I say massive, I mean truly enormous. It’s worth around £40 billion a year and it pays just over £16 billion into the Exchequer, which is tantamount to £316 per adult in the country, or double the UK overseas aid budget. Although there are some small players like Drinks Inc, the booze market is more or less carved up by the big boys, which include giants like Diageo (over £13 billion turnover, 25,000 employees, quoted on the FTSE) who owns Smirnoff (the world’s bestselling vodka), Johnnie Walker (the world’s bestselling Scotch whisky), Baileys (the world’s bestselling liqueur) and Guinness (the world’s bestselling stout). Another big chap is Bacardi Ltd, which has a portfolio of some two hundred brands including Bombay Sapphire, Martini, Dewar’s, Bacardi Rum and Grey Goose Vodka (which they acquired recently for a cool £1.1 billion). Pernod Ricard has big hitters like Absolut Vodka, Jameson Whiskey, Malibu, Beefeater Gin and Chivas Regal. And then there’s First Drinks with another fifty brands including Hendrick’s Gin, Cointreau, Tia Maria and Piper Heidsieck Champagne.

  These are all huge companies with huge brands and products that are household names, and which, because of their alcoholic content, are rather difficult to advertise on mainstream TV. So they have to go about it in a very different way if they are going to reach their audience.

  If you are the proud owner of a cool bar, in a cool part of town, with a cool clientele, with cool cash and cool friends, then the drinks companies are falling over themselves to get their bottles into your place – and they’ll pay you for the privilege of stocking their stuff. Not only do they pay, but they will also provide the stock for free. And we are not talking a small
amount. If a small, hip restaurant in Notting Hill can get £30,000 a year from one vodka brand, you can see why big groups can trouser up to £2m for the privilege of stocking one spirit over another.

  These sweeteners are called listing fees, and for a place like ours they can be worth about £250,000 a year, which is, as you can imagine, rather helpful. The listing fee means that the drinks company gets ownership of the ‘house pour’. The house pour is the bottle of vodka they have behind the bar in the ‘well’. House pour is what the barman will use when you ask for a ‘vodka and tonic’. House pour is where the big money is in the UK as most of us, some 90 per cent, don’t ask for a ‘vodka and tonic’ by brand. In the USA, it is absolutely the opposite, with 90 per cent of customers using ‘brand call’. So unless you ask for a spirit by name you will get the house pour. If a bar has been ‘listed’ by a drinks company, the barman might suddenly suggest a few brands to you by way of a serving suggestion: ‘Would you like Grey Goose? Or something else?’ That’s a very good way of suggesting you might want a Grey Goose. But if you stick to your guns because you know that once they put the tonic and the lemon in it doesn’t really matter what brand you are drinking, then they will serve you up the house pour. In the US is it the cheapest, most cheerful vodka they can get away with. It will be poured below your eye line and it will probably be a brand you’ve never heard of.

  In the UK the house pour is supposed to be a reflection of the bar, so if it is a swanky, swinging place full of swanky, swinging, expensive people, then the brand they use should reflect that. And if you’re charging £15 a drink then you shouldn’t really have mass-market brands like Smirnoff or Gordon’s as your house pour. Obviously, many do. But they are supposed to be offering up something else. So if it were a Grey Goose, Bacardi Ltd-listed bar, then something like Eristoff would probably be the house pour.

  When shelling out listing fees, drinks companies also hope to come away with ownership of the ‘back bar’. It is not guaranteed and it rather relies on the powers of the rep’s – in this case, Martina’s – persuasion. Personally I have never taken a listing fee without giving away the back bar.

  The back bar sets the tone of the place so you try and pack it with as many expensive, glamorous-looking bottles as possible in order to tempt your drinkers. Your glamorous and expensive customer is supposed to cast their eye over the back bar and have their tastes reflected back at them; they are supposed to be reassured that they are in the right place. So if you ever want to know what sort of customer frequents somewhere, check out the bottles on display. The Imperial Collection Fabergé Egg full of vodka on display at Nobu Berkeley Street, which sells at £2,600 for the coloured enamel egg, or £5,600 for the gold and silver one, wouldn’t really go down well at Le Bar. It is also a brilliant example of what Martina calls the ‘escalation of filtration’. Imperial Collection boasts that its vodka is ‘distilled five times through birch charcoal, then several times more through quartz sand and finally through an algae whose micro-structure guarantees this rare purity’.

  Adam and I are obsessed with collecting filtration techniques or obscure marketing ideas behind shifting bottles of vodka. My current favourite is a Canadian brand, Iceberg, that professes to harvest genuine icebergs in order to source the purest water available to humanity. You can have a lot of fun with vodka. I also quite like Roberto Cavalli’s vodka, which comes in a tall bottle with swirls, either frosted or black, and is marketed as ‘fashion on the rocks’ – and Roberto opines: ‘Fashion vodka … because “black” is fashion … sexy and mysterious … Just like the women I love.’ Yours for just under fifty quid a bottle.

  Talk to anyone in the drinks business and they will tell you that vodka is vodka and gin is gin. You can play around with it, add colours and flavours and filter it as much as you like, but it is distilled in a closed still and requires no maturing or nurturing at all. So unlike whisky or dark rum, which are matured in vats and as varied as the brands there are on the market, different brands of vodka or gin are extremely difficult to tell apart. So much so that they are mostly referred to in the trade as simply ‘the liquid’.

  When I first met Martina she talked me through the marketing of drinks. Rum is apparently the new big thing. In the seventies and eighties we were mad for gin and then we had an obsession with vodka but now, apparently, it’s all about rum. I have to say we have noticed some customers starting to order rum but only in the last few months. Anyway, she talked me through this new rum they have which was apparently delicious but was in a bottle that looked like a ‘cut-price olive oil bottle that only its mother could love’. The label was black, white, green and orange and look very retro but not in a good way. The rum was only selling two hundred cases (twelve bottles in each) a year. Smirnoff sells something like seven million cases in the UK alone. So it really wasn’t singing for its supper and they decided to give it a makeover. They kept the liquid, changed the bottle, updated the label and now they shift four thousand cases.

  ‘What’s the difference between a rat and a squirrel?’ Martina smiled. ‘Marketing.’

  Bottles are crucial. Tall, thin and long tend to be vodkas aimed at women. Short, fat and square are gins. Square is masculine, round is feminine. A tall bottle is modern, clean and sophisticated, whereas short and squat is robust, traditional and full of heritage. And glancing at the bottles she has lined up for Adam and me to have a look at this afternoon, she is right. The gins are short and fat and the vodkas are all pretending to be triple-filtered supermodels, so pure and elegant, I am amazed they contain alcohol at all.

  Martina is pitching for our cocktail list. We are currently in bed with another drinks company, but Drinks Inc have some very cool brands which I think our customers would like. It is a constantly moving market and in order for us to look as if we know what we are doing, we have to keep ahead of the others; the last thing we want is to look like we are behind the curve.

  We shift a lot of cocktails – we have an eight-page menu with ten cocktails per page and Martina is keen to get in on the action. Drinks companies pay to get their brand on these lists and, depending on the bar, it costs between £50 and £250 per cocktail to get a name check. So cross my palm with £200 and suddenly my Moscow Mule, when sponsored, turns into an Absolut Mule. Give me another £200 and my normal straight-up martini becomes a Martini Grey Goose. And the thing about cocktails (martinis aside) is that you can charge through the nose for them but they are nearly all mixers. We are charging anything from £16 to £21 for a drink that costs us about £1 max to make.

  Although quite often they cost us nothing. Along with the listing fee and paying to get on to the cocktail list, the lovely drinks companies obviously also give us stock for free. So along with our nice cheque for £250,000 we’ll get given fifteen to twenty cases of stock for ‘events’ – whatever they’re supposed to be. So instead of throwing a Malibu promotional party at the Le Bar, we’ll either sell on the ‘events cases’ to the customer or keep them back for a staff party.

  You can also get retro deals, so if you sell £200,000 worth of stock you can get 20 per cent kickback off your next order. They’ll also throw in staff trips to see the liquid being made. They’ll say it’s ‘training’, but everyone knows it’s a gigantic piss-up. A trip to the freezing cold Scottish Highlands to see whisky being distilled is fine, but a long weekend in Cuba checking out the rum is a very good way to incentivize the barman. And that’s what they do. They befriend the barmen, they take them on cocktail courses, load them up with freebies, teach them the ‘perfect pour’ and then once they’ve groomed them, they’ll follow their careers from bar to bar. Every barman you ever employ has his fingers in such and such a company, and a mate here, and a pal there. It is a very old-fashioned way of doing business; nothing is ever formalized, there are no great contracts to sign, there is a lot of mutual back scratching and plenty of room for manoeuvre.

  However, the great unfathomable in all of this is fashion, taste and the fickleness of th
e customer. Martina told us how a club around the corner tried to delist her after three years. They were paying £28,000 a year to get one of their rums as the house pour. They were in all the cocktails and shifted a guaranteed eight hundred cases a year. But the club got greedy and decided that they could get more from selling themselves elsewhere. The only problem was that the customers didn’t like the new rum, they liked the other cooler brand, as did the bar staff, and there were complaints that the £100 Golden Box cocktail didn’t quite cut the mustard. So the club begged the cool rum to come back. They said they would, but this time they wouldn’t pay the £28,000. The club agreed. They are not putting their rum in all the drinks, but they are shifting some three hundred and fifty cases for no fee. Or as Martina put it: ‘You don’t get the big apple but you get a lot of cherries instead.’

  In an attempt to control the market, drinks companies used to employ young, groovy cats to go around trendy bars and clubs and order their branded drinks. These ‘cool hunters’ or ‘early adopters’ were supposed to create a buzz, asking for certain drinks by name, in a loud voice, openly demanding why such-and-such a brand wasn’t stocked at all. However, these cats were just a little too smart for companies and would take money from more than one drinks company at a time. So instead of being employed solely by, say, Bacardi, they were also working for Diageo and Pernod Ricard all at the same time. Their back pockets stuffed with cash, they just went out and partied, irrespective of what branded cocktail they were drinking.

  ‘So we have this triple-filtered vodka,’ says Martina.

  ‘Through a virgin’s armpit, I hope,’ suggests Adam, picking up the glass and giving it a sniff.

  ‘Granite,’ she smiles.