Money blog: Big chefs have had a terrible year – but Jason Atherton fights back | British News

By Jimmy Rice, Money Blog Editor

Jason Atherton doesn’t get much sleep.

Hardly a week has gone by this year without another celebrity chef closing a restaurant amid rising costs, staff shortages and a sense that the public is no longer as willing to choose high-quality food as it once was.

Marco Pierre White, Michel Roux Jr., Marcus Wareing, Monica Galetti, Simon Rimmer and Tom Brown have all announced closures, and yet it is openings that keep Atherton awake.

Five of them, all in London, in as many months.

“I’ve bet my whole life on it,” Atherton tells Money, already on his third coffee, as we sit down at 10 a.m. with the intention of answering, at least from the interviewer’s perspective, one question: What does it take? to be successful? Hospitality in 2024?

“I’m not a culinary messiah,” he says. “I’m not going to sit here and say, come follow me, I have the magic recipe. Nobody has it.”

“The hospitality industry is in a downturn, everyone knows it’s pretty tough out there, but downturns also present opportunities.”

“If you’re brave and believe in yourself, there are really good opportunities to work with landlords on failed properties to get good rents.”

To further reduce costs, Atherton renegotiates prices with his suppliers every week.

“It is very time consuming, but that is what is necessary. Every Monday we have deals made for our meat, our fish, our chemicals, our vegetables and everything is recorded.”

Gordon Ramsay paid me £250,000 – those days are over

It was Gordon Ramsay who gave Atherton his first opportunity to open a restaurant, Maze, in the heart of Mayfair in 2005.

His salary as head chef was £250,000 and the restaurant, which was awarded a Michelin star within a year, reached peak sales of £14 million.

“Those days are over,” says Atherton. “It was a different time.

“For now, gone are the days of hiring an international designer and paying them millions of pounds to design this incredible restaurant that looks like something from the future.”

In the newly opened hall near Piccadilly Circus, the location of the interview, Atherton has reused much of the former restaurant operator’s furnishings.

“My mantra at the moment is to step back, watch costs and get back to cooking for Londoners who are being more frugal with their purchasing power,” he says.

And so at Mary’s, once home to Atherton’s one-star Pollen Street Social, you can now get a “Cumbrian Beef Dirty Smash Burger” for £16.50, while its “elegant” restaurant Harrods Social has been replaced by a concession in The store’s dining room, where gourmet hot dogs are served for £19.

Not exactly cheap, but not as unattainable as some of his previous and existing ventures.

A mistake of £3.2 million

If Atherton doesn’t want to come across as someone who thinks he’s a “messiah,” it’s because he knows what failure tastes like. In 2016 he spent £3.2 million setting up the upscale Japanese restaurant Sosharu, then spent another million keeping it afloat for two and a half years before accepting his demise.

“I was the golden boy, I could do no wrong, and then suddenly I did it completely wrong,” he says, before listing his litany of mistakes: overstaffing, no market research and “launching a Mayfair restaurant”. Clerkenwell”.

“Life is really hard,” he says. “I look at failure like this: It’s just a learning curve. If I open ten restaurants and two fail, I’ve won, but you don’t just brush the two failures under the rug. We’re tearing it apart, we’re examining it. “We want to understand why they happened and use that as a mini-university of gastronomy.”

A joke that’s making the rounds

There’s a running joke in culinary circles that Atherton’s productivity rivals Brexit in terms of impact on staffing in London, considering he snatched hundreds of young waiters, chefs and others from one city at once.

He and his wife Irha expect to employ about 250 people at the five new restaurants, which bring Atherton’s operation to 17 worldwide. Jay Rayner is among those who have already shared their experiences in print.

Despite new visa rules discouraging many young Europeans on whom the service industry now depends, Atherton says the problem is not finding staff.

“The biggest challenge is loyalty,” he says. “Because there are a lot of options, people know that if they don’t really enjoy it, they can leave the next day and take another job the next day instead of sticking with it like we used to do,” we call it it’s the attention span of social media.”

He’s aware of how that may sound – an elder statesman of the industry lamenting the generations that follow – but his view of Generation Z is broader.

“It’s a different time and we have to adapt to it,” he says. “I get some amazing talent coming through and we nurture it.”

“These children are very creative. I have a very young workforce and I love their creativity. I love that they push us on TikTok and social media, very powerful tools that I don’t understand.”

“They left me standing in a trash can for the entire lunch service.”

After a brief stint in the Army Catering Corps, Atherton spent most of his childhood in some of the world’s toughest kitchens, even before joining the Ramsay Group in 2001.

“There are many worse things, but I once threw away a few langoustines and had to stand in a trash can with the langoustines for the entire lunch service,” he remembers. “It took me a week to get the fishy smell out of my shoes.”

Atherton inherited these at times incredibly high standards and ran demanding kitchens of his own while stepping out of Ramsay’s shadow and earning Michelin stars with his own The Social Company.

Was a change necessary to deal with a generation that grew up with a different mindset and values ​​- or has he simply mellowed at age 53?

“A little bit of both,” he says. “When you start to develop real skills and the people around you don’t have those skills, you might see that as incompetence when you’re younger, but that’s not the case – you learn that as you get older. “

“We have a responsibility towards the new generation of chefs”

There are many stories about chefs having to work 16 or 18 hour shifts when Atherton first started.

Nowadays, as the industry slowly embraces the concept of work-life balance, its chefs can choose between 40-hour and 48-hour contracts.

“Our industry has a really bad reputation of being overworked, overworked, underfed and underpaid, and it’s my generation’s job to get rid of that so that the next generation isn’t burdened by it, because it was my generation.”

The question arises as to how compatible this is with other goals: Michelin stars (Atherton’s Row on 45 in Dubai just got its second) and, in this climate, ultimately survival.

“At the same time, I don’t tolerate fools,” he says. “I am here to work, I am here to deliver for my customers. The company has a lot of debt on its back that we have to pay back.”

“There are too many good restaurants”

In addition to Mary’s and those gourmet hot dogs, Atherton is opening Three Darlings, a bistro in Chelsea named in honor of his daughters, and he’s just opened Sael, his “love letter to Britain.”

These will range in price somewhere between the £16.50 burgers and its last opening in the race, the flagship Row on 5 on Savile Row, where diners can expect to pay around £200 a head for a “culinary journey”. 15 courses eaten in different parts of the building.

Atherton knows the latter is a risk as customers and the industry “move away from super-expensive restaurants.”

Is there even a future for the kind of fine dining restaurants in which he made his name?

“The market is saturated, there are too many,” he says. “Either you have to be the very best in the world, otherwise you won’t survive.

“For me it’s about whether I can perform with a team at this level to get the last chance in my life – that’s the dream and we’ll do our best.”

Joining him at Row on 5 will be the great Spencer Metzger, recruited from The Ritz and whom Atherton describes as a “generational talent” in the global food scene.

Metzger, who blew away a host of the country’s top chefs by winning the Great British Menu in 2022, could end up becoming a 50% shareholder in the company if certain financial targets are met, as Atherton considers life after the passport .

So could he soon join forces with the likes of Wareing, another Ramsay graduate, and retire from the industry entirely?

“This will be my last fine dining restaurant,” he said.

“You heard that here first.”