All restaurants have a coming-of-age moment, the point at which they survive and thrive, or go down fighting. For Gary Usher’s Sticky Walnut, in a two-up two-down house in Hoole, just outside Chester, that moment came in 2013, about 18 months after they had opened. Usher, like any ambitious young chef starting out on his own aged 30, had ploughed every penny he had into Sticky Walnut. He had gone back to Chester to open the restaurant – not far from where he had started out working in pubs – after successful stints in London at Michelin-starred Chez Bruce, and running Gordon Ramsay and Angela Hartnett’s kitchen at the York & Albany. He couldn’t afford to fail.
Sticky Walnut had started well. He was getting good local reviews, doing healthy evening business and was packed at weekends. But the busier he got, the hotter the two rooms of the restaurant became. Usher couldn’t afford air conditioning and in the heat of the summer, diners literally started passing out. “We were essentiallycarrying people out, Fridays and Saturdays, mostly older people,” he says, “which obviously wasn’t ideal.” To install air con upstairs and downstairs would cost £10,000. Usher went to the bank and told them how Sticky Walnut had quadrupled the turnover of the previous restaurant in the building, but how they really need this small loan so they could stay busy and people didn’t keep fainting. The bank said no.
Looking back now, Usher recalls how that rejection was the point that he had to ask himself how much he wanted the business to work. The answer was: very much indeed. But he was going to have to do things differently. “My dad had a big stroke the week before Sticky opened and he’d run businesses and I looked up to him,” he says. “He impressed on me how I needed to work with the banks, always to be suited and booted when I went to talk to the manager, all that. But I realised at that moment when they said no it didn’t matter what I looked like. Banks had changed. I never saw the same person twice. They had little interest in what we were trying to do.” The local branch was not far away from Sticky Walnut but, he says, no one there ever told him they had been in for lunch.
Eventually Usher managed to scrape the money together for “an airship of an air conditioning system” but he wondered if there might be another way. For a couple of years he had been in charge of everything in the kitchen, and also overseeing front of house. He had a tight team, but no way to promote anyone, without stepping aside, which he couldn’t afford. A stellar review from Marina O’Loughlin in the Guardian made Sticky Walnut even busier. It was voted AA best restaurant of the year in 2014, at which point, Usher thought: “Fuck it, let’s do another restaurant.” That way he might improve his revenue, and have a way to promote his staff. The banks, ludicrously, remained unforthcoming. Then a friend suggested crowdfunding. Usher’s elder brother Shaun had just done something similar with a book project he had been trying to get off the ground: Letters of Note. Gary was dubious at first. “But Shaun was saying to me: it will work. And that is how Burnt Truffle came about.”
Usher advertised on Kickstarter his plans to bring a new restaurant, with the same simple, inspired cooking of Sticky Walnut, to the Wirral. He offered backers free Sunday lunches once the restaurant opened, or, for those pledging more than £5,000, private parties or company Christmas dinners. To his surprise he raised £103,000 from 891 punters in just over a week, and Burnt Truffle opened in 2015.
Usher, an animated and engaging man, intensely bright-eyed and with two sleeves of tattoos, is telling me this story at a table in his latest venture, Hispi, in the Manchester suburb of Didsbury. This stripped-back bistro in a side-road off the High Street also benefited from £50,000 Kickstarter finance. A fourth Usher project, Wreckfish in Liverpool, has just raised £200,000 from 1,522 backers and will open in the autumn. If he is on a roll, he is not letting it go to his head.
He says he has no plan for the business, “You walk in and you get a feel for a building, if it will work. I certainly never sit outside doing footfall.” I’d seen a quote from him recently, I mention, that he was thinking about 10 restaurants, how accurate was that?
“Well, it was probably just something I said,” he suggests, “but part of me means it. Although we have pretty good careers in these restaurants, we don’t make lots of money. I don’t own a house, I rent a car, I hardly go on holiday. It’s quite hard work, and a lot of sacrifice. This isn’t a sob story,” he says, with a laugh. “But you know I wouldn’t mind getting a place of my own at some point, and if that means more restaurants ...”
You don’t have to spend long with Usher to sense a real energy and purpose about him. He speaks of the restaurants and their staff like family – his two long-term relationships have ended, he says, when it became clear the restaurants came first (“I think that is how it has to be until I feel they are a success,” he explains). Sticky Walnut first came to the notice of the press when Usher took to TripAdvisor and Twitter to take on all-comers whose criticism he felt was unfair (he posed as a surrealist reviewer on TripAdvisor, owning up part-way through that he was the owner of the restaurant, to prove how easy it was to game the system). He has a natural entrepreneur’s fighting spirit. I wonder if that has always been there?
“It has,” he says, “although I don’t like the word entrepreneur. You know I don’t avidly read Richard Branson’s books or whatever – I couldn’t even if I wanted to because my reading is so poor. But there was always the drive just to be good at a something, I guess.”
There is, you sense, a childhood of frustration and determination in that remark. Usher came from a bookish family, both his parents went to university, but by the time he was 14 or 15, with both his brother and sister on their way to top degrees, it was clear he wasn’t going to join them. He was severely dyslexic and in those days, at his school in north Wales, the choice was to wear thick black-framed glasses with coloured lenses, and be treated like a dunce, or bunk off. At 15, with his GCSEs approaching, Usher was working in a local pub washing dishes at weekends, near the family home. The owner knew he wasn’t doing well in school offered to make him “the first pub apprentice in the north-west”, with one day a week to go to catering college.
Usher originally declined the offer, but a couple of weeks later he was in an economics lesson struggling with an abstraction and walked out and went straight to the pub and told them he had changed his mind. He called home, and his mum responded in the best possible way: “Brilliant!” she said. “Me and your Dad didn’t want to put any pressure on you but we hoped you would do that.”
For a while, doing the drudge jobs, Usher thought he had made a stupid choice, but then things changed. “It sounds silly, but I used to do a really good job of mopping the kitchen floor at the end of the night,” he says. “And I remember one of the chefs coming up and saying, ‘Gary, you do such a great job on the floor, it really makes a difference.’ It was really the first time I thought: ‘I am good at something.’ Then after that, it was like, ‘Gary, you make a really good club sandwich,’ and then, ‘You do a really good risotto.’”
That was the start of it. There were a couple of detours. Asked what he wanted for his 18th birthday, Usher told his dad he wanted “a fucking massive bag” and took himself off to Ibiza with a one-way ticket to pursue a fantasy of working in a beach cafe he’d liked from a holiday. He was a chef at Cafe Mambo for three years before coming back to find jobs in London restaurants, and get a bit serious about his cooking. The history he brought to that, from dropping out of school, from the pub, from Ibiza, was, he says, that he knew exactly what kind of a chef he wanted to be.
It wasn’t the kind of chef, who, as he did in Angela Hartnett’s kitchen, made six different sauces for different game birds. “I love Angela and she is miles better than me,” he says, “but I would be on the pass tasting these sauces and I would think: ‘When I have my restaurant I don’t think Joe Bloggs will tell the difference between quail, pheasant and partridge so how about just making one great sauce?’ There is a lot you can leave out, and still make it taste great.”
When he opened Sticky Walnut that was the principle. “Just put good things on the plate, ideally three elements for a main and two for a dessert, things that people really like.” And that is how the business has grown. He has a few essentials – “always fresh cooked bread”, something he enjoyed at home as a kid; “a braise, preferably, in the evening, with truffle chips, a certain pâté recipe in the starters” – but other than that he gives his chefs relatively free rein to come up with dishes in his style.
In doing so he is quietly reinventing the neighbourhood restaurant, one crowdfunded location at a time. One thing his accidental strategy ensures, he says, is that the people who have pledged to help make it all happen feel at home from the first night. At Hispi, as at the other restaurants, there is a mirror on the wall with all the donors’ names etched into it. It becomes a perfect illustration of the power of connection. “People come and have their pictures taken with that and they will tweet those pictures, and we will retweet them and so on,” Usher says, before heading off on his daily round of his intimate, but growing empire. “It means they are on our side. After that if we fail, we really only have ourselves to blame.”
Gary Usher’s guide to successful crowdfunding
1 Work out what you need
Our estimate for turning a building in Liverpool into Wreckfish came to £500,000. The kitchen company said they’d finance £100,000 of the kitchen, and I hoped the bank would match what we raised on Kickstarter – so that’s how we came up with a target of £200,000.
2 Make a video
Most successful campaigns have one. Get it done professionally: if you’re trying to reach £200,000, £2,000 on a video is worth it.
3 Clear your diary
Give the campaign 100% of your time. If three people pledge in an hour, tell everyone about it.
4 Be honest and transparent
People need to know exactly what you’re doing. I respond to everything on social media, particularly negativity. If somebody says, “Why haven’t you got the £20,000 deposit?”, I’ll explain. Then anyone reading it will go, “Fair enough,” before it spins out of control.
5 Have a back-up plan
If you don’t hit your target, even if you’re £100 off, you don’t get any of the money. Ask a rich friend or family member to help you over the finishing line.
Wreckfish opens in September; wreckfish.co
