Hassan Abdullah is the ultimate aesthete. Les Trois Garcons - the restaurant he co-owns with his friends Michel Lasserre and Stefan Karlson - is a 65-seater testament to his astonishing obsession with aesthetics. It's crammed with exceptionally well-conceived combinations of kitsch - an exquisite, flamboyant mix of stuffed animals, tiaras, mismatched chandeliers, antique birdcages, and damask-upholstered chaise-longues. A full-sized stuffed tiger patrols the bar area, a vast Tiffany pocket watch hangs on the wall; as a whole, it's stupidly beautiful and inspires shocking clichés of the 'takes your breath away' variety in anyone who crosses its threshold.
'The cleaner's actually too scared to lift things and polish underneath them,' says Abdullah. Which is not remotely surprising.
Over the course of the past five-and-a-half years, ever since it first began peddling upmarket brasserie food to the general public, Les Trois Garcons has established itself as the most spectacularly beautiful component of London's destination restaurant scene. It's an event restaurant - the natural choice if you want to impress the pants off a new love interest, or even propose to them; its haute-camp undertones make it the natural choice for civil ceremony after-parties. It's got a dedicated and sparkling A-list following, every element of which is documented in the restaurant's Livre D'Or - £600 worth of Hermès-bound guest book, filled with adoring messages from Gwyneth Paltrow, Damien Hirst, Miucca Prada, Donatella Versace...
Yet Abdullah, Lasserre and Karlson never meant to create a phenomenon on this scale - they never even intended to be restaurateurs. Les Trois Garcons evolved by accident. They bought the three-storey building that houses it - an abandoned shell of a former pub, located in a particularly gritty and urban corner of East London - as a home in 1996. They'd fallen in with each other in the early Nineties, essentially because they moved in the same creative-adventurous-foreigner-who'd-decamped-to-London crowd. They'd started trading antiques in the city's markets together, and were surprisingly successful at it. None of them had any training in that area - Abdullah had abandoned a law degree to study interior design, Stefan was a waiter, and Michel had come to Britain to study English.
But nonetheless, Hassan Abdullah had that visceral instinct for great pieces, and also 'we worked fantastically hard. We caused a lot of ructions among the other stallholders, in Camden market in particular. They were jealous of how quickly it grew for us in two years,' says Abdullah. 'But it was great because apart from the money, we got a lot of contacts through it, contacts who would help with the restaurant, although we didn't know it at the time of course, because we didn't know there would be a restaurant. We met a lot of dealers and decorators, and also people like Jean Paul Gaultier, Donna Karan, Terry Gilliam, Yasmin Le Bon... we sold them furniture, we kitted out their shops and their homes, and then they heard about the restaurant and started coming... But we weren't networking! Not at all! We weren't working it! We're so uncomfortable with all that!'
They found the East London pub early on in their search for a permanent London base. 'When we first saw this place, it was in a state,' Abdullah continues. 'There were squatters and they'd knocked holes in the walls with their fists, there was flock wallpaper everywhere, the basement had flooded... there was one light bulb and one cold-water tap and nothing else. But I loved it, I loved the proportions. We made an offer on the spot. The estate agent thought we were mad.'
The three men dedicated the next year to the renovation process, dividing their time between their still-flourishing antiques business and the pub project. As it took shape structurally, Abdullah began filling the rooms with his favourite pieces. A vast 1940s Bagues crystal sailing boat. ('I chose it for myself for a birthday present. I always choose my own gifts. Stefan doesn't like that, but I never want anything I don't already know I want, so it's very difficult to buy for me.') A white ceramic Lalique vase. A bronze statue by Le Faguay which he found in a Parisian flea market, and which Karlson and Lasserre forbade him from buying because it was £2,000, 'so I had to throw a strop until they changed their minds'. The parquet floor of the living room (a long, light room located directly above the restaurant, which is kitted out in an entirely distinct but equally frenetic and divine manner) was salvage, rescued from a town hall in Sweden; each tile was sanded down and put into place by Lasserre and Karlson ('While I was away!' says Abdullah, gleefully). And then there are the stuffed birds. 'When I walk into any building,' says Abdullah, 'it talks to me, it tells me what it needs. This one said: birds, stuffed birds. That was before I knew that the pub had been called The Birdhouse, before I knew that the whole of Club Row had been overrun by bird-sellers. They used to come to the pub to drink, with their unsold birds in boxes. You have to respect the bones of a building. You have to do what it needs.' It's for this reason too that the three men own a deeply misogynistic parrot, who presides over the living room and sporadically says: 'Gimme my money.'
Once they'd restored their house, once Abdullah was content that it was filled with the most perfectly complementary mishmash of recherché trinkets, the three started entertaining. They threw dinner parties (in the basement of the building, which now houses the restaurant's kitchens), but also incredible parties. 'At least three times a year, for each of our birthdays,' says Lasserre. 'All sorts of parties, amazing parties, parties with themes... I cooked, Hassan did the table arrangements, Stefan did the drinks. We had a Shanghai Surprise party, an 18th-century party, and every time we had a party, we said: this is the best time in our life! The last one we had was for my birthday in 1999. It was a cabaret theme, with a stage and gold lamé curtains and red velvet. Ninety people came, and it was amazing. After that, everyone said, you should open a restaurant. So we decided we would.'
They had a business plan - Karlson, who is the more cautious and finance-minded of the three insisted on it - but no game plan, no major investors, little experience of the restaurant trade, and absolutely no concept. 'None at all! We had no idea what we were getting into; none!' says Lasserre. 'We did it through trial and error and we worked it all out as we went along. We were running before we could walk really...' They sent the increasingly hip neighbourhood wild with curiosity while they created the restaurant. The photographer Mario Testino, who has a studio nearby, used to walk past the building very slowly, pausing to peep through the keyhole and: 'People used to sit on the top deck of the bus to look in! They could see us bringing in all the stuffed animals, they wanted to know what was going on!'
Les Trois Garcons finally opened its doors late in 2000. 'We were going to have a big press launch for it,' says Abdullah. 'But then a friend said: "You're no one. Why would the press come? Let them find it on their own." And that was the best advice we ever had, because that was what happened.'
And so business built up. None of them knows quite why it's worked out so well. Why it's proved so successful that it's supported the launch of two new bars - Loungelover, the dream of a cocktail bar located just around the corner from the restaurant, which opened in 2003; and Annexe 3 (pronounced 'trois'), the West End outpost the men launched late last year. It's partly luck - they picked a great time to move into the Club Row area, which was teetering on the verge of becoming very hip indeed - and it's partly to do with the combination of the strengths of these three men; each of whom deals with a different facet of the business. Karlson deals with the moneyman, Lasserre deals with the food, and Abdullah deals with the look of the place. 'Every decision has to be unanimous between us,' says Abdullah.
'It works maybe because we do it all from the heart,' thinks Michel Lasserre. 'You can see our lifestyle here: our friends, who eat here - our antiques. We create venues we want to be in, and then we fill them with the people and the things we love.'
Next, they plan to consolidate their businesses. 'It feels like another phase,' says Lasserre, 'as if now we are becoming real, real professionals.' Abdullah laughs. 'We were very much a cottage industry until now,' he says. 'Now is the time to make it solid.' They're beginning that process with a lunch menu at Les Trois Garcons - a relatively commercial gesture for them. They're also taking tentative steps towards brand extension; they're kicking off with a range of scented candles. 'A friend says: "You guys do everything so slowly!" Yes! We do! We don't want anything to be a flash-in-the-pan thing. I hate it when people say we're trendy... We're not! We're just us!'
And so mainly, Abdullah, Lasserre and Karlson will focus on being uniquely them, and on enjoying their restaurant and bars. 'Every day, when I see the customers coming in, it touches me,' says Abdullah. 'I think: My God! People are actually paying to come to my home! How wonderful!' OFM
· Les Trois Garcons, 1 Club Row, London E2 (020 7613 1924)
TWO ROAST DISHES FROM THE MENU
Roasted tiger prawns with artichokes and black olive jus
SERVES 2 10 Tiger prawns (fresh are best)
50g pitted niçoise olives
35g olive oil
1 head of frisée lettuce
5g mixed soft herbs (parsley, chervil, chives)
2 globe artichokes
6 plum tomatoes
1 spring of thyme
2 cloves of garlic
100ml white wine vinegar
200ml white wine
150ml water
1 tbs salt
Wash prawns and push skewers through (5 per skewer). Blend tomatoes, thyme, garlic, salt, vinegar, wine and water until fully puréed. Clean artichokes and place in a pan covering with tomato mix. Bring to a boil and simmer for about 35 minutes or until tender. Leave to cool in tomato mix. Place pitted olives on a tray and bake at 120° C for about 1 hour or until dry. Blend dry olives with olive oil until smooth. Clean lettuce and mix with herbs. Season and dress with olive oil. Cut artichokes. Heat a pan over medium heat, add a drizzle of oil, add seasoned prawns and place in an oven at gas mark 6/180° C for 3-4 minutes.Dress plate with salads and artichokes; add prawns, sauce and olive jus.
Roasted sirloin of beef with oysters, red onion marmalade and Guinness sauce
SERVES 6
2kg beef sirloin
6-8 oysters
2 red onions
200ml red wine
100ml port
1 onion
2 carrots
2 branches of celery
2 cloves of garlic
2 spring of thyme
1 can of Guinness
1pt water
20g butter
Season and sear beef in a pan until coloured. Place onto a rack in a tray with vegetables underneath and pour water onto vegetables. Place in oven at gas mark 6/180°C and cook for about 45 minutes for medium rare. Shuck oysters and place on one side. Slice the onions and place in a pan with wine and port. Cook slowly until liquid has disappeared. Reduce Guinness by half by heating in a pan. Add to the vegetables in the tray. Bring to a boil and pass through a strainer. Reduce to a good consistency. Add butter. Slice beef, add oysters to the sauce and serve with the red onion marmalade.
