“You know,” Yevgeny Chichvarkin tells me, “people hear that a Russian opens a wine shop and a restaurant in Mayfair and they say that we serve novichok in golden glasses, or something. They make headlines out of us selling a bottle of cognac for £200,000. But that is not all our business. We also have wine in the shop under £30. We have Laurent-Perrier non-vintage cheaper than Tesco…”
Chichvarkin is explaining this over lunch at a window seat in Hide, his extraordinary three-storey, glass-fronted restaurant on Piccadilly, which opened with considerable fanfare, and a little sneering, in April. A tall, heavyset man of 40, his joints are a bit stiff from a game of polo yesterday – his first of the season – and as he talks, he occasionally rolls his shoulders and stretches out his legs.
Despite the polo ponies, and the house in Chelsea, Chichvarkin believes himself to be part of a rare breed: a refusenik, not an oligarch. He made his millions in Boris Yeltsin’s winner-takes-all Russia by setting up the mobile phone business Evroset in 1997, aged 22, and over the next decade cornering the market with 5,000 shops. In 2008, having refused to let his company be compromised by interference from Putin’s government, he fled to the airport face down in the back seat of a car, narrowly escaping arrest on what he firmly maintains were fabricated charges of kidnapping and extortion. Once in London, he and his business partner sold up for a reported $400m.
He has not been back to Russia since – not even after the death of his mother, a former government economist, in 2010. The official version of Lyudmila Chichvarkina’s death was that she tripped on a kitchen tile and banged her head. Her son is certain that she was murdered in an effort to trap him into coming back to Moscow. Having successfully fought extradition over the kidnapping charges, later dropped, he stayed put in London, however, where he appears to have decided that the best form of security is to make himself as visible as possible. In March, in the weeks before the Russian election that saw Putin re-elected in a grimly predictable landslide, Chichvarkin was outside the Russian embassy in Kensington, with a megaphone, leading a handful of fellow Russians in denouncing the regime.
He has become known not only for his political bravery, but also for his singular style. Having abandoned the mullet of his formative years he has adopted a beard and a waxed moustache pitched somewhere between Romanov and Rasputin. He favours extravagantly patterned pantaloons, though on the day we meet he is wearing a relatively conservative fringed white linen smock shirt, jeans and bright red winkle pickers.
I ask him at one point if he called his restaurant Hide as a joke, given that, like its owner, it is so insistently in plain sight – just over the road from the Ritz, in a building refurbished for a reported £10m (Chichvarkin does not confirm the figure) and with ostentatious features, including an inbuilt car-lift to parking on the floor above the restaurant. Chichvarkin insists the name was more a reflection of the fact that, despite the windows, you cannot see in properly from outside – and, because of the triple glazing “you see the police sirens go by but you cannot hear it”. He is, he insists, a lover of discreet style. In this he sees the restaurant, with Michelin-starred Ollie Dabbous installed as chef, as a natural progression from his Berkeley Square wine shop Hedonism, which was conceived to be “the best wine shop in the world” and which, to some customers, has made good on that boast.
When he first arrived in London, followed by his now ex-wife and two children, Chichvarkin drifted for a couple of years, trying to work out what to do with his millions. In Moscow, he had developed an interest in fine wines, in part because he lived next door to the best vintner in the city – “the guy was every night studying the Robert Parker guide until midnight”. One afternoon in London, he decided he wanted to drink with his wife a particular bottle of a favourite Rioja – a £170 2001 Roda Cirsion – so he phoned around the main merchants Justerini & Brooks, Berry Bros, Harrods to see if they had a bottle and was brusquely quoted a six-week delivery. By the time he had finished with his list of possible stores, he realised he had his business. He would create the highest-end offy with great customer-friendly service.
Hedonism opened in 2012, with 4,500 lines purchased by Alistair Viner, the head buyer Chichvarkin had lured from Harrods. Before lunch, Chichvarkin showed me around Hedonism with Tatiana Fokina, his youthful CEO, with whom he now also lives. Fokina formerly ran an art gallery in St Petersburg, and is, he insists, the real driving force behind the concept of the shop and the restaurant. She recalls how in the early days, before the shop opened, the pair of them would go to suppliers with Yevgeny dressed in his pantaloons, and her “several years younger than now”, and it would be like “we want to open the best wine shop in the world”. The more aloof suppliers would listen and smile and say, good luck, but they did not do business. “When we opened,” Fokina recalls, “we showed some of those guys around and I took some pleasure in seeing their faces.”
The shop, a great airy emporium with natural woods and summer light that gives way to a vast low-lit cellar space below, is clearly a shared obsession that sees them routinely going over the day’s takings at two in the morning. Chichvarkin has a Russian antipathy to queues (“At Christmas, we make sure everyone can be in and out in two minutes if they wish,” he says). Along with the fast turnover, there is room to linger in the store’s various inner sanctums – the vintage champagne room; the wall of backlit Chateau d’Yquem bottles, dating back through the last century – the colour variation changing during the war years, when good glass was hard to purchase; a room dedicated to the most fashionable of American wineries, Sine qua Non; and a locked vault of one-offs – a 1740 madeira, an 1811 d’Yquem, worth more than £100,000, and magnums of Romanée Conti 2005, each priced at £67,000. Some estimates have put the stock value of Hedonism at £10m.
All of the wines in the shop can be paired with food at Hide – a van ferries bottles the few blocks between the two. Chichvarkin and Fokina believe that will give their restaurant its special edge. They knew to hire Dabbous, Chichvarkin says, for two reasons: first it had taken them six months to get a table at his eponymous restaurant; and second, when they did so, the wine “was three notches below the food”.
When Dabbous first opened in Fitzrovia in 2012, Fay Maschler gave it a five-star review in the Evening Standard, a rare accolade saved for “game-changing” arrivals. Hide, four and a half years in the planning, was created, Fokina says, to give Dabbous a chance to see how good he could be without the pressure of running his own restaurant. In many ways, Hide could not be more different from the 30-cover intimacy of the chef’s original venture. It allows him to express himself in three distinct spaces – the airy first floor of “Above”, with its £95 tasting menu, an earthier all-day offering at “Ground” and more food options in the cool underground cocktail bar “Below”, with its range of private rooms. The three are linked not only by Dabbous’s signature playfulness and precision, but also a fabulous Gaudi-esque oak staircase like something out of the elves’ palace in The Lord of the Rings.
Dabbous is undaunted by the challenge of scaling up so dramatically. Chichvarkin’s offer to him came out of the blue, but also at a time when he felt he had gone as far as he could with his own restaurant. “We got on well straightaway,” the chef tells me, of their relationship. “There were a lot of compelling reasons to do it: he could do the wine, we could do the food… and then, when I saw the site, I was convinced.” The building was an empty shell at the time, “an aircraft hangar on Piccadilly”, but already with triple glazing – “it was complete serenity looking over this super-busy vignette of London life,” Dabbous says. “And we had very similar ideas of how it should look – this idea of it being a kind of dwelling with Ground as the heart of the operation. We never set out to be a once-in-a-lifetime restaurant,” he continues. “We wanted something that you could come to and grab a £5 glass of wine after work with some charcuterie or flatbread, or equally celebrate your big wedding anniversary.” Because of the staff numbers – on any given day there are 34 chefs, including bakers, serving up to 500 covers – Dabbous can concentrate completely on his kitchen. “Those opportunities don’t come around often,” he says.
Chichvarkin knows all about seize-the-day moments. He does not talk easily about his journey to this rarified London life, but he offers snatches of the past that give an insight into how he got here. As we taste some of Dabbous’s magical ways with beetroot and asparagus, the Russian recalls, fantastically incongruously, the worst of times in the former Soviet Union, near the end in 1990.
“I remember 400-metre queue for toilet paper,” he says. “And how people would buy 20 and put them on a rope around their neck to bring them home. I remember the shop would have two options on the shelves: both smoked fish in a tin. I remember like yesterday how people would crush faces and teeth for the possibility to buy a 90-cent bottle of vodka – and people lying on the road protesting outside the tobacco factory because they could not get cigarettes. Smokers without cigarettes became very aggressive.”
Those memories have given him an entrepreneur’s iron will to hold on to what he has made, as well as a delight in fine taste, and a political scepticism. “When I see a newspaper with Mr Corbyn saying he wants to move this country to socialism, I think these people should go and live 60 days in the middle of Russia in the 1970s,” he says. “They would lose 10 kilos, be beaten up a few times, queue for cans of fish, and then they should come and talk about socialism.”
His own politics have involved providing funds – a reported £100,000 – for the courageous opposition leader in Moscow Alexei Navalny, support which has led to him, he believes, being a surveillance target for Russian agents in London. He first observed a couple of men standing for hours across from his front door not long after he had arrived. Studying them more closely, he saw that they were passing the time peeling and eating sunflower seeds, a common Russian habit but one he had not seen before in England. Since then, from time to time, laptops have gone missing, that kind of thing. With the apparent suspicious deaths of several exiled businessmen out of favour with Moscow – and the Skripal poisoning – it is a brave act, I suggest, to be vocal in opposition to Putin at this moment.
“The brave thing was to have a business in Russia after Putin came to power,” he says. “After 2004, he put his people in every part of business life. The first year in oil and gas, then TV and press, then banking, then retail…”
He could see them coming?
“Yes, and now there are FSB people [state security services] in every retailer, all seriously poisoned by corruption.”
Is it safe for him to talk openly about that corruption? He shrugs. “Here it is OK, I think.”
Given his history with the regime, he gets understandably angry when characterised as an oligarch. “Some people tell me, ‘Shortly you will be sent back to Russia and your restaurant will become a Costa, something like that,’” he says, without a smile. “I don’t care about that. I only care if we make a mistake with service, or if someone is waiting too long for the bill.” He scans the room of diners from time to time, making sure no one is being overlooked by his attentive army of waiters.
Inefficiency clearly drives him crazy. He talks with frustration that he is currently waiting for an extension to his residency visa, despite the fact that he has been a significant employer, paying taxes here for five years. “They have had the forms for a year now – and nothing, for something that should take two days.” In the meantime, he cannot leave the country, for fear that he will not be let back in.
He has built a life here, however, as well as a business. Polo has given him a way into British elite society – he has played against the royal princes a couple of times – though he suggests most of his socialising is still with émigré Russians. He and Fokina like to cook when they are at home – he shows me, on his phone with some pride, an aesthetic platter of rabbit meatballs, before giving me the full tour of Hide’s kitchen, where Dabbous, finishing service, greets him with a fraternal grin.
Does London feel like home to Chichvarkin yet, I wonder, as we return to the restaurant and look out over Green Park toward the Mall and Buckingham Palace. “No. I am temporary here. It is like an alcoholic after 20 years with no alcohol. They are still an alcoholic. I am still Russian. It is nearly 10 years since I have been back. But home is occupied territory.”
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