One damp morning in early summer, I walk through Soho with Russell Norman, its latest king. It's a slightly maddening experience. Norman's attention span – he admits it's short – could well be the secret of his amazing success (we will come to this), but it also means that it's quite hard to keep track of him. One minute, you're deep in conversation. The next, you turn your head to look at him, and he has disappeared. He will have dived into some arty bookshop – I do mean arty; I'm not being coy – or be deep in conversation with some shady bloke in peculiar shoes and retro sunglasses. In Polpo, on Beak Street, the first restaurant he opened, and the place where we begin our tour, it's amusing to watch him watching his early regulars arrive. "Who's that?" I hear him mutter. "Oh, shit. What's his name?" He rises from his barstool. He is smiling at the man in question, who is smiling back, thrilled to be recognised. "It'll come to me, it'll come to me," he says, still under his breath. The man is approaching. His hand is extended. Norman's hand is also extended. Oh God. Can he do this? Can he? Yes, he can! "Richard!" he says, at normal volume. "Great to see you."
Norman opened Polpo, a reinvention of the Venetian bacaro, complete with a cicchetti menu of small plates, in September 2009, exactly a year after the collapse of Lehman Brothers. Other similar restaurants followed: Polpetto, above the French House pub in Dean Street, and da Polpo, on the edge of Covent Garden. Plus, Spuntino, a wannabe New York speakeasy with a diner menu of mac cheese and sliders, and Mishkin's, a Jewish-style deli that also serves cocktails. Norman will open his sixth restaurant, Polpo Smithfield, near Farringdon station, in early July, and hopes to follow this, pretty swiftly, with a third in Islington. (The original Polpo will become Polpo Soho and da Polpo will be renamed Polpo Covent Garden.) He also has two top secret ideas for other restaurants. Not bad for two and a half years' work. "Yes," he says. "It's silly, really. But for us, things are going slowly. We're always saying: what shall we do next? We could easily have opened twice as many if we'd put our minds to it."
How does he keep track of everything? Well, there is a lot of walking (it's handy his establishments are close together). Plus there is a lot of hanging out (Norman is highly visible, to a degree that you sometimes wonder if he can instantly transport himself simply by closing his eyes and pinching his nose, as the characters did in Rentaghost). But there is also… webcam. He hands me his iPhone, on the screen of which are four different shots of Spuntino's kitchen and larder. So he spies on his staff? "I wouldn't say that exactly," he says, with a grin. How often does he check this, er, facility? "Not too often. This is the first time today." We peer at a tiny backstage staircase. No member of staff is in sight. Perhaps they're all huddled together in a place the cameras cannot reach: the fridge, say, or the loo.
Our tour takes in all of the restaurants. At Polpo, there is a praise for a waitress who has cleaned a mirror without being asked. At Spuntino, the head chef, Rachel O'Sullivan – with the opening of the new Polpo, four of Norman's head chefs will be women – asks us to try a new salad of asparagus and hazelnuts, flavoured with the Egyptian spice blend, dukkah. We love it, and it will now go on the menu. At Polpetto – by the time you read this, it will have closed in preparation for a move to a new site in Soho, with more covers and more of a Manhattan emphasis – Florence Knight, its outrageously young chef, is preparing to roast a kid. At da Polpo, there is excitement: it has just had its best week ever (da Polpo is responsible for more sales of the Italian aperitif Aperol than anywhere else in the UK; Polpo does the same job for Campari). Finally we wind up at Mishkin's, where we will eat lunch. For me: latkes with smoked trout and horseradish cream; a salt beef sandwich with cauliflower slaw. For him: chicken matzo ball soup; kipper mousse and toast.
"I want you to try the chicken soup," he says, when we sit down. "I had a letter of complaint about it – a guy said it was bland." What did he do? "I refunded the cost of his dinner." Was the customer right? "The customer is always right – but about the soup, I think he was wrong. Our chicken soup is very authentic. It's supposed to be comfort food. It's supposed to be… a little bland."
He pushes a steaming bowl of it in my direction. I take a good slurp.
"Well?"
"I think it needs a little salt."
Norman doesn't say anything. But he shuts his eyes, and shakes his head sadly. The poor thing. The fools he must suffer. The pearls he must throw before swine. He pulls the bowl towards his side of the table, and finishes it off with pointed enthusiasm.
The parable of the chicken soup tells you quite a lot about Norman. It embodies his cockiness, for sure. But it also reminds you of the strength of his vision: he knows that for a restaurant to be truly successful, for it to be loved and adopted by a certain kind of cool, young professional, it must be run with stubborn passion. Clarity, not accommodation, is the order of the day. Which brings us, neatly, to the thing that drives even those who adore his restaurants – I'm one of these people, having never had a bad dish in any of them – absolutely nuts. I speak of his no-bookings policy. All his establishments take bookings at lunchtime – save for Spuntino, which is so resolutely cool, it does not even have a telephone. But in the evenings, only one does – Mishkin's. (Why? No reason. Not even Norman is able to explain it.)
Norman insists that this policy – one that has, alas, been widely copied by a new generation of small, groovy restaurants – comes down, not to cash, to keeping tables busy, but to social engineering. "When Polpo opened, we got a bunch of good reviews," he says. "And that led to the phone ringing off the hook. We were booked up weeks, even months, in advance. But when people turned up, they'd be disappointed. They look at the bare brick walls and the exposed filament lightbulbs, the rough butcher paper placemat and the reclaimed cutlery, and they'd wonder: what's all the fuss about? They were coming out for a fancy pants destination restaurant experience, and they were getting this backstreet wine bar. I stood there in those early weeks, scratching my head, thinking these people were not the right audience for the restaurant. Meanwhile, about a hundred times an evening, really cool people would come and ask for a table for two, and I would think: crikey! These are my long-term customers I'm turning away. They live or work or play in the area, and they want to eat in the restaurant I built for them, and they can't get in."
And lo, his ruthless regime was born, at least for dinner (lunch, he says, is for business, making lunchtime bookings acceptable). How does he feel about its critics? They're voluble, and sometimes slightly crazed. ("A total pain in the arse," says our own Jay Rayner, on no-book restaurants; "Wasted journeys, aggravation and bad feeling," says Time Out.) Answer: he couldn't care less. "It does confuse me that people rant and rave about this. If you want to book, choose a restaurant where they take reservations. It's that fucking simple! There are 4,000 restaurants that take bookings in the West End, and maybe two dozen that don't." But it's so awful, arranging to meet someone, and then having to stand in line all hopefully! "Well, I don't like waiting either. So if I'm going out, I choose a restaurant that takes bookings." Either that, or people should plump for the early bird special. Unlike me, Norman likes eating at 5.30pm. "Maybe it's an age thing, but for me, eating early is great. That's what New Yorkers do."
Norman, 46, grew up in Whitton, west London. His father was a toolmaker, and he was one of six boys. After school – "I got excellent A-levels," he says – he went to Sunderland Polytechnic, where he read English; he chose the course purely on the grounds that Sunderland was a long way from home. Why? Was he unhappy? "No. I just thought it would be a good idea to put some distance between me and home." Is he close to his family? "I wouldn't say close, though of course we're in touch. I feel like the black sheep, though I don't know why. It's me, not them. I'm the prickly one." Luckily, he liked Sunderland a lot. "I didn't do a lot of work. I did what students do. I was interested in music, and there were so many great [north-eastern] bands around at that time: Prefab Sprout, Martin Stephenson and the Daintees."
After his degree, Norman returned to London, where he qualified as a teacher at the Institute of Education. For three years, he was head of English and drama at a girls school in Stanmore. "I loved teaching. I think I was a good teacher. But the whole time, I was also working weekends at Joe Allen in Covent Garden. I was the Saturday maitre d', and I loved that, too. At a theatre restaurant, it's all about the people: working out where to sit them, knowing not to sit Jack Tinker [then drama critic of the Daily Mail] next to Nicholas de Jongh [then drama critic of the Evening Standard], or whatever." Eventually, he decided to work at Joe Allen full time. "The money was better."
There was a brief, unhappy stint as general manager at the Blue Print Cafe, a Conran restaurant – "Corporate structure," he says. "Russell Norman doesn't like that" – and three-year stints as general manager at Circus, in Soho, and Zuma, in Knightsbridge. Then, in 2005, he received a call from Mark Hix, then chef-director at Caprice Holdings, which had just been bought by the fashion billionaire Richard Caring. Norman was appointed operations director: his brief covered front of house across the entire group, but the work he really enjoyed was developing new business. He was involved in the opening of Scott's, the Sheekey Oyster Bar, and the Ivy Club.
"But then the recession took hold, and that side of things just stopped. Life became less interesting." Restless, he handed his notice in – as a director he had to give 12 months – and started to plan his next move. He drew up a business plan, and found himself a partner: his best friend, Richard Beatty. "He put the cash in. It wasn't a great deal. But it was enough." To save money, Norman designed Polpo himself – and has done the same job on every restaurant they have opened. "I must have saved close to £1m." He's good at designing, it must be said. He has an eye for detail. He haunts secondhand shops in places like Margate, and buys old Formica tables on eBay. He knows exactly how to get hold of "six-inch by three-inch American subway tiles". He is annoyed that other places have latched on to the groovy twisted filament bulbs that hang over the Polpo bar, and will not be using them himself again any time soon. At Spuntino, he showed me what looked like an ancient skylight at the back of the restaurant. In fact, there is no sky behind it, just a very clever lighting system; staff lower the lights as sunset approaches. He likes quirky buildings, with features that must be discovered. He could never open "in some glass box shopping centre".
His first idea was to do a purist version of a bacaro – no tables, and sawdust on the floor. But then he came to his senses. Polpo is, therefore, an ersatz bacaro – or a more comfortable, more professional version of the real thing, depending on your point of view. "I went to Venice as a student. Then I went back as a hopelessly romantic Englishman, a man who loved the architecture and the decrepitude… Byron, Mahler and Thomas Mann. Then I met my wife [they have two daughters; Norman has an adult son from a previous relationship], and we had our honeymoon there." It was only then that he started thinking about its cooking. "I realised that, away from all the tourists, it was a living, breathing city. I also noticed that the locals don't really eat in restaurants; they spend most of the day gossiping in wine bars. I thought: would this work in London?"
The trick of Polpo, and all of his restaurants, is that the dishes, being small and designed to share, are keenly priced; they speak to the times, even if things do rather add up once you've had a couple of drinks. "We've taken traditional recipes, and refined them; we've taken some of the more challenging elements out, and made them daintier." Does he ever get Venetian customers? "Yes, loads. They fall into two camps. The first will say: this isn't authentic! We would never put lemon zest and parsley on cuttlefish, or serve pork with radiccio and hazelnuts. One came in and said: 'Why are you serving capers? They're from Sicily.' But the second camp love it. They see the heart and soul of Venice here. They feel transported."
Norman insists that each of his restaurants has its own identity and he has made a conscious effort just lately to detach himself from them. "Though I do loitering, standing outside, listening to people. So often, their impression is completely wrong. 'This is owned by an American,' they'll say. 'It's his first place in London.' I stand there with a smile on my face. I love the fact the restaurants confuse people." But doesn't he worry, too, that those in the know will fear Polpo is fast becoming a chain? "No. People will just think: oh, good, there's a Polpo opening near us. The word 'chain' is charged. But we don't have a boardroom. We've got a scruffy office [in a Soho terrace] with a floor so sloping the water cooler is at an angle. We're not corporate. We're just two guys." What's his endgame? "I'd be lying if I said I didn't want to make money. But I haven't yet, and it doesn't matter because what I'm doing is building a little family of restaurants that interest me. We've had gentle inquiries from very well known squillionaires in this field. But we're not tempted."
Or not so far. My guess is that one day, Norman and Beatty will sell up, and become very rich indeed – at which point, he will probably start all over again. He has the restaurant bug. He likes the performance of it, I think. He likes being Russell Norman. You have only to read his tweets to know this. 'Even the Holy Sandwich of Most Sacred Cured Pork is made of the flesh of the Periodic Table,' he tweeted the other day – and only a little more prosaically: 'Champagne is good with parmesan and gruyere.' Am I right? "Well, I've learnt my lesson the hard way. I used to spend such a vast amount of time out, day and night. There's a phrase: restaurant widow. I didn't see much of my wife and family. So I've forced myself to ration it." An uncharacteristic pause. "But I do like being me, yes. It's fun."
