Jason Atherton: ‘The days when you made so much money are gone’

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It has not been a good year for the restaurant industry, so buffeted has it been by the ill winds of food inflation, rising wage bills and a cost of living crisis. Not even celebrity profiles and Michelin stars have saved some from biting the dust. Marcus Wareing at the Berkeley, Michel Roux at Le Gavroche, Monica Galetti at Mere, Marco Pierre White at Mr White’s — all have closed their doors recently, as have well-funded international arrivals such as Saltie Girl and Il Borro in Mayfair, which shut up shop almost before the paint was dry on their expensive refits. It’s clearly no time to be taking a bite out of the restaurant pie.
Yet Jason Atherton, it seems, didn’t get the memo. The 52-year-old chef and restaurateur, perhaps the most commercially astute of Gordon Ramsay’s many disciples, is opening not one but three restaurants over the next three months, on top of the two he opened in the past four weeks. As Oscar Wilde might have observed, to launch one restaurant may be regarded as a misfortune but to launch five looks like carelessness. Does he know something that the rest of us don’t?
The question is met with a slightly nervous laugh when Atherton and I meet at the site of Sael, just off Piccadilly Circus, which he opens on September 16. It wasn’t by design, he explains. The restaurants have been in the pipeline for several years but various delays have meant they’ve all come together, rather like London buses.
“I’m literally terrified. This is a massive risk for us. Financially, emotionally, my whole reputation is on the line. And if we don’t deliver over the next four months, there’ll be a lot of people out there who will say, ‘I told you so. Maybe he wasn’t as good as he thought he was.’”
Stronger than the fear, though, is Atherton’s belief that if you get the offering right it’s not all doom and gloom for the restaurant business. “Restaurant owners just have to accept that they need to work harder. The days of the Noughties, when if you had a successful restaurant you made so much money you needed a counting machine to count it, those days are gone,” he says.
“Pre-pandemic I predicted that people would stop going to all of these Michelin-star restaurants and want something a little bit more honest, a little bit more affordable, on a regular basis. And I think that’s definitely the future.”
Affordable: isn’t that the truth? Who hasn’t gone for dinner recently and been left reeling at the size of the bill? “I know I have,” Atherton says. “London started getting a bit crazy. Even I would go to certain restaurants and I’d look at the bill and go, ‘Holy shit, did I really spend that much money?’”
It’s hard not to feel that some restaurants have been so busy trying to attract the super-rich that they’ve not only squeezed out the average customer but put two fingers up to them as well. Yes, costs have gone up, but do we need all the razzmatazz and fripperies that many meals are accompanied by?
It’s not just London, either. Many restaurants, the kind with aspirations of maybe one Michelin star, have dropped the à la carte in favour of a set menu that puts them out of reach of the regular customer. You can see the appeal for the restaurateur, who wants to keep the average spend up, but what of the customer who wants just a main and a glass of wine on a Wednesday night? Not everyone wants to dedicate £120 and three hours to a six-course tasting menu, and perhaps more restaurants could do with listening to what their customers want rather than their chefs.
“I love what Richard Caring has done, for example, with Sexy Fish and Bacchanalia, but not many Londoners go to these chichi restaurants,” Atherton says. “It’s predominantly very wealthy tourists. You can see the resistance from the public. They’re just not going to go out, week on week, and spend £350 on dinner. They’re just not.”
That’s why he has been busy putting his own house in order, in an attempt to bring more locals back to his restaurants. Last month he closed Harrods Social, his expensive restaurant in the basement of the department store, and instead opened a bar in its food hall that serves gourmet hot dogs for £16. “OK, it’s still not cheap cheap, but it’s not crazy prices and people can have a bit of fun with it.”
He also reinvented his flagship Michelin-starred Pollen Street Social restaurant just off Regent Street, the first he opened after leaving the Ramsay group in 2010. When it started it was keenly priced — the £19.50 set lunch was the bargain of the capital — but over the years, as his ambitions grew, prices crept up and it became a destination restaurant. So he gave it the lightest of facelifts and two weeks later it reopened as a New York-inspired grill called Mary’s, named after one of his regular customers. “She’d stopped coming because it had become too much of a special occasion, and my wife [and business partner], Irha said, ‘We need to start getting people like Mary back.’ So it’s got the same Atherton flavours but with lots of small plates to start, the fish and meat from the grill.”
• Read Giles Coren’s review of Pollen Street Social
The three-course set lunch is back — it’s now £29 — or you can sit at what used to be the dessert bar and have a burger. “I mean, did I ever believe I’d be selling a burger for £13.50? No, I didn’t, but people are loving it, so why not? I want to be cooking for taxi drivers, for office workers, for Londoners.”
At Sael, taken from an Old English word for season, Atherton is agonising over four huge chandeliers. He’s done the same trick of recycling much of the decor from the site’s previous restaurant incumbent, Aquavit, staining the wood panelling, turning the private dining room into a bar where you’ll be able to get £6 pints of Guinness and £12 cocktails — honestly, that’s good value for London — but the lights have defeated him. He’s not a fan but, he reasons, “do I really want to be spending £1.2 million on new lights?” The answer is no, because it will just end up on people’s bills and represents the kind of insane profligacy that has left so many restaurants on borrowed time.
“Sael will be our love letter to Britain. The country’s getting a bit of a bashing at the moment and we tend to focus on the negativity, but we need to be less down on ourselves. We have so much to celebrate in the arts, in music, in fashion and in our restaurants.” The menu is still at the planning stage, but he wants to do things like an elevated British grill with an Asian twist, and cheese on toast cooked in a wood-fired oven. He expects it to cost about £40 a head. In October comes an all-day bistro, Three Darlings, on Pavilion Road in Chelsea, whose name is a nod to his three daughters.
The key is to be clever with the menu, he says. “It used to be duck flown in from France with foie gras and figs, and all of a sudden I’ve got to charge you 150 quid for two. It’s an easy trap to fall into when you are writing a menu, to make it all langoustine, scallop, fillet of beef, but at the same time you’ve got to cook food that people want to eat. You can’t just fill it with lamb sweetbreads and pilchards. It’s almost like the shackles are off because I’ve never really cooked like that before.
“I’m not just doing it because I want to make more money. I’m doing it because I think it’s what people want. As long as we can survive and we can pay the wages and we can make a few quid along the way, I’m good with that.”
It’s not all over for fine dining, however. You sense Atherton can’t help himself. Is there still an element of competition with his former mentor, with whom he spent nine years? He says not.
“To leave Gordon on a really good salary was hard because I really enjoyed working for him. I enjoyed his presence. I enjoyed him as a person. He was good to me. But ultimately there was always the burning desire to see, can I do it on my own? How good am I? Will people come to my restaurant if it doesn’t have Gordon’s name attached?”
In November he launches Row on 5 with Spencer Metzger, the Great British Menu winner whom he persuaded to jump ship from the Ritz. The restaurant, on the former site of Kilgour Tailoring on Savile Row, will be a similar offering to his 28-seat restaurant Row on 45 in Dubai, which won two Michelin stars within eight months of opening.
“Fine dining will always exist. But I think if people are going to go for that, they want something much more than just a three-course meal with snacks, a pre-dessert and some petit fours. They want you to blow their socks off. And I want to see how far I can go.”