In the gutted upstairs room of Bibendum on London’s Fulham Road, I’m suddenly feeling my age. The flagship Conran restaurant is in the process of a makeover. Floors and walls have been stripped and the famous Michelin blue stained-glass windows and great arched conservatory glass roof look down on an interior of rubble and scaffold. The windowless kitchen behind the cathedral-like dining room has been half-removed by the contractors giving it the look of a medieval vault. I’m surveying its gloom with Claude Bosi, recently installed as the new head chef for the restaurant’s reopening in April. Bosi, who won his first Michelin star at 26, and still carries that forward-looking sense of exuberant possibility, points to the few tiles that still cling stubbornly to the kitchen walls, as if at a cave painting: “Most of this stuff is from 1987!” he suggests, marvelling at the antiquity.
Bibendum opened that year, the year I first moved to London, and since that obviously doesn’t seem much more than five minutes ago, it’s hard not to take his marvelling a bit personally. Squint and the dining room itself feels like a monument to those beginnings. 1987 was the first full year of Nigel Lawson’s Big Bang, when, for better and worse, London determinedly rehashed itself as an outward looking global city, at ease with foreign money and foreign culture. The deregulation was the starting gun of a different kind of confidence, one which wanted to adopt the lifestyle of European capitals. That openness was symbolised most clearly, perhaps, in a trio of new restaurants which opened almost simultaneously. Rowley Leigh’s Kensington Place, the inspirational River Café of Ruth Rogers and Rose Gray, and Bibendum itself, which were united in celebrating a joie de vivre that had, up until then, most often seemed the preserve of life across the Channel.
Newspapers noted it as a “let there be light” moment. London felt a bit airier. The Guardian welcomed Bibendum in these terms: “The dining room is an extravagance of glass windows and space. A central pile of open shelves is filled with fruit and shellfish and plates and topped with a great vase. Above all the room is big, big on the scale of a grand hotel.” The food too represented something of a breath of fresh air from the fussier interpretations of French cooking that had been approximated in London kitchens in the recent past. It would not try too hard, but aim to do simple classics well. Bibendum, under the direction of Simon Hopkinson, would be a deliberate break from the “mould of colourful sauces”; it would dare to call itself “continental”, the Guardian noted. Hopkinson pledged to create the best steak frites outside France. There would be also tete de veau, tripes lyonnaise, rabbit with mustard sauce and boudin blanc. The Observer’s review, by Paul Levy was succinct, but to the point: “Gastro-retro, reactionary chic French bistro food: herrings, braised endives, pink roasted veal, chocolate pithiviers, mmmm.” Bibendum even came with a slogan, from Horace’s Odes, that raised a glass to a more hedonistic future: Nunc est Bibendum! (Now is the time to drink!) Three decades on, it seems appropriate in the sobering year of Brexit, that Bibendum should have temporarily shut its doors on that past, and be dusting itself down and reinventing itself for new realities.
Looking back on those beginnings from his home in Battersea, Sir Terence Conran, now 85, can recall something of the thrill of opening. Bibendum was an ambition it had taken him half a lifetime to pull off. Conran had opened the first Habitat store over the road in the 1960s and as the nation’s most ardent Francophile had been “utterly seduced by the Michelin building” and coveted it. “It was always my great dream to finally get my hands on it, and restore the building to its former glory,” he suggests.
His chance came when the French tyre company decided to cash in on its dramatic London headquarters, its UK home since the dawn of motoring in 1911. Conran, along with the publishing tycoon Paul Hamlyn, bought it and decided it was the place for a special restaurant. “Our dream was to create something entirely new, somewhere between the relaxed atmosphere of a Parisian brasserie and the precise, elegant formality of somewhere like The Connaught,” Conran says. He’d had experience in creating new restaurants, with The Soup Kitchen and The Orrery, and his venture with brother-in-law Antonio Carluccio in Neal Street, but this represented “a big step up the gastronomic ladder”. He had been eating lunch two or three times a week at Hilaire, a few streets away, where Hopkinson worked. He persuaded the chef to be the third partner in Bibendum.
Not long after its opening, Bibendum had established itself as perhaps the most fashionable of west London restaurants, with a mix of Kensington regulars and relaxed celebrity. (Hopkinson recalls a table for three of Alec Guinness, Lauren Bacall and Alan Bennett as a particular favourite.) Elizabeth David, culinary heroine to both Conran and Hopkinson, would come in from time to time (Conran can still recall the howls of delight of then sous chef Jeremy Lee when the “great lady declared his lemon tart was the best she’d ever had”). In 1994, though, after Hopkinson had published his suitably understated cookbook Roast Chicken and Other Stories (voted “most useful cookbook of all time” in a 2005 poll) the chef suffered a sort of breakdown one night during service. At the time, Hopkinson was straining to do 100 covers a night. One evening Alain Ducasse was in. Ducasse asked the head waiter if he might have the recipe for Hopkinson’s steamed ginger pudding, and to see the kitchen, but Hopkinson heard himself in a moment of extreme stress refusing both requests. Later he went into his office and cried uncontrollably.
After that Bibendum wasn’t quite the same. Though Hopkinson retained his stake in the business, he left the kitchen soon after to pursue a career writing about food, and while Bibendum remained true to his philosophy and standards, a little of the buzz inevitably departed with him. Conran suggests now that “it is very rare for a restaurant to have lasted so long while managing to keep a sense of timelessness, particularly in London”. But he also concedes it is true that Bibendum “got a little too comfortable” and added a couple of tyres to his waist over the years. It is said it rankles with him a little that his efforts with Bibendum over three decades have never been rewarded with a Michelin star (the star for Conran’s Orrery remains a solitary achievement). It is, perhaps to right this particular omission that he has taken on Bosi, who has not been without one (or two) stars for the past 17 years. In bringing Bosi in, Conran suggests he is hoping to make the restaurant “virile for the next 30 years”.
Sitting with Bosi on a couple of knackered restaurant chairs among the rubble, you can see why he fits that particular bill. The Lyon-born chef is not long back from a holiday in Mauritius with his wife and young son and, at 44, is looking tanned and bright-eyed and straining to get back in front of a stove. When he first came to Britain, Bosi avoided London and went out to Ludlow where he established his restaurant Hibiscus as a destination. He moved Hibiscus to Mayfair nine years ago, but had hardly visited the capital before that. “It’s funny,” he recalls, with a laugh. “The first time I came I picked up the Michelin guide and looked where to eat. And I saw this restaurant called Bibendum. I thought wow! You have to be pretty desperate to get a Michelin star to call your restaurant that! I didn’t know any of the history.”
Conran’s offer came at a good moment. Bosi had arrived at a crossroads with Hibiscus. He had bought out his partner in the restaurant three years ago and was sole owner with all the pressure that entailed. He was due a rent and rate review on his lease and experiencing a few sleepless nights as a result. The high-end landscape of fine dining in Mayfair had lately been disrupted by the flash arrivals of Caprice Holdings’ Sexy Fish in the old Nat West building in Berkeley Square (after a £15m refurbishment) and by Alan Yau’s “tens of millions” investment in decorating Park Chinois. “These big places were a bit more cool, a bit more funky,” Bosi suggests. When a good offer came in for the lease of Hibiscus he knew it was the time to take it. Conran originally asked him to work as a consultant on the new Bibendum, but he told him and the Hamlyn family that he would only be interested in a “heart and soul” role. The resultant partnership has involved him putting “every last penny” he made at Hibiscus into the new venture.
Conran likes Bosi because he is full of the “confidence, personality and vision” he knows Bibendum will need to recreate its former excitement. Given he is not coming in to the restaurant at the easiest moment, you suspect he will need every ounce of those qualities. The area around Fulham Road has become synonymous with the trend of “lights out London” as properties in the neighbouring squares have been bought up by foreign investors and left empty. A couple of years ago, Henry Harris, who had been another of Hopkinson’s protégés in the Bibendum kitchen cited this fact as the reason he was shutting his much-loved restaurant Racine, a few hundred yards up the road.
“The non-doms have bought up large chunks of central London,” he said. “I had a regular customer living in Cadogan Square call me to say she is selling up because she didn’t like returning home with all the lights off in the flats around her. A lot of the locals would come in once a week or once a fortnight, but [many] have moved away. There was a strong and loyal core to the end, but not a big enough one.”Bosi is up for the challenge. He is enlarging the kitchen slightly and aiming for slightly fewer covers than the restaurant enjoyed at its height. He likens the opportunity to the time he arrived in England without a word of the language to be sous chef at Overton Grange and was offered the job of head chef instead after the incumbent left. “I just take it as a joke,” he said. “I could do whatever I want. They said, you take over in February, we want three rosettes by April. I thought OK. I started and I got the three rosettes and at the end of the year we got a Michelin star.”
He is not daunted by the task at Bibendum. He respects Hopkinson’s reputation but admits the two have never met (though he plans to before the opening). Bosi made his reputation with some obsessively precise French cooking at Hibiscus, but he has no problem with Conran’s direction that they should keep some of the classic dishes of Bibendum’s past.
“I said ‘of course!’ because it was never in my mind to get rid of them,” Bosi says. “I want a roast chicken on the menu, a different flavour for each season – we are having a rotisserie put on the carvery. We are going to have tripes lyonnaise – my mother used to make a wonderful tripe and cuttlefish gratin, which I am revising a little bit.” He insists that over the years his food has become more concentrated and simpler. “In the beginning there was of course some showing off at Hibiscus. But this is going to be more where I want to be.” He says he wants people to come to Bibendum for perfect calf liver and onion and bacon. The restaurant won’t be fixated on tasting menus, it will be about eating. The aim is Conran’s original vision, of making people as comfortable “to come with their kid or with their wife as for a business meeting”.
To this end, Bosi’s second wife, Lucy, who works for Open Table, is his most reliable critic, he says. His rule of thumb when thinking about the Bibendum menu is to have nothing on it that her parents wouldn’t recognise or want to eat. He smiles. “Lucy is never afraid to say, ‘What are you doing? Tone it down a bit …’ Sometimes I don’t want to accept it, but I know she is seeing it as a normal customer would see it.”
Bosi has a reputation for fieriness – he had an infamous spat with a food blogger who gave Hibiscus three stars out of five in a review. (Bosi tweeted ‘Nice way to gain respect with chefs...!! I think you’re a cunt and this it’s personal sorry...!!’ – the tone of which he now regrets, if not the sentiment itself.) As evidence that this was out of character, he points to his 17 years of regular custom and the fact he will be bringing pretty much his entire staff from Hibiscus to Fulham Road.
When I ask him how long he plans to be here, he talks in terms of fixtures like the Waterside Inn and Le Gavroche. He grins, gazes over the rubble. “This is my last move. I hope so. I feel at home here.”
And Michelin stars?
One thing at a time …
Conran tries to be equally sanguine about the ambition. When I ask if a star would be a vindication of his three decades of effort under this glass roof, he is not sure that vindication is the right word, but of course can’t help thinking, “It would seem perfectly fitting for our Michelin building. No pressure, though, Claude, there’s no rush – just enjoy the kitchen!”
But he would say that, wouldn’t he?
Michelin House, 81 Fulham Road, London SW3 6RD; bibendum.co.uk
