Square Mile to square meal the restaurant game is proving all too alluring for City boys and girls. tired of the stresses of big business, many of them are ready to splash out their hard-earned cash on a new challenge. Chris Blackhurst reports

As Gordon Ramsay’s hit TV series Kitchen Nightmares so vividly illustrates, it is many people’s dream to open their own restaurant. And, as the programme also highlights, succeeding in the hospitality trade is exceedingly tough.

Nowhere is the ambition to enter the restaurant scene greater than at the top end of business. Stuck in office jobs, thoughts all too often turn to the finer things in life, the activities City slickers enjoy and the things they think they know something about. That’s not to say workers in other areas don’t also have moments when they stare out of the window and wonder what might be, but those in the higher reaches of commerce often have the money and self-confidence to put those thoughts into practice.

At the last estimate, there were 3,000 folk in the City earning £1m a year. What’s often forgotten when faced with such a statistic is that in most cases this isn’t a one-off payment – these people have been high earners for several years and will continue to be so. In other words, that £1m a year is just the tip of the iceberg.

All of which means those City boys and girls have much more money than they need. Sure, they pay off the mortgage, buy the second home, put enough aside for school fees – but still the money comes in.

The downside, of course, is that they’re working long hours, coping with the relentless hell of commuting, rushing from meeting to meeting and having to put up with the unceasing demands of clients. It’s hardly surprising, then, that sometimes they look for a route out and that, inevitably, their thoughts turn to times when they’re happiest – which more often than not is in a restaurant with fine food and wine for company.

There are other factors that make more and more of them take the plunge. Compared with other areas, the food and drink sector – even at the luxury level – involves low start-up costs. There’s no need for technology and, as many prospective restaurateurs see it, no requirement for specialist knowledge. The skills of chefs can easily be bought in.

Moreover, the growth in popularity of simpler British food as opposed to fancy fine dining means more and more people are convincing themselves that they have got what it takes to open their own gastropub or restaurant.

There’s no shortage of premises to choose from. As even a quick glance through trade journal Caterer & Hotelkeeper reveals, there are stacks of pubs, restaurants and hotels on the market. So, the would-be City boy-turned-restaurateur can even find somewhere near where they live, should they want to. Suddenly, all those years spent grappling with the train and underground can be consigned to the memory.

The restaurant trade ticks other boxes, too. It’s a multi-faceted industry, full of niche operators, and that means those in the City who specialise in putting together mergers will be spoilt for choice by the manifold opportunities open to them.

Quite often, they don’t imagine themselves having just one establishment but a whole chain – or even chains – offering different varieties of food and hitting more than one segment of the market. And, naturally, hard work doesn’t faze them and they are blessed with enormous self-belief.

Jamie Barber is typical of the new breed of restaurant entrepreneurs. He owns Villandry, the gastronomic retail and dining temple in Marylebone, and Hush, the trendy bar and restaurant combo in Mayfair, which he opened with Geoffrey Moore (son of Sir Roger).

Although a third venture, Shumi, bombed, these two big successes would be enough to convince most people he is a trained caterer who has worked his way up through the ranks in restaurants. Not a bit of it. He’s a lawyer by profession, who used to work for Harbottle & Lewis, the London firm that counts Sir Richard Branson among its clients.

A successful law career should have been enough but it wasn’t, explains Barber. ‘I always wanted my own business,’ he says. ‘I was a very good commercial lawyer, very good at putting deals together – although I wasn’t that great on the legal detail.

‘Sir Roger Moore introduced me to his son, Geoffrey, who was setting up a chain of themed restaurants on a Bond theme – you know, serving Live And Let Die burgers. It didn’t sound like a good idea. He asked me to get Geoffrey out of it, which I did. I said to Geoffrey: “Rather than burgers, why don’t you set up a chain you want to entertain your friends in and hang out in?”.’

Geoffrey agreed and the pair decided to do it together. Their first venture, Hush, worked and continues to do very well today. But their second opening, Shumi, wasn’t such a success. As Barber points out: ‘We didn’t deliver the product people wanted.’

Most recently, Barber has acquired Villandry, which is being redesigned and restructured.

Overall, he says, the career change has involved a ‘phenomenal learning curve’. ‘I’ve had to work in the kitchens, be a waiter, a receptionist, all that stuff,’ says Barber. ‘It’s avery hard graft.’

His words of warning for hospitality wannabes don’t stop there. He says that, despite the significant wealth of entrants from the City, many go wrong because they believe they know what the clientele wants without doing the research.

‘You need to have a massive conversation with the customer,’ says Barber. ‘Where we went wrong with Shumi is that we forgot to remember ourselves as customers. That really is the key. Every time we put a new dish on the menu or a new design on the aprons, it’s vital to think about the customer.’

So, does Barber have any regrets about his career change? ‘It’s a different way of making money, and it’s a lot of hard work. But at the end of the day, it’s my own business and there’s a terrific satisfaction in that.’

Another ex-City high-flier who now has his own restaurants is Chris McFadden, a former telecoms analyst at Merrill Lynch. He put part of his earnings from the investment bank into Feng Sushi, the high-quality sushi chain, in which he remains a major shareholder and non-executive director.

‘We’ve got six restaurants now – in Borough, Notting Hill, Kensington, Fulham, Chalk Farm and at the Royal Festival Hall. It’s a great, self-financing operation,’ he boasts.

McFadden says that to make a restaurant successful it is crucial not to stint on standards and to always source the very best ingredients. And, like Barber, he thinks it is important to consider whether he would be happy to eat at the restaurants himself.

Barber, McFadden and the others highlighted in this article are the successful ones. But, for each success, there are plenty who don’t make it and whose hopes end in tears.

The reality, however, is that, even for those whose ambitions of running a thriving restaurant are not enough to pull in the punters, it’s a struggle that pales into insignificance compared with the stresses they may have faced in their former profession. Indeed, once they’ve made the decision to leave big business, very few go back.

Editorial feature from Square Meal Lifestyle Magazine Summer 2007