9 Bonkers Ways The Unruly Pig Became The UK’s No.1 Voted Pub After a Fire Burned Down Their Pub “We are COMPLETELY F*CKED”

0:00Buongiorno, buongiorno. Hope you are amazing. This week's episode with Brendan Padfield, founder of the Unruly Pig. is an absolute 30 banger um i mean brendan had literally no hospitality experience he just loved eating dining enjoying restaurants and then through lots of grit and graft he's built the number one pub in the uk it's been in the top three sorry top 10 for fucking ages best roast the food there is absolutely 10 out of 10 banging um but he got a call like 12 weeks in to literally pursuing his dream he got a call at 203 in the morning saying mate your restaurant and your pub and the early pig is on fire everything burnt down his dream was shattered and it's been a great lesson for me that i'm applying a lot like when things get hard you've got to really lean into that that's what james watt brew dog founder says julian metcalf founder of monje nitsu lean into hard hard's where it gets interesting that's where the magic lies and he he lent into hard this whole fucking pub's been burnt down and it really allowed them to sort of find the magic that they simplified the menu they really lent into battalion there's tons in this episode there's tons about leadership um how they found their point of differentiation like you know be different not better it works across restaurants as well um we slide across a whole sort of smorgs aboard of different terrains we go into fucking castles brendan's got an obsession with castles which i found super interesting um the dark side of hospitality that no one talks about kind of uh you know people nicking stuff and um how the uk the changes we need for hospitality become like an actual uh profession that we cherish versus a transient kind of job which we kind of just dip in and out in tons tons tons more would be super grateful if you please enjoy if you enjoy this episode please share it uh leave a five-star review it all uh helps and yeah without further ado brendan padfield brendan uh thank you so much for doing this my absolute pleasure and thank you for a wondrous uh absolutely insane lead delicious lunch this afternoon um yeah it was just as i said i've heard so much about this pub this restaurant the um the high how highly acclaimed it is voted the best pub in the uk on so many awards um and it really has lived up to that in fact it's gone past that it was it was astounding thank you the checks in the post done thank you um and there's loads of places i mean there's there's so much to talk about but where i want to start is is the fire and you've you i don't know how i think you're like six months in or something but not even that uh 12 weeks.

2:4812 weeks. So you've left your corporate job as a lawyer. You finally decided to take the leap of faith, follow your passion, open a restaurant. 12 weeks in to your dream. Your dream's on fire. Describe the feeling in your soul when you found out that your beloved restaurant and pub is on fire. I can...

3:15it still causes me to draw breath and and um i think disproportionately uh upset i mean i was talking about this the other day with somebody who who you know before you you hear somebody has a miscarriage or or a fire you say oh that must be awful and then when you are unlucky enough to encounter a miscarriage or in my case a fire only then does it really bring home how absolutely devastating it was and I think people standing back might say look it was bad yeah I get that but was it really that bad nobody was injured and isn't that a positive of course it's a positive I think there's something about um the point you made which was this has always been my dream this my little retirement project you know i may have needed neuroleptic medication to do it but but uh and people think i'm mad what's your what's your you give it to schizophrenics apparently apparently sorry for the ones of doubt i'm not schizophrenic i used to do some mental health stuff um yeah neuroleptic medication goes to schizophrenics and people sort of said you must be bloody bonkers to want to go and do do this but it was my dream and um and it did disproportionately upset me and to your question um um i don't know that i've ever wept so much and well that's not right when mum and dad died maybe but but it was i i was really really upset about it all it was a very difficult time because it wasn't straightforward with insurers we eventually get that resolve but there's lots of sleepless nights and and and you know when you face you've achieved this dream and you've invested heart soul and money and then you don't really know where you're going to get back on your trotters so to speak and and um one of the things that um the head chef will still say god bless him um my business partner and head chef um dave wall god bless him i will say look for the positive i did get a new kitchen out of this which i can't look at it that way because it was a horrific period and um i've never encountered anything so much that can still cause me my eyes still to water and and trying to get to bottom of why i don't know but it had a disproportionate effect in the context that i used to be a litigator you know I wasn't a shy chap I was used to dealing sadly my my bread and butter was dealing with tragedy gas explosions rail accidents etc to this day I can't explain it but it it got to my core and when when you said it got to your core like describe that a bit more because I think that's uh because I think what we've said there is your dream was on fire well I I suppose part of it is the drama of you know you get this call to 2 17 in the morning from the alarm company and we'd had a series of false alarms and you know i nearly didn't come down and and i remember showing on my shorts and my wife saying that bloody pal that bloody alarm what's going on and i've stopped about half a mile down the road by the police roadblock and i said well i'm terribly sorry i've got to go through i think we've got burglars at the unruly pig and he said you from the unreliable pigs uh your pub's on fire

6:49that was it i think i burst into anyway i don't know why it probably because i love the damn place so much and um it really got to me and it was a hard period but what i tell you got to me even more in a positive way um we were told we would be closed for initially over a year and um just for some context what actually happened like and how much of it had been decimated i'd say my apologies that's that's really important we lost between about 45 to 50 of the pub so um the pub is essentially a medieval building and next to a regency building um all of the building was smoke and water damaged but physically destroyed was the upper half of the medieval building all the beams beautiful medieval beams um part of the cellar all of the kitchen all of the kitchen prep area or all of the walk-in fridge as the cause you know i don't know we ever got to the bottom of it the police and the fire service thought it was a walk-in fridge there were various theories and it is what it is but but it wasn't as people oh it's a kitchen fire but it but it but it but it but it wasn't it wasn't um we had you know it was hard it was hard putting it back all together but we did it one of the most um emotional things for me um was we had to sit down early doors when we were told that it was we'd close for you and and talk with the head chef and the manager and and sort of say look we're going to be close for a year you know are you still with me because there's this guy who's been with me for 12 weeks opened up this but it's been really hard anybody who's opened a restaurant but it's really hard and you just make mistake after mistake after saying hopefully learn from it and you know and he said no i'm sticking with you which took me aback and i think bigger and better people than dave wool might have said shit this is a disaster from the outset and if he thinks i'm hanging around for you what the hell am i going to do i mean and it was hard damn work and i'm not sure maybe this pub is not meant to be but but he was there and he stood yeah because he he was he was at a point in his career where he He could have kicked on to something.

9:15Absolutely. Yeah, it's not like, for listeners, he wasn't like, he was quite, he worked for Gordon Ramsay. Yeah, he worked for Gordon Ramsay, he worked for Bybendham, his provenance was huge, he was at the toll booth, these are all pack of restaurants. He's a highly valued commodity. But let me tell you something about the milk of human kindness. You know, it's a bit like COVID, people say it brought out the best and the worst in people. Yeah, there's, like, calamity can bring out, as you said, the good and the bad of people, but you see that on, yeah, Yeah, people can be absolute dickheads with these things.

9:46But, you know, I had customers, and there's a guy called Guy Nichols. He's probably our best customer, and he's a lot of other stuff. You know, I barely knew the guy. He's on, what can I do? What can I do? And people bought, customers buying gift vouchers to try and keep us going. And I'll never forget, he was in at the weekend, and there was a lovely chap called Justin Solomon, and we were talking about this and the trials and tribulations of the Unruly Pig and the successes, of course, thanks to Dave and Carl and the rest of the team. And he said, do you remember that night where I was in and his friend was a retained fireman from Orford, which is a village just down the road.

10:27And what happened was there was a massive gas explosion because eventually whatever caused the fire, the liquid petroleum gas tank went up. This is here, right? Yeah. massive fireball how big when you came here was it on fire it was on fire yeah when the first i was allowed uh i was called what it looked okay i was called um at 217 i arrived here about 230 that's where the roadblock was and we were alive we were allowed up at about 5 30 obviously they had doused most of of the fire but you could what i could see was the upper floor of the pub gone fuck the kitchen destroyed the the bashed in door where they'd have to bash in with it to get the fire brigade in the place was a wreck and the upper floors were still smoldering yeah um that's wild it's wild and then what that day that next day like talk talk me through how you survived that because i think when any people who listen to this podcast there's a quote i um i kind of use a lot and it's by the founder of the four seasons and its excellence is the bit with is the ability to withstand pain and i like that because there's an ability to whatever you're trying to do or the other phrase someone said to me is like your hope needs grit so your dream your dream of this glorious pub needs the ability just like it's not the fucking things on fire and and you how do you what's your ability to take that pain you know frankly i think it was limited but but but as my mother used to say in a lilting irish what doesn't kill you makes you stronger yes and it did make us stronger i don't know i you're shell shot for a couple of couple of days and then you're dealing with insurers which is not straightforward and you're then dealing with the team and trying to actually put on that brave face i'm pretty good at that mostly not always as people what did you say to the team when you got them in here i just said we're getting in here no no no we had them all around the house and yeah and we were waiting for confirmation as to whether the insurers would pay out and the first thing was to reassure them that we are staying put dave had committed to staying put the management had committed to stay we will pay you regardless even though at that stage we didn't really have the wherewithal we certainly didn't have the wherewithal and income to do it but it was a stage that you just needed to make a commitment pending here now happily the insurers decided to pay out and and and that's another day but what you needed to do was to try and reassure the team that although there has been this incident that it isn't the end of the world we're going to come back stronger it's going to take time and all of that jazz and and i used to do a little bit of this in my former job because sometimes you're knackered and you've had enough and you're stressed to hell and the figures aren't right and but you had to come in and be breezy and upbeat um whereas you know sometimes you just wanted to hide yourself in a corner so we we did all that and then poor old dave the head chef and and kevin the then manager then had to come and work at 111 the thoroughfare which is my home and the dining room became the office and and and you know what those of hospitality have been through a fire and sadly it's not uncommon we'll know this it's damn hard work but it is what it is and eventually you begin to see some positives, things like Dave being able to draw breath, which he hadn't on the menu offering.

14:24Look, I'm not sure we got this right. This is where we were going wrong. The menu was too big. Let's cut it back and try to deal with some of the positives in life. And then, of course, it gives you the opportunity to look at the structure of the team. And that's when Carl Green came along. He was our sous chef. He's now our very proud head chef. And he's been here with Dave since the first, so eight, nine years. And so I think I exaggerate because I think the man standing back would say, yeah, that was a blow. That was a big blow. And I get why it's difficult. You get a bit emotional about it.

15:05but there were some positives in that not least they all got a new kitchen um and also when we came back we thought well okay we've the place is a wreck because it was wrecked but the room we were in here this was sodden and smoke and we thought well we've got the builders in let's try and do some alterations so that's when we knocked through the bar so do you think this would have become if the fire hadn't happened, do you think you could have become the best UK's number one pub?

15:41That's a difficult question. I think Dave would say no, because I'm not sure that's right, because whatever was wrong with the kitchen, if he'd come to me and said, look, this kitchen's holding me up and it's precluding us from doing this and making the standard and making the cut, you know providing the business case was made out which inherently it would have been i probably would have done i don't know i don't know yeah it's interesting i suppose my point is i think sometimes sometimes blows as you said and people listen to this podcast half reason they listen to it they're like oh i loved it when i when i heard this person talk about when they had their sat back and it helped me and i think actually sometimes a blow a lot figuratively allows you to burn the whole thing down partially to partially your point by god it welded us as a tea that's what i mean yeah so not that's why i'm that's what i was trying to kind of tease out is it's not necessarily the um what was it there was something i was reading where people people there was the sense of community and optimism was actually super high during like world war ii because there was this collective yeah yeah of like we're getting bombed or eat a speech a bit like covid everyone was like closer together in covid i think after 9 11 people in america everyone had a flag out they were super they've never been more united i am sure how did you galvanize as a team that couldn't have happened without the well i think because dave and giving had to spend so much time in my dining room with me which they wouldn't have done normally because Dave would have been in the kitchen and whereas we might have spent an hour or half an hour together you know spending eight hours that we had to make some formative decisions together though Dave is a highly intelligent um able chap and he too saw that he needed to brave face this with the team to some extent um and I don't know it In the face of adversity, it did weld us together.

17:46I don't want to over-egg that omelette because we did do some changes in the team. And then one of our major team players, a guy who has a key part in the strategy of the business, because he's now head chef, Carl Green, came along. He may have come along anyway. Yeah. Well, probably will, according to him. And then what do you think, because I know we talked, even when we were having lunch earlier, you talked about uh you know dave being incredibly stoic and sticking with you but as i said i said there's no like i was gonna say there's no smoke without fire but that's the worst thing to say there but for what i mean poor joke yeah poor joke sorry but what i was what i was meaning to say is like there's there was something that pulled pulled him to you and and the unruly vision well i don't know could you describe what you think that was see that's that's always been i think to the outside observer so let's try and put some flesh on that yeah yeah so there's this lawyer as he would say more politely than this by the way he would say he thought he knew a bit about food because he'd had the opportunity to eat in a few fancy dandy restaurants in the course of entertaining his clients and life generally because he was a bit of a bon viveur so he thought he was obsessed about food he thought he knew in fact he knew absolute fanny adams about the mechanics of running a restaurant that's what i mean the economics of running them you know and and what was involved and the culture of running a restaurant because that that is very different to my former life and it never ceases to amaze me when i'm reflecting like i am now about put yourself in dave walshue you're an extremely accomplished chef having worked for some of the best in the uk gordon ramsay by bend and top etc and there's this mad hatter who thinks he can run a bloody restaurant because he's had a vague interest oh i want to run a restaurant and he came for interview never forget he he said why did i allow two hours my wife was bawling at me on the phone after four hours and where the bloody hell are because we were still chatting away before i don't know um i think he may have at least seen some passion he may have seen that i had a little bit of business acumen i.e although i was a lawyer i was principally running a product or a business and it was all about where's the margin what's the return man management market positioning where's your strategy etc where's your differentiator and um he might have seen that well there's somebody there but also i think what really sold it to him was that I said, look, I want to set the philosophy for the restaurant, which is Britallian food, i.e.

20:34fresh seasonal British food with the Italian influence. But then it's over to you. And I would like to have a right of veto over the food. I've never exercised that right. I haven't had to. um but i think the fact that he was going to have autonomy de facto autonomy in the kitchen is was very well he's told me it's very powerful and motivating for him and for he and carl i mostly don't interfere um and in the tasting process we have three rounds of tasting for each dish and i'll express a view we have a very transparent relationship i don't hesitate to say look that's not for me and the deal is if i'm outvoted by the the jackie the general manager other managers then i say just run with it and i have to tell you almost always dave wall is right he's in i say what's your conviction rate on this one i'm not sure about this and do you know what often he'll say because he's that sort of chap and carl's exactly the same yeah you might have a point you might have a point but i do like this sort of collective input where he is receptive because my understanding dan forgive me you chefs out there that many chefs would not be that receptive to group input into their work of art dave and carl are and always have been and it's the way we've always operated and I'll say to him, I'm really not sure, so what's your conviction rate on this day?

22:10Well, it's at least 8 out of 10, so go with it. He's almost always right. I can't think of a dish where I had a reservation and it didn't go well. But he's also, he's very nimble on his feet. He's not afraid after he's done it and he's gone through all the development process, which is long-winded, and then the tasting process. If after two weeks he's not feeling right, he'll either alter it or pull it. Where, so, Britallian. Yeah. I read that on the website. I love that as a concept. um that's that's the end point and we will what we'll do to kind of explore this is we'll pick a dish that really kind of exemplifies what britallion food is and how you're doing at the unruly pig but like first let's zoom out and uh kind of go into the backstory of where you're you know as you said you loved your food you're working as a lawyer kind of not gallivanting around as we said earlier but like you were going to different restaurants and you were having uh albeit potentially entertaining quite boring people that's the truth i'm sure they were bored with me too yeah it's a two-way street but then yeah so why how did you get into battalion like where did that okay what pulls you to that out of everything i get it um the brits can tend to fall into three categories i'm embarrassed that i don't know what the equivalent of Italophile is for Spain, but it's either Spanish cooking, but they tend to be either Italophiles or Francophiles, and sometimes there's a Venn diagram and they overlap.

23:40I've had this obsession with Italy since forever. We've been going every year for over 30 years, sometimes twice, sometimes three times a year. The kids, my kids love it. I love Italian food. I don't know, it's in my DNA. I like the way, I love the crazy driving. I love how they haven't destroyed their their hill towns etc i love that i just love their cuisine and particularly how it varies so so dramatically from region to region the truth of the matter is that um at my former firm which was called eversheds um uh there were really there were many many many things that eversheds did so well for me uh and some of them was about teaching me how to because i was clueless financially manage the importance of those things we mentioned earlier and one of them was about having a differentiator and they sent us away to school and stuff and and they and one of the outtakes was sorry sorry so so even that you're a lawyer but they were telling you about marketing differentiation yes absolutely why why is that well because you're fighting for market share and and um but is that is that a differentiator for the clients you're representing or for like your for my product the way we're delivering the way that we were delivering a legal service needed a ideally a differentiator and it was for this adage which i came back from they sent us away to business school and it says if you're the same as everybody else you're going to be chased on price i call it the fish and chips don't get me wrong i'm no fish and chips i love fish and chips love love love fish and chips but the problem with serving fish and chips like 92 percent of pubs in this country by the way i've pulled that figure out the top of my head yeah yeah of course yeah but you know um and we were in south world on friday and what did i have fish and chips but is the problem is they say oh you've charged 20 pounds for fish and chips i can go down the road and get it for 14.

25:35whereas if you're delivering something different then they see tend to see that that adds value and it's very difficult to do to the comparison but if you're doing sticky toffee pudding chocolate brownie pork belly chicken and chips fish and chips but inevitably there are price comparisons so on a basic level we needed to do something different so i did some competitor research sounds very grandiose it was just something else that talked you know we used to do competitor research um in my former job all the time saying what are we doing different what are we doing better what who else is doing better than us because if we can do do it better we can charge more broadly and and in a competitive market where you're chasing margin that's what you need in all businesses but certainly in hospitality where the margins are challenging um and broadly speaking it was i'm going to get this wrong but within a 25 mile radius i worked out that it was something like 70 or 80 of the pubs were serving 87 of the food and it was variations on a theme of those things i've mentioned so sorry so you're literally this is this is prior to opening oh sorry so this but the lesson was from the time at law yeah the time was at law because they taught me to do a competitor research yeah to search for a differentiator you you went around the pubs around here yeah and they just looked i thought christ everyone is so in the same so what is the same on those menus let's see it's just yeah yeah fish and chips sticky toffee pudding chocolate brownie uh pork belly uh duck spring roll you know the usual suspects so the baseline was i wanted to do something different and then but not now there weren't many focusing on quality italian what i mean by that is i mean my second favorite dish in the world is spank bowl but i don't mean spank bowl but doing if you like italian trattoria uh coquina povero dishes you know sort of focusing on the quality of the ingredients and letting them speak for themselves rather than over stylized presentation and also have this rather cliche obsession with the river cafe because i've just cooked everything in all their books and they focus on the quality of the ingredients not over stylized presentation and let the ingredients speak for themselves so back to basics it was what's going to be the differentiator well if everybody else is doing that we need to do something different let's do italy because i haven't i love italy god bless him dave wall had a classical french training for god's sake so this was a conversion therapy for him thinking not only is this guy off his rocker because he thinks he can run the restaurant but now he's going to get me to cook italian food whereas for ramsay italia he's been broadly doing variations in the theme of french quasi british but it's a conversion that by god he embraced and with with gusto so that's where the britallion thing is because we do you know suffolk is chef heaven we the fresh and the quality ingredients you can get within 30 miles it's extraordinary so we wanted something that um people were gonna also want because it's all very well this this guy this former lawyer saying well we're gonna do britannian food because that's why i go on holiday and therefore i'm going to shove that down your throat and you're going to eat it the britallian bits is the because you actually got to give people also what they want and as beauty uh beautiful as a raviolo of cuttlefish in a in a lobster ragu might be you just had just absolutely yeah insane yeah yeah yeah um maybe that's not everyone's cup of tea and so it was britallion because we can still serve some of the best british food around given an italian slant make it slightly different and different to the pack so that's how it came about and it seems to work yeah it's just it's genius in that the the differentiation piece because that's the universal rule and that's what one of the things i was going to ask you but you kind of went there got there before me is what are some of the lessons you took from law that set you up set you up for success and and man and the dave and carl and jackie the general manager will be laughing their socks off when they make this next point and man management and they'll say you're crap at man management but the importance of that you know financial management managing the margins setting your differentiator setting where you're going to sit in the market you know are you mid-market up market in between the two those those are important things and um you can have the poshest restaurant in the world and my predecessor was a fabulous restaurant serving really high-end food it didn't make any money why would they say you're a crap manager out of just out of hilarity here because i've well no no i mean because i'm irascible I'm up and down or I have an unreasonable response crotchety old git that Dave would say rightly when I get somebody in my sights instead of sort of backing off and trying to see an objective picture I want to fire the gun he would say that and that and this is when you say fire the gun is that a bollocking or is that well it might be a bollocking but it might be a sacking no i don't it sounds as if i'm some fascist no it wouldn't i mean you know we've just been through this recently that i would like to think we have a very fair approach and there are several occasions recently where an act of gross misconduct hasn't resulted in sacking but he what he would say is uh and this is wholly reasonable i'm too emotional and often you need a bit of to be dispassionate in these things but then just playing devil's advocate here the emotion and seeing that when when your fire burnt when the fire burnt down your dream that emotion is ultimately what's got him here you know like well one of the reasons so i think because i think it's a lot of fun as i interview the vision and idea and dream needs emotion to keep that thing going that's what pulls people in so i think it's not necessarily okay it's like a strength and a weakness maybe yeah strength and weakness let's accept that.

32:01I mean, I think he, both of them certainly saw my passion. Carl said something to me recently and it was really nice. He said, you're like my second dad. You bloody nagged the hell out of me and all of that. I don't know. I think why it has worked is that we've been extremely lucky. I happen to really like the boys, you know, and they do think I'm an old git and I'm wrong and unreasonable at times, but I think we do get on and we like each other very much, very much. And it's a pretty... I've never worked with anybody nicer. That's amazing. Yeah. And then when... So, Britallion. Yeah. What's the dish when you're in this gestation period of the business where you just thought, fuck me, that's it.

32:58that's the unruly pig is it i don't know maybe not a specific dish but like what was that moment like you had a you had a you had a little whirl around our octopus dish today it's not that octopus is though i happen to think this iteration of it is probably the best with the anchovy emulsion it was you know it's a stonkerini um early doors day one a number of prizes and accolades for um his octopus dish which octopus not particularly italian but it's certainly Mediterranean but you get a lot of octopus in it but he served it with a tortelloni of and do you and all sorts of other stuff that was the one and squid ink and that was the one where um I think you've got a little bit of Britain you've got a little bit of Mediterranean you've got a lot of Italian and that's the one that sticks in my mind is that that was very firmly imprinting um his identity onto um we're accessible we're deliberately except we are a pub we are a pub i'm proud to be a pub and therefore we do steak and chips perhaps a better example is the steak is rare breeds or organic harryford angus cross but it's tagliata so it's sliced and it's served with wonderful uh onion puree but also really stonkingly good parmesan chips No, that's not chips with a load of Parmesan chucked on top.

34:24They strip the potato with a potato peeler. They season it in between, put a little bit of Parmesan. They put it on weights overnight to extract the water. Oh, yeah. Yeah, and then it's deep fried, so you get all this crispness, all the layers, and then a shitload of Parmesan, aged Parmesan on top. That's probably the best example of it. So an accessible dish, yeah, I can go and have steak and chips, but it's Britannian. Yeah, that cuttlefish bolognese was wonderfully perplexing. But it just kind of sends your taste buds gallivanting around. And great texturally. So is that fish? Yes, yeah. It's cuttlefish, so it's those big fat squid things.

35:07The mint is cuttlefish? No, no, no. The meat is cuttlefish, yes. So the bolognese, the bolognese is just the sauce. There's red wine and tomatoes, et cetera. But the meat is not meat. It's cuttlefish. Yeah, that is crazy what that's doing. But you've got, but it's cut, cut really. So you think it's, it's, it's mimicking minced beef. It's got the fish flavor. And then those things that they're like very al dente. It's genius. And the first, I only, it only came on last week and I went, this is great. Yeah, yeah, yeah. what are some of the other dishes that over the 10 years have really oh christ rung true to you oh honestly that there there are there are so many i mean he did a wonderful raviolo i'm not sure i knew what a raviolo was i mean it doesn't raviolo well thank you for asking that because i was about to say is it ravioli single ravioli it's the single form because ravioli is plural.

36:05We're in the very wanky territory. You know, talk about, but you know, I vaguely intended, but I had to think, oh, bloody ravioli. Well, funny enough, it's the singular of the plural. So ravioli of, we were getting great guinea fowl right up the road in Norfolk and he just thought, oh, it's too good to waste. And he did a lovely ravioli of guinea fowl, Norfolk guinea fowl. And he served it with various beets as in beetroot. Yeah, I mean, there's loads. there's there's loads and and um but neither is he here afraid to do a dish that is purely british you saw today i'm not particularly italian i had the wild sea bass sea bass just caught off the coast here with orford lobster um um and a lovely uh uh lobster sauce but it's not particularly italian but it's both dishes would be served in italy but you know that's just pure british food served locally from local you know on the other hand to contradict the point you saw the the little bowl that came on the side with lobster orzo so the orzo is that little pasta that's and great texturally so just when you think you've got a pure british dish in fact on the side that there's that Italian little number.

37:28Yeah, it's... Yeah, I was trying to think, was it the pork I had with the little ham hock and the... Yeah, that's quite British. I mean, do you know where that came from? But that's a school... Carlos, Head Chef Carl, he used to go around to his nana's and she used to cook him gammon with parsley sauce and he just loved it. He just loved it. And we got some of this middle white pork belly. What's middle white? Is that a... like it's it's it's a type of pork a type of pig and um and he just wanted to replicate that in posher form so you've got your lovely you saw the the crackling on the outside served nicely pink but fundamentally that was his version of egg and gammon and and and and parsley sauce but it was a bit more sophisticated but that there's nothing italian there there's nothing italian there it is gorgeous but also we're not we're not purist about it all the time we are very careful we you know we're about to go back to iberico pork because as great as the pork is around here and it is the best in the uk um we've been serving various iterations of an iberico pork dish because it's fed on acorns it's got a high fat content fat is where the flavor comes from um and as good as it was dave's saying that's nice but we're not getting the same quality of iberico and we're all about flavor so we're going to move back to iberico well well the slightly embarrassing thing about the brand is there's nothing spanish you know britallion but we're pragmatic yeah better to serve the flavor and get the right ingredient that'd be purist but do protect where your identity yeah i like that there's like it's like a pragmatism it's like you know planting your feet in the puddles of pragmatism in terms of like not because i think people can be too purist where it's like to the point that they're actually uh shuffling themselves from yeah and also like yeah if something tastes better then surely that's it's also like the the we want to uh we want to obviously uh shop locally we want our ingredients come from local i referred earlier as to how suffolk is chef home but he has an absolute rule dave and carl have had this rule from day one we won't go local just for going local sake over the price of quality so if we get about 70 of our goods within 39 miles that's great fantastic but we're not afraid to say well well that is going to come further afield because it just tastes bloody better and that's epitomized by what i've just told you by iberico where embarrassingly the air miles are large coming from spain but hey ho the so what we were talking about earlier is how meeters and stars like because i think what's interesting here is um one of your learnings from law was you actually understood a business and i think what we're saying the place here before was i don't know what not to not to shout out it was called something it was called something else and amazing uh restaurant and amazing amazing restaurant did really really well and we were basically saying whilst we were having lunch is that um a lot of these big celebrity chefs they have their michelin star as their flagship but they'll actually make the money off the pub or the yeah uh or the yeah bistro for example it's you know by its nature the standards michelin set a high standard with that comes very high labor cost because you're employing a large number of chefs at a skilled level and that's difficult in itself these days um and therefore you're paying more so you have high labor costs you have high ingredient costs because you're tending to serve not always it does you know you've got various examples of michelin stars who are selling not serving turbot but let's go with the turbot or the lobster are serving high-end ingredients it's a difficult gig to make money at michelin it's not impossible there are obvious examples many up and down the country but i was rather taken we were just briefly touched upon at lunchtime that you know a very accomplished lifelong restaurateur David Moore at Piedatera in Fitzrovia is just saying look I would like a staff buyout because the lease goes in about five years and I just can't make any money at this and it's very difficult and that's because of change COVID dynamics massively increased costs energy costs labor costs food costs whatever but what one does see and my my analysis is very shallow because you can cite an example to suit whatever case you want to put forward but what i do see is a number of high profile chefs opening either bistros or gastro pubs because i don't say it's easier to make money jesus christ i think my team would crown me but those developments i think may speak for themselves that it's very difficult indeed to make money at a michelin unless you are packed lunch and dinner every day um and once um but doing something like the unruly pig i mean we're doing 36 000 40 000 covers a year so for i think some chefs would say it's very difficult to deliver really high-end quality with those numbers christ knows how those magicians do it but they do what isn't the mission people no no i mean it's just that we we we would do those numbers a year well so so so let's go to saturday night so typically we're what would a bicho do a year uh but i know we're kind of plucking well because because the bistros are tend to be higher volume let me let me put some flesh in your typical michel restaurant on saturday night probably does 45 to 60 right we do 100 to 120 right now with that comes you know it's it's a difficult gig if you're producing high-end quality food um with quasi michelin expectations i hesitate to say that but you get my drift um but my point being we're getting over 100 covers on a saturday that's 100 average spend per heads whereas in the michelin they're getting say 40 to 60 albeit they're charging probably double i've never run a michelin restaurant i don't know that dave will be giggling his pants off now saying he doesn't know what he's talking about again look he's bullshitting but broadly speaking even those that charge at a higher rate my understanding is the volume's not there the volume isn't there necessarily because volume and michelin quality sometimes don't go together automatically not always there are notable exceptions that but it's it's really hard but basically your michelin requires a level of staffing and a level of skill that's really expensive and often a quality of ingredient that's also very expensive that means it's very difficult to make lots of money i was listening to a podcast completely tangential here but a podcast about this how porsche became successful right really interesting and they basically uh it's called acquired they go into loads of they'll go into all the companies they did nike they've done uber they go right into the details and it's sort of three four hour podcast episodes but they were talking about the gross margin of bmw versus porsche versus ferrari right and i think bmw was these numbers are off but as ballparks i think bmw is about 30 percent but the volume's super high ferrari is um is i think they put a 50 markup on again these is the volume's tiny whereas porsche are really clever because they're in that sweet spot where they've got much higher margin than the bmw but they've got a but the volume's still there but it's still pretty high margin yes and i think that that is that's that's the art isn't it that's the art and there are people who are much more adept at that i you know if you look at somewhere like hyde in london i don't know what the covers are but you know there's a lot so it can be done but it requires a very slick operation and a lot of investment and for many it's difficult yeah and I'm not saying this is a port, like this is a Porsche, this restaurant at my only church, but it seems like you've got that balance in terms of the volume and the quality.

46:23You're voted the best pub in the UK. That food I had for lunch was, I think, fucking better than some of the Michelin star restaurants I've been to. Absolutely stunning. And I think you could easily win a star. Very cool. But what is the art of getting those numbers right, do you think, from what you know? It's a constant battle. and we've evolved and we've cut those numbers and we've um you know when we started out i mean my god like we made so many mistakes and we're back to where we came in i mean but dave went through hell i put i ended up putting him through hell unintentionally we had a far too big a menu and we were just pushing through the numbers and we weren't controlling flow and etc so controlling flow flow flow of customers it was almost like um the customer arrives let's take the order well hang on although the kitchen's already got eight tables I want to just store them a little bit and give them a good get them oh fuck that no no yeah well we didn't do we didn't say fuck that yeah of course yeah it was just ignorance and stupidity and I look back with embarrassment but that's what but over the years and I have to say it's it's Dave and Carl being right again saying look we can't be all things to all people I get you want it to be an accessible pub but Dave has always led the charge on reducing the menu whilst trying to keep it offering as big a choice as we can because it was a painful lesson for me because I think Christ but it's so obvious now if you have a more limited offering it enables you to achieve better rate of consistency of delivery because it's self-evident really isn't it but the poor chap he had to fight a bit on on that one you know and so over the years we have cut and doing less has become more but you still get a customer increasingly less but you're coming in oh there's nothing on this menu i can eat you've only got six main courses you know but sometimes you because you want to build a business and you want to try and keep the customers happy and you don't want to be in the position of my predecessor and not making money the temptation was trying to be well we can do that but we can do that but we can do a burger well Dave doesn't want to cook a burger who doesn't love a burger it's everyone's guilty pleasure but we used to have a burger it was it was a really nice burger with you know it was glorious but in fact but over the years we we've cut that back and and we've cut our covers back um because we've we've understood i mean he was always on this dave was always on this mantra and he was right that you know you just cut back a little less will be more because you'll achieve a better quality and you may have overall happier customers and of course that will mean that the choice is more limited and you can't keep all the people happy all the time the so are you focused on repeat custom or yes you're so how I mean, we're very lucky because the Australia Dam top 50 gastropubs is a great thing.

49:37And all of us are in the, whether it be the national restaurants or the gastropub list, will say the same thing. They do bring food tourists. And we do get people traveling down from Leeds to eat with us because we're the number one gastropub. But we are heavily reliant upon and proud of the fact that the majority of our clientele are from suffolk or have a suffolk home so the truth is we are proximity to london means there's a heavy amount of second home owners here down the road in orford 58 percent uh in second homes i think it's higher in alber up the road and so uh our main catchment is is east anglia suffolk in particular but at the weekends very much london but we do get some numbers traveling to us i wouldn't want to over egg that on it are they coming in the thousands from the orkney isles of course they aren't but we do get occasional surprises we do get people coming from north london for example midweek which is which is a joy and that's the joy of this list and what it has done for us the the gastropub list and latterly the the restaurant and you said there's there's like painful obvious um kind of truisms or principles and what i think the one was like you know less is more um but i think it's so easy to pull those out retrospectively i mean i'd have that with this well how exciting yeah it's gloriously exact isn't it it's like so go back i think when we were having lunch you were saying that you know you were first in last out and i kind of love why i love your story brennan is like is you've taken that naivety you've just jumped into your dream and like thought say that the dream's away you just thought right i'm gonna surf this no matter which way it goes um but now when you look back on those first year or like after the pub was um after you got back on your feet after the fire what are some of the obvious lessons like the kind of your obvious truths that you kind of wish you know which kind of obvious oh god you know there are there are there are so many um i think i've covered the main ones off which was um for goodness sake um do lesson build rather than the reverse which we did i in terms of menu size.

51:57Be bold. Be bolder. And when were you? Because I said to Dave, we need to be accessible. I'm shit scared of not making any money. My predecessor made that mistake. And yet, fitting our burger, this sounds like burger, not the burger. I mean, for the point of view, I love burgers. and the Unruly Pig Burger was exceptional, you know, gorgonzola mayonnaise, brioche and all that. But I wish I'd sort of said, look, actually, my predecessor may not have made any money for a variety of reasons and it wasn't necessarily the length of the menu or what was on it. um and the other thing would be that um i should have investigated and understood the gig more and what i mean by that one of our earliest difficulties was the inability to control flow on a saturday night when we were turning tables and in those early years i used to call it the f1 pit stop team i mean it's a ridiculous situation we got ourselves into i hate to do that not promulgated by the kitchen but you know i couldn't go home on a saturday night before hopper's date because the crucial turns at 7 30 to 8 that's when people turn wait so sorry i'm just trying like for someone who's not in the industry no no no no this is my job but so if you come in at six o 'clock your table's probably turning at eight if you come in up as five your table's probably turning at 7 30.

53:38once you've arrived at eight o 'clock that table isn't turning but crucial to the economic success is to turn as many tables as you can right and and if you do that that would enable you to um do the 125 135 we were doing at some point covers on a saturday saturday night but because we weren't controlling the flow and we plural equally to blame um so we would sit people down we wouldn't be sufficiently on it right they've arrived late so can we just manage expectation we've got a problem coming up on table four here they're they're only just getting to their dessert that means their table's not going to be ready on here we've just slammed the kitchen with 20 orders in 10 minutes what the hell did we do that for that's never going to pull them down instead of actually having a complete grip and flow on making up the jigsaw of how you turn tables and managing right we'll just say to them they've arrived half an hour late say we can't take their table now until x and and and but also making sure that you don't overload the kitchen um it may sound very obvious this is the dance isn't it this is the yeah yeah yeah but so obvious that mr smart lawyer here not i didn't get it and my restaurant manager then sorry let's not go there but but you know that would be the biggest thing i'd do differently would be to say right we are not going for these big numbers early we are going to have a very slow build as opposed to what was just a soft opening and then bang what a mistake two we would have less on the menu and three we'd have somebody who understands how to control flow because otherwise that kitchen's going to sink and it seems so damn obvious now it's embarrassing i know i love it and how did you control the flow oh jesus i don't think it was me because the day would be lovely it wasn't him he did he was clueless he's very clueless i've had to look at him sat the bar on a glass of wine it's a hidden pontificating about as if as if he was bloody gordon ramsay or so um well how did the doubt of the well we used to sit down we have we're always uh one of the things um we have some key values in the business which we try to adhere to easier said than done but one of them is being very straightforward so we don't pull punches and in the management team and it would always be what the hell is going wrong and we will then say right i don't want you to book tables one to four because we're going to have those as holding tables we're going to hold people we try various things what actually happened was this that I had a number of excellent restaurant managers who really did a sterling job in the face of adversity of a new business but we just had a particular manager came in and he was used to a volume high-end operation and therefore he was right well we're blocking out that that particular 745 slot no one's booking there so we're creating a barrier um i will tell you when you can take an order you ought to tell me when you know customers are getting itchy it wasn't rocket science but it really is a bit of an art and anybody who's a restaurant manager or a chef will know um they'll know when there's an operator who can do this and it's easier said than done all i can tell you is that we developed into a business that the f1 pit stop team i mean literally there would be four of them right christ they've arrived keep them chatting right you do the chair i'll do the cut reading and it was like that i mean ludicrous ludicrous so it's just one of those things that in hindsight i now i now understand and but uh but i wasn't equipped to do it you know if i'd spent this is my 10th year in hospitality now i think i could do it don't laugh chaps um but i didn't understand how to do it even though it wasn't rocket science the uh it was more intuitive yeah yeah i believe naivety's momentum like if you're not naive you're you're kind of um let's talk about the we've talked about the food we talked about battalion i think one thing that striked me and this osh has the same at the devonshire they've got that room at the back which is just kind of uh plastered with all this gorgeous like esoteric art and obviously i've walked in there's mad art everywhere what talk me through some of the your faith like i love that you call it mad art that that is um the biggest uh compliment we've ever received was um he said um i think it was a strangle dam said the the personality of the owner is reflected in the pub and i think that was intended as a compliment and then they say brendan's a bit quirky yeah i'll take that i'm quirky so okay let's so actually in fact i was meaning to ask you this like why why did you what does why does unruly speak to your soul like how are you unruly as a person yeah well i am i am a bit um okay my brothers would say um i was the SWOT which I was what's a SWOT SWOT was a very school I was very scholarly right they would be out playing footy and I'd be studying and I would um he let the family down by going to university I remember my older brother doing that I mean he ended up getting a master's degree for Christ's sake but anyway um I whilst I've been quite straight in the sense of um boring in that sense I used to be, it sounds very modest, I was more scholarly than some, just put it that way.

59:18So there is this straight and sensible part, and inherent in being a lawyer, for God's sake, there are bent lawyers, I know. But you have to have a modicum of sense and sensibility and reasonableness and rationality about you. But there's always been this street where I said, I just love a great giggle, and I love things that are unruly. unruly i find it very humorous when when you know somebody says something out of the ornery i like wacky um and we we had to come up with the name for the unruly pig and of course i was going to call it the pig because i wanted something that would reflect something down to earth that spoke of suffolk provenance we we know i think we're the biggest pig rearing county in in the in the kingdom um and then robin hudson opened his first pig hotel down at brockenhurst just as we were about to open did that start in 2015 yeah i think so or he declared it and um so i had to come up with something different i mean i'm just having a bunch of friends getting slowly drunk at a dinner party and well what do you want what are you trying to well i want to convey somewhere that's a bit down to earth and a sense of fun and giggliness and um i'd quite like to retain the pig and it was a friend called Alison Barter and she says what about an unruly pig and I thought it was very different coming back to differentiators there isn't an unruly pig in the UK and I really loved the idea of running an unruly house not in sense of you know there's prostitutes upstairs and all of that but I liked that sort of zaniness and my friends who who know me will say but he's always had a little bit about it but fundamentally he's sensible but there is that edge to him so that's how the name came about and and and that's i like the unruly aspect of it that and that's reflected in some of some of the art it is unruly if you're a challenger brand that's absolutely killing it in d2c but you're struggling to crack retail then you've got to listen to this maybe you've got a cardo listing maybe you've got a whole foods listing maybe you're absolutely killing it in selfridges maybe you're absolutely killing it in your farm shop and your indies But my friends, making the leap, crossing El Chasum, crossing El Rubicon to grocery retail is not easy.

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Their team are amazing and they actually get the challenger mindset. said north star are your shortcut to smarter decisions stronger pitches and investor confidence all built specifically for challenger brands like yours you don't need a massive sales team you need north star link in the show notes click that link and you'll be able to book a free demo with north star highly highly recommend that and thank me later yeah it's almost like you were so ruly working in law yeah and then it's almost like the never thought about it no no no you're so ruly in law that like then then as you've as you said crossed the chasm to europe to your dream it's like almost the anaesthetist that is unruly and the pigs are down to earth and um yeah because like i mean and i mean this in a compliment like that when you if you told me that you when you said i've been i was like a lawyer most of my life i wouldn't think that because you're quite like well thank you um but i suppose but like my son my brother like he's probably he's a lawyer he's a lawyer but he's on his way back from glass and brain's probably been off his head for five days but he's got that streak in him I wouldn't say he's like well then I'm like him yeah yeah yeah I wouldn't say he's like but then he loves I play hard yeah yeah he knows how to play yeah for sure I play hard and you know Dave will he'll be the first to say you're right Brendan yeah fine too much red wine last night yeah it's all that and then so then with the we got to the unruly part but then with the art yeah is and I said it's mad you said it's wacky it's eclectic yes because I think it's a bit of a juxtaposition not necessarily juxtaposition but the when I think of Italian restaurants I know this is a battalion and it's a pub I don't I wouldn't necessarily associate all this wacky art no you wouldn't and that's where again it kind of why I love speaking to people who have these amazing restaurants is because it's just a lot of the time it's lots of things clashing together but like I said Osh said it's a British pub with an Irish accent yes this is battalion that's your kind of um i was going to say je ne sais quoi but it's not that yeah yeah yeah delissimo we'll go with that but um talk to me about how you began to to bring bring the whole feeling together inside and the ambience yeah that was um i i've always collected art from a very early age which makes me sound really even more boring but I don't know we all have our passions and but I always have and even when what's the earliest thing you remember collecting and how well I was on receipt of housing benefit god help us the Daily Mail's gonna say well he's an example of a doll waller who should never have got that doll in the first place but we were paid so poorly when I was in what was called then articles but it's now called training contract training contract to be a solicitor that's two years I was paid so poorly that i was allowed my income to be supplemented by getting housing benefit and i'd rather save up some of that and spend it on a piece of art which i did than spend it on i don't know maybe going out and getting pissed on a friday night i certainly did that too but but so i don't know i've always collected that and it's always been different and if i love a piece i'll just go for it and occasionally when things got a little bit better if i saw something at auction i would you know just go for it because i love so there was always that and i wanted as part of the differentiation process not to put however cliche this may sound and make people throw i don't want you know men in red coats doing with hunting horns and dogs and and which tends to be associated with country pubs and there's a particular artist around here as well known and shall remain nameless and you know that artist is in four pubs that i can name you so i wanted something so all i did was buy some stuff at auction brought a load from home and i still rotate from home and then supplement it um as and when and it was a bit of an imposition really it's almost egotistical to impose your taste upon the the general public but they seem to to like it's certainly a talking point it's certainly controversial i mean in the loos like you went to the upstairs loos but downstairs in in the main loos gents there's chinese propaganda i just happened to buy it up the road at the auction at camp t ash and the 10 original propaganda pieces from mao tsi tong but you know i get all sorts of shit for that you know i get people coming in and say you ought to be ashamed of yourself inculcating the the cult of mao in your pub i think do you think i'm inculcating cult cults of mal by putting it in the bloody pisser for christ's sake and but i do get that and but i also it produces i had a letter from a lady in lerstoft who said that i should be ashamed of myself there's a bit of a theme there because you saw that picture of johnny rotten and she said um where's that i haven't seen well It's on the entrance and he's got, and he's like this.

1:07:29Lego pieces. No, the Lego pieces, they're cool. They're from an artist in Berist and Edmund. Anyway, there's Johnny Rotten. I'll show you on the way out. And he's on a cross with him. He's got help. And it is a bit irreligious. Okay. I was reared a Catholic. My mother would be ashamed. I no longer go to mess. God bless you, mum. So I don't deliberately insult anybody who happens to be a Christian. but she wrote to me saying you ought to be ashamed of myself because i was taking the name of the lord her god in vain and it was absolutely outrageous they had johnny rotten on a cross mimicking christ i hadn't really thought about it and i'm not just saying that defensively i wrote back as look the last thing i want to do is insult you i'm sorry if you're taking offense no offenses meant but the job of art is to provoke and even his holiness the pope in the vatican art collection has some really controversial parody art you know the bacon uh parody of Pope Pius VI and you know it's it's really grotesque stuff and she wrote back and said she had another go at me she said what's that gonna do with it it's a disgrace so it doesn't produce it but but it's a bit like uh the name when we first opened 50 liked it and 50 hated it but they were all talking about it you know you know and and i know the first piece of feedback was on facebook um and um you know i used to be really sensitized to the um feedback via trip advisor or shit advisor as giles corinne calls it but but um somebody went on facebook and said the unruly pig the name suits him oh fuck off my wife said well they might have a point you're the unruly pig yeah yeah yeah no i get people coming up and say are you the unruly pig i say well i am i am the you said art provokes i love that um and i think that that what i'm picking up literally live now and after having lunch here is it does provoke a feeling and i think you said giggliness is the word it's almost that it has those things that kind of tweak you ever society so when i walked in the lego thing which was i was like what does again it's just played with my semiotics of what a pub should be i'm like well this this looks like pub to me i'm going in there's a guy at the front to say hello to me greet me oh hang on a sec there's a johnny rotten on a cross obviously i didn't see that but then johnny rotten on a cross and there's this massive lego wall with all these weird quirky things and it provokes that feeling of something well i i i would like to hope the intention is to provoke a sense of fun okay yeah that's what i was trying to get to is what's the sense of fun and a sense of difference and, you know, people will look at that one over there, which sadly your podcasters won't see.

1:10:18But, I mean, he's got a detached head and he looks a bit surreal. I might get a picture of it. It's funky and different and thinking, what the hell is that? And I like that. I like that. And I suppose that's sort of, that epitomises what you'd want. It is unruly, that, isn't it? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, it's also like it's bending. You want to bend with the rules. Yeah. I want to ask you about I can't find it but I read somewhere in one of the interviews you did that you've got like an obsession with castles Christ I have where did you find I have Jesus there's a castle in Wales you went to go and see when you were about 10 years old Conway to this day we turned the corner and you're going over to the North Wales Expressway and you turn and you go into the town and there's a point where you're suddenly confronted with this massive Edwardian castle.

1:11:14And I remember saying to my mum and dad, wow! What's so Edwardian castle? Edwardian first. So it's sort of, Jesus, the historians are going to say, no, I'm wrong. I think it's 1100 to 1200 or is it 1200 to 1300? But yeah, they're a big thing in North Wales, not exclusively North Wales. But, you know, I was brought up near Exxon. and within 80 miles, 90 miles, there are four extraordinary Edwardian castles, Harlech, Bermaris, Carnarvon and Conway. And it was part of the massive building programme to suppress the Welsh in the day. So that's why, yeah, I was going to say, why were all these, so these were English castles?

1:12:01English castles, it was part of containment of the rebellious Welsh. and um so conway was a british sorry english castle yeah built by edward the first yeah um i don't know why i don't know why i mean why just why you know why do some people like motor racing or you know something something gripped me at an early age i was a bit you know that comes back my my pet my my brothers just thought you're weird mate you like castles but you know and the time when tuten carmen uh the first tuten carmen exhibition came to britain he's too hard so as in the gold mask from the egyptian museum the famous pharaoh that he came to britain in 1969 and the queues were around the block at the bridge he was an actual guy no no he was he was at the howard carter in the tomb of the kings found tutankhamen's um tomb intact it's the it's a treasure house and there's a there's a gold mask which is and and it's like the fire Yes, the pharaoh.

1:13:01And that came to Britain. Well, I asked my dad to take me to the British Museum. We were living in Kent at the time. And most people say, but you were eight. Yeah, I know. I can't help it. I've always been fascinated by history. And when my youngest kid was born, two days afterwards, I knew I had to get out of the law. I never did until 54. So I started another degree at UEA. we were living in Norwich and I started doing this history degree because I hate the law, I've just got to get out. What am I going to do? Christ knows, I've got two kids to bring up. But anyway, I started history and you had to do a dissertation on things.

1:13:41I'm like, yeah, what do I write about? Castles. It's mad. I love linking things together but like this, connecting the dots but I think Steve Jobs got a quote which is you can only connect the dots looking backwards and it's almost like this is your castle. I don't mean it like that in terms of like you're the kind of messiah running it, but that's like your... Maybe, I don't know. It's probably stretching it. I don't know. Stacker, do you know that? Well, I did it, but to be fair, this is what I've been blabbing to. I must have been particularly drunk. No, I don't know. But then, so then what did you, out of all the history periods, like what really like because i find it fascinating as well what what periods do you think not this is not really about the restaurant this isn't as i said like we'll scatter around yeah but what do you what are the periods that really intrigue you because i think what i like about history is you can learn a lot about um humanity yeah and i think someone's got history doesn't repeat itself but it rhymes and i think it's like well henry s ford said all history is bunk and he couldn't have been more wrong because you've just said history repeats itself and it's so relevant if i had my way thank god i'm not in charge of the country i'd have everyone in doing history compulsory because you you know history repeats itself and profoundly and um to your question uh the period i find most fascinating is the early modern period which is 1832 through to 1939 um and i find that the most fascinating because it was a period of social upheaval in britain firstly we had a middle class for the first time through um industrialization there was a move from the country to industrialization because of the industrial revolution it was a movement of social change because uh in 1832 they uh created well it began the journey to universal suffrage it just took a little time to get there in the 20s for the 1920s for the women was it the 1920s um you saw great wars uh you saw great upheaval in in france you saw germany destabilized what was the upheaval in france well they were always doing they were were they going to be a republic or were they not going to be a republic and the reinstallation of the monarchy etc uh you then have um you moving into the the franco-prussian war leading into the 1914-18 war um the great war to end all wars that wasn't and then and then of course the build-up of hitler and and and i don't want to over egg this omelette either but um you know i hitler gained power via democracy he was voted chancellor through demagoguery and you know you see these are on it's really interesting times look what's happened yesterday in in france you've got a right-wing national party that that was founded fundamentally as a fascist party that looks it's going to be the largest voted for party and people say well it's fine they've changed the colors they may have they may have but look look what happened in the biggest democracy in the world the leader of the western world with trump and he egged on supporters to siege the capital and to try and overturn the democratically elected result of the last election democracy is a fragile thing and why i to your question why i found that period the most fascinating is because in this country not as opposed to in Greece, that's when it evolved.

1:17:37And I think one needs to keep a very careful tab on history because people think democracy is enshrined and nobody could ever alter it. Well, you can see even within Europe, the prime minister of Hungary, his suppression of the press, until recently, Poland's suppression of the judiciary. What's he doing to the press? Well, he controls the press. he's introduced really repressive um uh he introduced really repressive press laws the previous government there's a great government now um in in poland but the previous government were booting out the judiciary and once you the government interferes with the judiciary and you're controlling the law then that's a very dangerous role because you're fundamentally on the road to closed trials just like you know show trials because you're appointing your men to deliver the result that you want anyway why have i drifted onto that no no it's fine i find it interesting because i think uh what we were saying is history what i like about history there's a book called by will darnt which is uh it's called the lessons of history and it's basically he does it in like a hundred uh it's like a hundred page book and actually linking this all back together there's a point in there which was a universal law is the point of differentiation and he talks about that in the book um and this is really i mean literally you could read the book like that um and it's really really interesting goes through every single period but that one universal law is like differentiation and that is as we said history doesn't repeat itself it's sometimes rhymes sorry can repeat itself and can rhyme what would you say are some other lessons that like we should um like that do repeat themselves too much in history do you think As you said, that's your favourite period, but have you looked at other periods as well?

1:19:29Yeah, but I think the truisms apply in other periods, that the truism of power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely, and that goes to the maintenance of a democracy. I mean, people look at the whole Brexit debate and put on one side what is now universally considered, almost near universally considered, a disaster for the company economically and culturally. People forget it was only the EU led out of the economic, the coal and steel community created post-war. It was only in 1948 that we started forming the European Union. and one of the main reasons for its foundation was that europe went to war with each other too often and regularly and people of my of of my era and younger would say oh we're not going to go to war but who would have thought that putin would have invaded ukraine and we have this proxy war now um and and and i would say is is is never ever overlook or underrate the mechanisms of peace however ineffectual they are you know the united nations some would say it's a busted flush it is not terribly affected but it has had some effect in controlling in controlling conflict that we should be not afraid to go to war if necessary or intervene militarily for the greater a good look what went was done in yugoslavia it saved hundreds of thousands of lives now we have the ukrainians fighting a proxy war on our behalf because we won't put the foot soldiers on the ground and it's very well for me to say we should but we are supplying all the weaponry when in when the face of things you've got this belligerent dictator who's actually pushing and going you You know, he was given an inch in Crimea, and now he's taking a mile.

1:21:42So never overlook the lesson to your question. Never overlook how important the mechanisms of maintenance of peace are, namely the United Nations, NATO. Look what Trump is threatening at the moment. You know, it's a busted flush. And the European Union. and I know we're not a member of the European Union now, but don't ever look at the fact that there were so many other benefits to it. And one of them was that there was this political organisation which has assisted peace in Europe when Germany and France had been to war three times in the previous 70 years. But people forget that, he says. No, but I think the bigger, like, I think where I was trying to kind of take that is there's truisms and principles that are kind of unwavering in times of everything.

1:22:35And I suppose if we look at the history of the last 10 years with this restaurant and pub, what would you say are some of the principles you have? And what I mean with this is you want your customers when they're here to have this feeling of giddiness and excitement. Or fun. Or fun, like being unruly, being quirky. all of the all of those things great food in a relaxed setting exactly but i but i think i think a lot of pubs think that but i think the quirky bits where it's really different and especially with the food like how what are the kind of principles you have that you that it comes from you but ultimately it's your team who are delivering that that that the values and stuff i think you talked about the values how do you how do you only again no rocket science at all i mean I've never thought about it as the answer.

1:23:27However, to your question, I think some of it would be about trying to adhere to our values. I said earlier, that's easier said than done. You can set these values. And the values, the key values, I think, are mutual respect, i.e. the cleaner and the kitchen porter is as important as the head chef. And people say, well, that's bollocks. But it isn't. It isn't. because without either of the cleaner and the kitchen porter we couldn't function and they need to feel valued if they feel valued they are more likely to form perform better and feel part of a team if they feel part of the team um that they will say um the second key value is so if they feel respected from top to bottom um then i think that's important in terms of our success to what is equally important is a further value which is continuous improvement in the early days absolutely not now he's with it 100 both carl green and dave wall are um they they would say christmas you know we just get the thing running like a swiss watch and you up the bloody bar i say right we're now going to improve even further and that's because another thing that my firm taught me and it's another key basic truths of a business unless you continuously improve or try to it's bloody hard you'll be overtaken by the competition because all good products and ideas are copied.

1:25:09I'm sure we've copied ideas. Go, that's a great idea. Did you see that low-alcohol margarita in so-and-so? Yeah, that's a great idea. And whereas before, David said, Christ, we've just got it operating and your money is getting... Yes, we're unapologetic. And they've really embraced that culture now because forgive this immodesty. i have seen the food in this place just go like that and particularly over the last five years as they found their feet and and there's been a serious focus on it so mutual respect but how do you um i'm just this is out of curiosity because you've got no background in in like as a chef yeah when they're when you're saying like we've got to go up a level yeah like how are you getting them to do that they they do it i mean they don't see it's not with each individual dish i i well fundamentally it is fundamentally it is about so it's like you saying i tried that and he's it needs to go up a bit all right yeah but that's for them because both the look the appearance and what we're doing and and you know dave has had a very conscious effort of we talked about it earlier less is more but um it's you know sticking to three core flavors on a plate for example whereas we might have had four on there before and and and it simplify not complicate there's nowhere to hide of course you've got to get those three right but that has been a conscious effort i haven't having i have not sat down ever with dave wall and said now that dish is deficient well i might have had this continuous having set the bar and saying we've got to improve and improve and improve and get better and and you know whether it be down to how the managerial team dress you know um how's that changed well it used to be i don't want to introduce too much formality because the team are deliberately in jeans and trainers but they have their bibs and whatever the managerial team now will wear a suit now son that's not everyone's cup of tea but at least it introduces a note of slight difference well not a difference you can go into 100 pubs in in london but for us that that's a bit of a change it's not a particularly great example but some a lot of this stuff is incremental and it's been a conscious effort and and um and particularly in the kitchen i i you know carl will be he was holding forth on this eloquently recently saying you know the dishes they are producing now are of fundamentally different qualities to what they were producing eight years ago.