London’s Most Famous Restaurateur “Maintaining Your Standards Is The Fastest Way to Bankruptcy” - The Wolseley, The Ivy, Le Caprice, Simpson's - Jeremy King

38:04That is the divide there is I think South traditionally richer. And he's like, you have an unfair advantage because there's no real status. Whereas here we've got the different accents, which I think is fascinating, but it all melds together. In terms of like restaurants in New York versus restaurants in London, how would you say the class, because I'm obsessed with this idea of restaurants as microcosm of humanity, how would that play out say in like a new york brasserie versus say a london brasserie

38:34Jeremy King:what's the similarities and differences i don't think the class structure is so defined and of course for a lot of people um new york was important because the class was a different sort of class which is the class of somebody behaving well somebody whose aspirations were to be more articulate, more literary, dress better, all those different things. And there wasn't privilege before. Unfortunately, there has to be that element that it becomes about money. My sadness about New York in one way, and I celebrate in other ways, is that there was a housing period in New York where all the money was on the Upper East Side and all the creativity was, was downtown and the and although that that's wrong in some ways it it actually rather worked and it became a cauldron for downtown for really for great creativity and uptown people would be kept were becoming more snobbish and uh in class structure and then the upper east side uh i always loved the Upper West Side because that was a much more egalitarian society and creative society.

39:58Jeremy King:And you get restaurants like the Cafe Des Artistes and places like that, which had a different nature to them. And then the Upper East Side started to move downtown because it was cool, and they saw all those lofts being developed and so on. And they thought, quite rightly, It's a bit boring here on the Upper East Side. They went downtown. And none of that's wrong. The only thing I didn't like was that once the artist mixed with the money,

40:37Jeremy King:it was felt that unless you sold paintings for a lot of money, for instance, you couldn't be really very good. and I I always bemoan that is that yes it's inevitably is an indicator of somebody's talent potentially if they're selling for lots of money or Van Gogh might disagree because he hardly sold a painting when his life and it was a yeah yeah yeah the my lament is always when things are quantified by money. I remember being told by somebody in the Ivy when I think it was James Cameron, the director, and this was, I think, pre-Titanic, but he'd done some big films. He said he's the best film director in the world.

41:39I said, really?

41:41Jeremy King:I mean clearly very very capable what makes him the best and this this was fairly early in his career well what other criteria are there he's the he's got the biggest box office that's where we're different because I wouldn't judge that to be the best and there's been this interesting thing about what makes the best and uh it just links to the score stuff you're saying you know about like measuring it yeah how do you how do you measure it and and i i remember the early days of um giles corin when as a critic he was really really mean about the wolsey and his review it had a very good review from adrian gill and who said one of the best things ever about critics in he said before i commenced this review some of you would be right to point out that i've written books for chris and jeremy and i'm a friend so you might ask can i truly write an objective review of the wolves he said well i'll answer that by saying they know me well enough enough that should they not do their job properly it doesn't mean to say i shouldn't do my job properly which i there was a very very outside giles came in and slagged off the place uh terribly and although we did laugh out loud at um one turn of phrase because giles of course is brilliant too when he said it was the worst it was the worst uh cassoulet i've ever eaten and i've eaten cassoulet in Miami.

43:23Jeremy King:And I thought that was actually very, very clever and funny. And then the point of story is that he then slagged us off because it was the first year of the San Pellegrino best restaurants in the world. Yeah. Which, of course, has now got a lot of credence. But at the time, the Woolsey went into the top 50, and it hadn't been open that long. And Jasa, what on earth are you talking about? Best restaurants in the world. But what is the best? Is it the best restaurant to have fun? Is it the best restaurant to eat well? Is it the best restaurant to do business? Is it the best restaurant to date night?

44:08Or is it define it?

44:10Jeremy King:And they hadn't defined it. Eventually, they defined their criteria and everybody's entitled. I happen to, for me, the best restaurants are the, I mean, there's the famous quote, your best restaurant is the restaurant you're known best. And then is the restaurants which are catalysts for what any of us want. And I always talk about, in fact, if I walked into a full restaurant and was able to clap my hands and say, right, we're going to come around and do a survey and ask why you're here this evening. Oh, I'm here with my wife, my husband. I'm here with my family. I'm here to celebrate. I'm here to seduce.

44:59Jeremy King:I'm here to divorce. I'm here to all the different reasons we use restaurants. And the best restaurants are the ones which allow those things to happen because the elements are not too strong. If it's a really expensive restaurant, those things aren't all going to happen. You're not going to have an interview. You're not going to have an office reunion or whatever it might be. If the music's too loud, that won't work. If the service is too fussy and intrusive, that won't work. Like if I always think that some of the most boring restaurants I've ever been to are restaurants with a great view. Because that's a wow.

45:41Okay. So if you've got a fantastic view, first of all, everybody wants a table with a view.

45:49Jeremy King:Yeah. So you've got two-thirds of the room pissed off anyway because they didn't get the view. And they're sort of rather begrudging. The people who got the view hardly say anything to each other. They're boring. Nothing happened. So this is the alchemy. What was the best? Giles was right to say Woolsey shouldn't be in the best restaurant unless the criteria had been stipulated, and that is always the big argument because it is fair to say a lot of the best restaurant lists are full of these restaurants around the world, which I'm largely I've never been to and probably I'll never go to. I love that.

46:33And I have that with this podcast because there's the score, again, this book that's just come out recently, but the philosophy is it's all about playing your own game. So there's ways to cut this up and make sure it goes for the algorithm. But I'm like, I just want to have a real conversation and it may not do as well as other things, but it's about what's right for you and I love that. I love, see, when you say, like, all movements start in restaurants, I love to detail from sort of 70s, 80s, 90s, noughties. Like, I feel like you were kind of at the epicentre of cultural movements or seeing how culture has changed.

47:15Like, how has it changed for you to start in sort of the 70s, 80s? Because you must have seen all the different movements, whether it was, yeah, like punk or, you know, like the rock and roll and, you know, Britpop, all those kind of things changing. For a restaurant lens, could you sort of detail some of that?

47:34Jeremy King:Well, I take great pride in the fact that a lot of those different movements, which often were incredibly important, people didn't have much money. and my assertion is always that the restaurants depend on talent and they because often the most interesting people in a restaurant are the least affluent and we need the affluent people because they might they might buy the champagne and so on but often the really the the people that the affluent come to see are the creatives. And so my maxim is always, we give people the opportunity to spend, but we don't make it mandatory. So that if you want to just come in and have a small pasta and a beer, fine.

48:25Jeremy King:And whereas a lot of restaurants hate that. And And so early 80s at Caprice, we were very sustained by the artists, a lot of whom were academicians from the Royal Academy, and they would come a lot. And what was interesting is because they'd seen shortly before the emergence of restaurants like Odeon in New York and so on, which for them is a new star. then odion suddenly you've got um andy warhol and and uh philip glass and laurie anderson and people like that all going to the diner type restaurant and that was fascinating because and they were breaking down the notion of what's a good restaurant for them it was what's what's a fun restaurant we saw big big big changes there and we we followed on in this country and And the story in terms of change is very early 80s, not long opened Capris, and I was taken out for dinner to a hotel.

49:41Jeremy King:And I came back and talked to the head waiter about it the next day. So I went to this hotel, and it was fascinating because we ordered. And once we'd ordered, we never got interrupted about the food. They knew where to put the cutlery. they knew where to put the dishes and so on. How do they do that? And he said, oh, that's straightforward. You number the seats. And you always basically start the numbering, and it's like the 10 o 'clock, effectively, on a clock dial, and you number from there. And then you also put, I forget what they were used in those days, a square around the number of the host, and then he put a circle around the female guests because the kitchen's meant to send, in those days, female dishes before the male.

50:37And they said, well, I said, oh, yeah, that makes so much sense.

50:40Jeremy King:That's great. Right, we'll do that. He said, oh, no. No, no, no, no. I said, what do you mean? Oh, no, no, no, no. You wouldn't do that in a restaurant like this because we were a middle-class restaurant. That was an upper-class restaurant. I said, that's the whole point. We learn from those people. I'm never, ever going to know my place. We have to innovate and change. It's impossible anyway. You need twice the number of staff. No, it's not. Come on. You just have to get used to it. And one of the things people hate about change is that it is often a retrograde step in terms of quality of service or whatever it is.

51:22Jeremy King:the golfer who is changing their golf swing will probably go back go backwards for a bit uh before they they get they get really good and it's when when you open a restaurant the analogy i often use is it's like learning to drive a car because there's so much to remember and so many things and whether you're in the waiter station looking for cutlery where is it or all these different things and when you're driving a car okay i've got to have the handbrake i've got to look in the mirror i've got to check my side mirror i've got and so it goes on all things which are really easy to mess up and take a long time initially and yet very quickly we do it without even thinking and that's what happens around and so if if you're very comfortable going in and to take an analogy further in a car which is an automatic car and you're automatic and that's fine see then put somebody into a manual car which is and it's much much better let's say it takes it takes a while and it's all the myriad of reasons we don't like change and i've taught before is when we went for the new EPOS systems, Romanko was the one at the time, where you could order a dish on a keypad, but there was no screen.

52:56Jeremy King:And the keypad, if you wanted a espresso, you typed in 101. And a lot of the dishes would be four-figure. People were brilliant, and they would know hundreds of dishes off my heart. And when I saw on the BBC on the news that there was this amazing innovation that soon people would have screens which you could touch. And of course nowadays most people don't even remember what it was like not to have a screen. You could hit the screen and it would respond. and so I went to Romanka and said right we you know I'll help you develop it let's do that for the restaurant the reason we'd gone to the other is that it's it was efficient and also you could print originally on the keypads you could print the bill very quickly as opposed to manually adding up and all the mistakes that would be entailed in that but the staff didn't want it they didn't want it because they were used to the keypad even though it was going to make their lives so much easier and what i noticed every step of the way is that when i finally got them to have keypads uh to to have more than keypads and have a screen and eventually begrudgingly got too used to it that's fine and then the next innovation which came along well no no we don't want to change it's uh yeah that's so yeah it's this resistance to try and change in like so so like the big changes in sort of bigger culture like music and stuff i love this idea of and i I was speaking to a guy with my friend Andy who owns a brand called Dirty yesterday.

54:35It was like a mushroom, like this sort of functional mushroom brands, which are kind of over, he thinks the tension now, people want to reduce coffee. And he's really good at sort of seeing, worked with John Hagsley actually, where the cultural tension is. And when that tension happens, he believes the change happens.

54:56Jeremy King:Yeah. Again, through the rent, through everything today, the lens of restaurants, What have been those big sort of cultural, other than technology, changes in maybe that you've seen in restaurants that have then spawned into arts?

55:11Jeremy King:I mean, in the arts, one of the great sad things is it's safer nowadays to pigeonhole. And whether you're making a film and you'll hear film pictures on the basis that they will say, well, it's like a combination and they'll name three different films. because there's proof of concept. Also, like, so instead of doing Pulp Fiction, they'll do Avengers 4. Yeah, exactly. And then this is what we're seeing more and more. And that's the way it works. With the fine arts, if an artist has achieved success with a particular style, if they try and change that style, it really unsettles people. They don't know how it works.

56:00Jeremy King:And you'll find people standing in the gallery and they're wondering whether they should, which is a terrible word, whether they should like this or not. Is it good? And what that opens up, and it's very prevalent in the art world, is that a lot of people in the art world are scared of change. And if they get scared, they then pronounce. so they will look at a look at um say photograph over there they won't say gosh when you know horse p horse changed his style with that photograph and it's really interesting i'm sorry horses yeah yeah who did it did it and it's really interesting in that this sort of slightly surrealistic etc so it's a move away from what he was doing before i have to think about it they don't do that society more will say that is a great photograph and somebody else might be thinking really i don't think so but you can't be wrong if you pronounce and this is why we say pronounce as in pronouncing that is a great photograph and so and that's a danger for art that's a danger because you either say that's a great photograph or it's a shit photograph right can't be wrong it's the new okay it's the scoring again well yeah and you can't be wrong because if you if you do that and somebody says actually what's a more nuanced way to approach stuff like that would you say well it'd be because that and you touched it in the book is about authority to be able to do that so the person has authority that's great or shit and if anybody argues against them and says no i everybody thinks that's terrible photograph he's gone in the wrong direction yeah then and say just wait that's maybe what you feel now wait for 10 years and you'll see the truth or if you say it's a shit photograph oh god what's this so then the And the person will say, no, we all think it's good.

58:07Jeremy King:And so let's see what it looks like in 10 years' time. There's a thing called the Lindy Effect, which is by Nassim Taleb. And Lindy was a cafe in New York where a lot of script writers, comedians would go. And there's a whole thing of basically where if a writer had been around for two weeks, the chance of them doing well would be, this is what Nassim Taleb's called, the lindy effect and the chance of them doing another three months would be x if they if they'd done two months the chance of them doing two years being around in two years time was much greater and he basically says you're looking for like to buy to buy literature or books use the lindy effect as like a heuristic i.e anything that's been around for 50 years or 100 years is likely to be around so like i don't know if you read fitzgerald or tom wolf that's been around for so long that it's likely to still be good but anything any of this these vanilla thrillers that are coming out in wh smith again it's like just you wait and i think there's a really it's a really good way to pick what you read what you watch because i think as you say it's this um what do you say is it proc um what do you say proclamation or proclamation yes to make to proclaim proclaim yeah proclamation to proclaim it because you can't be wrong and what where you only can be wrong is if you prevaricate you lose us people say oh they don't they don't have a strong fit because we love we love strong strength of assertion so if we if we're lost in the jungle and we're trying to get out of the jungle as a group yeah and we come to a fork in the road you don't want somebody saying hmm well we could go left and i think that might work because it looks like higher ground over there or there again there's an argument for going right we're worried we don't like if somebody steps to the front and says unquestionably we go right people will go with it and it's that's the human nature and sometimes if you've got a strong leader if you have two or three strong leaders there then you have just a big argument and nobody knows which way to go, and there's rancor and disagreement.

1:00:27Jeremy King:There is no definition as to what is great. There's no definition as to what is the best restaurant, in my mind. We can tell whether a restaurant's doing things well because of the quality of the cooking, but it's all in the eyes of the beholder. and in the book i tell the story of one of my best meals ever was in a closed restaurant where i joined the family on a on a monday and and just to uh i had a wonderful time now by the same token i think that was it was amazing i have been in the 80s to joel roberchon's restaurant in paris where we had an all-white truffle menu, which is amazing. I can't tell you what we ate.

1:01:17Jeremy King:I can tell you exactly what I ate on the forecourt of that restaurant. What did you have? Mr. I started off with they brought out terrines, then they brought out saucisson, then they brought stuffed mussels, and then we had lamb and fresh goats, milk cheese, and everything about it was wonderful. Yeah. I can't remember what I had at Robichon, even though it would have been impeccable quality. However, there are people who that Robichon meal might be the best meal they ever had in their life and would be miserable as hell sitting where I was in the south of France on a deserted terrace. That's what I love about it.

1:02:09Jeremy King:There is no... There's no right. There's no definable. But we try as society to moneyball the whole thing. This is the right decision. This is the right verdict. Yeah, I think it just all boils down to like an evolutionary fear of... I love like sort of evolutionary psychology. It's like our whole innate fear is essentially death. We really go quite deep on this. So we always want some sort of authority to basically, in anything, to make sure we're doing the right thing. We're not going back to that innate fear. But having said that, in the mind of a good intellect, that death actually is not the great fear.

1:02:55Jeremy King:Interesting. Because particularly if that intellect has had a fulfilled life, because they rationalize on the basis, my body is failing, my brain is failing, I've had a brilliant life, And I always liked the way Richard Rogers, Lord Rogers, the great architect, I can't remember who it was, whether it was Socrates or something, quoted the fact that we should all aim, particularly architects, but we should all aim to leave the city or the country where we've been domiciled better than when we arrived. and that we have an obligation to try and improve society and the environment in which we live in.

1:03:43Jeremy King:And he was a great exponent of that. Most people are too selfish. They want to leave with themselves better, not society. That was the book I was referencing there. I think Becca was, I read it at uni called The Denial of Death. We had to read it, a really interesting book. It's basically building all this stuff we're building with like, you know, naming someone's golf course. There's all this stuff to build status for when we're gone, and it's quite a selfish act, that. It's obviously like the Trump Tower, the fucking like whatever. And it's actually, and it's all, and I think it does link to some way of this scoring thing.

1:04:21Interesting. Do you fear death?

1:04:26Jeremy King:The moment?

1:04:30I fear impending death because I don't want to experience what it's like to regret.

1:04:40Jeremy King:And I'm perfectly happy with death if I'm at one with it. So what I'm motivated by is actually preparing myself for my death as opposed to running away from it. So the way you prepare yourself for death without running away from it is by having no... trying to have as linear what were some of the regrets regrets you're trying to rectify would you say well the thing about regrets i i if you read any of those big interviews with captains of industry and so on lead leading business people a very common thing is that when they're asked do you have any regrets they say no i don't understand that i have regrets every day of the week i have almost every hour I regret things.

1:05:26Jeremy King:And, but it's, it's no harm in regretting because hopefully one learns from him and constantly trying to improve that defensiveness of saying, no, I have no regrets. I find that. I think it's the proclamation stuff. Yes. Wow. Okay. Yeah. So just, so just like just swim down that channel a little bit more, Jerry, because I think this is fascinating. It's another contrarian view in the sense that. I think it's, what's the thing? Is it your happy problems in the book? Yeah. Which I love, which is, and I actually wrote about this in one of my newsletters, which is when it's like, you know, everyone, is everything okay?

1:06:04Is that what it is? Yeah. Could you detail that? Because I think that. Well, it's something I do, and it's often irrational when I utilize it.

1:06:15Jeremy King:Somebody would be in the restaurant and say, hi, Jeremy, everything okay? And sometimes I brush it off. If I know them a bit, I quite often say no. and they and they panic oh no what's wrong can i help tell me tell me what what what there's nothing nothing particularly serious and they say but why did you say no i said because you asked me if everything is okay isn't it i said no last time i seemed to remember everything being okay was for a couple of weeks in the summer of 1964 when I was 10 years old and life seemed pretty pretty good then after that is for me is is enough of my life okay now of course I said earlier on enough is never enough but it can never be enough there are books on the show The books on the shelves of my library, which I haven't read, I regret that.

1:07:15Yeah.

1:07:16Jeremy King:And I would be a better person perhaps if I had read them. There's any number of things. There's a Japanese word, I think it's called, I want to butcher it, called Tisindo. This girl I was seeing told me about it, and it's the Japanese word for the joy of collecting books that you'll never read. Yes, I saw that, actually. Yeah, and I actually, I find that's really interesting because there's, I sometimes will look at a book if it's on my bookshelf and just be like, just even the look of it will make me interested there's a book i've got called in the miso soup by murakami which isn't the other murakami and just like the look of it just makes me interested and i've never actually read it i think it's stimulating it's really stimulating any any sort of is there anything you haven't specifically talked about on other interviews before or conversations before i mean i think in your book there's enough there's a lot i mean i've been giving it i gave it to rory sutherland oh did you for his birthday and then i had lunch with him in Osho at Devonshire.

1:08:10Yeah, yeah, because that was his, and we were discussing it. And just, and then my mum's reading it now. And it's just, what made you sort of decide to write it and why now? Okay.

1:08:22Jeremy King:The fundamental thing to know about me is probably that surprisingly, I'm a very shy person and a natural introvert. So a free evening is probably just as much or more enjoyed being by myself than being in company. So it might seem an unlikely career to be in restaurateuring, and I did kind of fall into it. although it has to be said that walking into a room a full room in a restaurant uh is is for me exciting and and challenging walking into a full room at a cocktail party is uh is very debilitating in in truth so when it kept the notion of me writing a book is anathema and the person who... So what does that mean?

1:09:22Jeremy King:So Nathwa is completely against what I would normally want to do because I have a little bit of an abhorrence of narcissists and therefore to write a book about oneself would qualify me as being narcissistic. We've been as a bit closer, yeah. We did books previously. Obviously, the first book Chris and I did was The Ivy, and that's because we were fortunate enough to have Adrian Gill come on board as the writer. And actually, that was a groundbreaking book in its way. Adrian continued to do books, varying degrees of success. There's no question that Adrian is brilliant. is just a question of did it always come out in the right way?

1:10:15Jeremy King:And he did Capri's book, which was about scenarios in a restaurant, whereas the Ivy was a day in the life of a restaurant, which was very cleverly done, although without being able to actually mention who the customers were. The customers had to be fictional for privacy reasons and so on. And he also did a Zadel book. And then another one, which was actually funny, and I mentioned because it was possibly the genesis of me writing, is that we were doing Breakfast at the Wolsey as a book. And originally, I went straight away to Adrian and said, would you do it? And he said, no, no, no, I'm too busy, too busy.

1:11:03Jeremy King:and we ended up through Ed Victor, the agent, hiring somebody who was the head of a book of the Food Writing Federation of some sort, I can't even remember, and it just didn't work. And so I phoned up the incredibly busy, have no time, Adrian Gill, and found him on a grouse moor and said, Adrian, I miss you. I need you. come and write this book he said okay okay and then he wrote a really really good book and this this bit this book is the ivy or the walls of the walls and he wrote an excellent book and it's a smaller format book but he he's a lesson in being thorough and he's a lesson in being thorough yeah he's a very though he has a brilliant a brilliant wit and he can extemporize particularly well he is very dyslexic and which makes life hard for him made life hard for him as as a writer but he is very thorough and at the time we had a tourier at uh at the wolsey The tourier is anything to do effectively with yeast, like the dough and yeast, and they will make the croissant and all the other Viennoiserie-based items like that.

1:12:33Jeremy King:And he would come at 2 o 'clock in the morning, 2.30, to watch him make those croissants. And he wrote the book, and it was really good. And then it suddenly stopped. It was an abrupt ending. I said, Adrian, it's really wonderful, but it's too abrupt, this ending. Why is that? He said, sorry, darling, meter ran out. And I said, well, maybe I can put a few more shillings into the meter, but you haven't done an introduction. It was meant to be an introduction. He said, oh, yes, darling, I can't be bothered to do that. You do that. Yes. So I wrote the introduction to Breakfast at the Woolsey, which in a way was an interesting exercise because it had to be in keeping with the writing of Adrian, but, of course, not mimic, even if I could.

1:13:35Jeremy King:And from there on, Ed Victor, the Adrian, the Uber agent, sadly not with us anymore, he kept on saying, when you're going to write a book, your memoirs or whatever it might be. And I declined and declined and declined. And the baton was passed to Caroline Michelle after Ed died, who's a wonderful agent and a wonderful friend. And eventually that shy boy, because inherently we are often in our boyhood or as men, and you can often recognize that. She gave me the confidence. And Fourth Estate, part of HarperCollins, Louise Haynes is a very good editorial director, and she's produced books for Nigel Slater and many others.

1:14:35Jeremy King:They showed confidence in it. and i thought how do i write this book and the catalyst was the graham norton story which is in the book of him saying the youth of today does not need the proposed national reinstating stating of national service what it needs to do is spend six months front of house in a restaurant You learn so much about teamwork, communication, dispute reconciliation, any number of things you learn during that period. And it's absolutely true because having watched a lot of the children of my friends or not so much my own children who are very plied, but so many kids grow up either looking at a screen or their feet.

1:15:34Jeremy King:and to be in a restaurant that completely changes it and my own children talk about the fact that on this when they the proudest thing on the cv in their early years was the fact they'd worked in the wolsey or fishers or whichever restaurant and they said the most interest in them was engendered by the work in the restaurants because the interviewer would say oh, tell me about this. And so many people, of course, either eat in restaurants or even worked in restaurants at some point in their life. And interestingly, Ruthie Rogers told me that at Apple, where you can imagine the number of applicants they get for each job, if somebody shows, I don't know if it's still an extent, but if somebody shows that they worked in a restaurant, that enhances their chances.

1:16:31Jeremy King:because of what you learn. So it gives the background of that and a very long answer to your question, why did I decide to write the book? I started writing, and it was difficult, particularly when Fourth Estate said, should we give you a ghostwriter? And I said, no, the whole point is I have to write it for myself. It's cathartic, it's a challenge, and in life I like challenge. I like risk. I like, I've done various things. I was actually talking this morning to a very, very dear friend of mine, Amanda Levite, who worked, who's an architect, a brilliant architect, built for me and has a really successful practice.

1:17:22Jeremy King:I was her best man at her wedding and the, and decided pretty much last minute that the basis of my speech, which was a Stephen Sondheim song called, um, sorry. And it starts off of a younger man asking an older married man, do you ever regret you, you married? And, and so it's not, sorry, it's grateful. I think it sounds good. He says, You're always sorry. You're always grateful. You always wonder what might have been. So I sang that at the reception, which surprised people. How it was an insight into my nature is that if it's scary, it doesn't debilitate me. It challenges me. So how important is shyness?

1:18:15How is shyness an unfair advantage when it comes to risk-taking, would you say?

1:18:21Jeremy King:It's an interesting question. I'm not sure it does have the unfair advantage, because in many people it would send them back into the shell. It's my nature is to try and do things really well. Being shy makes me a big observer, and so I observe and observe and observe. and why in some ways that is the underlying fundament of the book is that it's my observations. And so that I will, I look so much that the staff would be, they might point, say, oh, table 42 or whatever it is. The guest, we're trying to remember who they are. And the guest is sitting there with their back to me. So I've only got the back of their head.

1:19:18Jeremy King:And the team has haven't worked out who they are. And I will name them. And they say, well, how do you do that? And I say, well, partly I know the host. So that narrows it down to a certain set of people who might be more likely to be having lunch with them. and then I believe so so strongly that we don't use our brains enough because we have too much help and this is we have information we can read things we can be phoned we can go on the internet we can any any number of things we can do and I asked myself why is it and this has happened far too many times for it to be coincidental, is that not long after we got a dog, my wife Lauren noticed that she would sometimes jump up on a chair and look through the window suddenly in earnest.

1:20:19Jeremy King:And normally about 15 minutes later, I would appear. And it's not at the regular time every day that, yeah. Oh, wow. So your dog would know that you're... No, and it could be six o 'clock. It could be 8 o 'clock. It could be 11 o 'clock. Yes. Yeah, yeah, wow. She would know. Because she can communicate. And we can see things and hear things if we utilize our brains, but we don't need to so much. So there's a wonderful book called Extraordinary Knowing. I can't remember the name of the author, which is about people who can divine information across continents. What do you mean by divine information?

1:21:01So the story started by way of a mother and professor at Berkeley College in California.

1:21:15Jeremy King:Her daughter was a bit of a prodigy at the harp, and she had a comparatively small harp. And she performed at a place in Oakland, not far from Berkeley, and the harp was stolen. so she did everything she could to try and find it and this is pre-internet day so so she rather than searching all the musical instrument dealers because it was a valuable piece she wrote to them across the country if you see this nothing nothing and months later a friend of hers said did you ever get that heart back and she said no he said what did you do and She said, well, I wrote to everybody. I did this. I tried everything.

1:22:00Yeah.

1:22:01Jeremy King:No sign. And she said, have you tried divining? I said, no, of course, divining we associate with finding water, you know, and you hold two sticks, hold a forked stick. I thought divining was like some sort of divine, like God thing. No, divining water is a lot of people. you get a stick which has... So this has no context for it at all. It's about getting information so you can find out where the water is by holding sticks above the ground. And in this situation, oh, there's this person, I can't remember, Kansas or something like that, who's brilliant. Get in touch with them. So they spoke. Send me a photograph.

1:22:47Jeremy King:Send me all the information you've got on this, and I'll find it for you. So she's in Kansas. I don't know how many miles, 1 ,000 miles away or something. And she comes back. She said, yeah, I know where your harp is, and gives an address in Oakland. She said, you'll find the harp there. Wow. And, of course, for the mother, you can't knock on the door and say, have you got my daughter's harp? so she put up signs around saying looking for this harp no questions asked what a big reward for it and she gets a call from somebody said yeah my next door neighbor has that and so it was dealt and because of that she started to to really delve into it and because she was an academic She really researched it.

1:23:42Jeremy King:And any number of stories in the book which are really interesting. And the ultimate is that during the Cold War, the CIA were using people with these powers to look into nuclear bunkers in Russia. And all I'm saying really is that we have extraordinary knowledge. To like observe, essentially. Yeah, but we have to learn that and develop it. And if you're a silent person, which is how I was for much of my life, and I'm just watching, and I love watching, then, to use that word again, I'm divining information. And so the more that went on, and I learned how people behaved, and I would walk up to a table, and I can feel it's tense.

1:24:34Jeremy King:And it might be a couple who are having marital problems or something like that. And that side of me which likes danger, which is that other element, I might say something. I say, I know what's happening. You're saying that he's doing this. He's saying that you're doing that, and so on and so forth. And they say, how do you know? It's just I know you over the years. I know your marriage. I know what's happening. I can tell by your demeanor now. I can tell. What about for non-regular customers? Does that divineness pull through? Basically what I'm trying to ask, is that something you can train?

1:25:16Is that like getting rid of the ambient noise from your phone or is that something you can only learn through experience or is that kind of just an innate thing to Jeremy that you've?

1:25:25Jeremy King:I think we can all do it if we open our minds to. And one of the things is that our brains are incredible digital machines, which we use a fraction of. And we use the brain, a lot of people, we're held now, of course, through screens and so on. A lot of people use their brain almost like an analog animal rather than a fully sophisticated digital. uh what do you mean by that specifically so like so that um we take everything on on just first observation and we don't wonder why we're why we're thinking it i mean let's say in restaurants yeah i was going to say what's that in restaurants in restaurants part of the process right at the beginning is somebody deciding to go to a restaurant so let's say we decide to go for dinner uh where should we go and one of us suggests a restaurant what enables us to say yes or no very quickly and for me i i see it that what happens is if you if we say point of argument one of one of my old restaurants let's say if you if you say let's go to the Woolsey.

1:26:57Jeremy King:I see it that a media card suddenly plays in our brain. And that media card is a mixture of audio, visual, almost scratch and sniff. And there are a lot of things. So you say that restaurant name, and immediately the brain pictures the restaurant. So you're thinking of that then what else makes you decide to go to a restaurant it might be a dish at their reason it might be who you were with you had a great time or you had a bad time with restaurants if you have an argument in a restaurant you're less likely to go back to the restaurant even if it's not the restaurant's fault there'll be a little video playing of an incident members all these things out but that media card in our brain plays in a fraction of a second and enables to say us to say yes that's a good idea yeah and we're incredibly fast i mean and if if we analyze it it almost defies analysis in the same way is that there's another book um sorry just quickly jerry on the analogs those things you're basically saying that the way analog we're almost operating like analog creatures versus digital creatures in the sense that analog as we see something come like well we're just going to go and do that as a split second whereas whereas say a digital creature would be processing it more you know almost looking through the different you know what the weather was is that basically what you're trying to say interesting yeah and because we're not utilizing the brain there was a there was quite an interesting film with scarlett johansson and um about a woman who is forced to smuggle a drug which breaks in in in her stomach in her stomach and um the and the result is her brain goes crazy and she sees things hears things etc because everything is enhanced, and then it explodes effectively.

1:29:10Jeremy King:And there's an interesting argument, because I think I may be completely wrong on the exact figures, that it's felt that we utilize about 30 % of our brain. So how does my dog, which has an infinitely smaller brain than me, know things better than me? and has that sense of smell that a dog has, an incredibly enhanced sense of smell. And also when a dog sees danger, any dog owner will know the dog will happily go and say hello to a different dog, and then they shy away or shy away from people. And there's a wonderful book called The Social Animal written by, I've forgotten his name, which became very popular of the white house and he he would talk about the fact that we are much more sophisticated than we give ourselves credit and he in the book he talks about um how let's say a man looks at a woman and says they're beautiful well a lot of people think women are beautiful or not or fairly whatever it might be just so wrong it's a woman that's beautiful to me or a man who's beautiful to me may not be to to you what his argument was is that we're being sort of slow and humpty down you know that's a good looking person i i he used it in the book i'm not sure it's the it is the the best way of doing it whereas the brain is actually the brain knows what the man or woman likes about somebody else and it's measuring the distance between the nose and the lips or the size of the mouth or all sorts of things very very quickly which allows us to make that yeah and he does he talks about a really really interesting thing which is um marines american Marines when they were serving in Afghanistan and Iraq, there were particular people who gained a reputation and were used a lot by the forces because they put them at the end of a street and say, is there an, what do they call, IEDs, improvised explosive device, Is there an IED in the street?

1:31:48Yeah, yeah, yeah.

1:31:48Jeremy King:And there's one particular guy who was brilliant who would look and would say yes or no. Now, you and I would fail at doing that. We would look for some maybe disturbed ground or something, and we'd get it wrong. They would get it right so much of the time. And when asked, how do you know? And they'd say, I don't. I don't know. Why do you say yes or no? If I get a cold feeling in my chest, I say yes. Wow. So it's not what the eyes are seeing in what I would call the analog basis. It's all the information going back into the brain, which informs that decision. But it's intuitive. It's not fully regarded.

1:32:40Jeremy King:And something which I'm feeling stronger and stronger about, and I talk about somewhat in the book is that I feel intuition and instinct have all been discredited in a society which is driven more by, what was that film called Moneyball? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Everything has to be defined by statistics, precedents, et cetera. We cut out instinct. Well, there's a book called The Score, which was recommended to me, which is really interesting. And it's essentially how we've, we're starting to, everything is now done through metrics and numbers, and it's actually making us kind of depressed. So it's, you know, there's a whole thing now, if you can't just go on a run, you have to put it on Strava and you have to be, I was having an interview the other day with these, this fitness couple.

1:33:37and they were saying like you've done a marathon but now to be the score in society is unless it's a sub three you don't have status yeah you know everything is the score of restaurant reviews the score of instagram likes the score of followers the score of money and it's written by a philosopher um whose names escape me but he he's but the central theme of the book is stop playing everyone else's game which is beautiful let's move this from battlefield to sort of dining room right um and i love the idea of the guys kind of that sixth sense or intuition of knowing where the bombs are when you walk into a restaurant any of your restaurants what is like and i love this idea of this kind of thing that's not it's ethereal it's intangible this energy and sense what would what's obvious to you but like non-obvious to most people when you when you walk into Russian like what what's the Jeremy's antennas like how do you pick up that energy do you know

1:34:37Jeremy King:what I mean yeah and and as with all these things and as with that Marine it's difficult to actually identify and and and describe what makes me know that something's going wrong now if somebody's got their hand up in the air waving and for us you know the surface is going badly Adrian Gill used to talk about the hum in a restaurant and that which is one aspect of it and it is the same for me i can walk in i can walk into because i go between the restaurants come back say here to the park and walk into the room and the number of people what's going on it doesn't define whether it's going well but i can feel because my brain scans the room and it will pick up on all sorts of things the demeanor of the people the the demeanor of the staff the then it might be a ratio of uh people waiting for for meals i couldn't tell you what that percentage was but the brain's thinking there are too many there are too many people waiting there's so many things and i think adrian's right the hum of a hum of a successful room how do you cultivate the the hum Is there a way to cultivate that?

1:35:58Jeremy King:No, I think it is just natural. And it's trusting our intuition that something is going wrong, even when ostensibly and theoretically it's going really well. And so something might statistically say it's very good. A really, a very simple empiric version of this, it just occurs to me is that very much in the news at the moment is p is um psa readings for men to make sure they don't have prostate problems well it's sort of psa readings i can't remember what the acronym is is so that you take a test through blood and it gives you a reading right and it that reading alone tells you whether you are high risk for prostate as a lot of people even people I know who've been told their PSA is good.

1:36:55Jeremy King:And at the same time, they then develop prostate cancer quite soon afterwards, and nobody could understand it. But the good doctors, the good surgeons will actually say, I'm going to get you an MRI. And it's instinctive. Because on the money ball basis, PSA reading is good. So then they realized, and it becomes, is what we observe has to be put into context. And we make assumptions. There was a famous, famous advert made by Don McCullen. I think it was the 70s. And it's the shot is you see an elderly man walking down the street carrying a bag and you see a guy and playing into the particular time as a black guy running towards him.

1:37:52And so what is our prejudice?

1:37:55Jeremy King:What is our conditioning? And so on. And most people read that, that the black guy was attacking the, and you see him right up to the moment of contact. and we made a prejudiced decision on that. And they did the statistics and it's incredible. And then they stopped the film and then played on and actually that guy is running to push the older guy out of the way because there is a piano or something, a big load about to drop on him. And this guy has seen it, acted quickly. so he's a hero he's a total hero whereas two seconds before isn't he he was an aggressor and a robber or whatever whatever looking behind looking beyond the first thing absolutely this really good advert which um it was like about a male suicide i think it was there was two friends at a football game and the goal the one guy's on his phone looking kind of you know sort of drenched in melancholy and the guy next to him is going like that screaming like really you know happy and they and then they i think it cuts to um like the funeral and the guys the funeral was it was the guy who was happy when and it was like you know mental health hides in plain sight or something like that and i think it's linking to your example there it's like that's so interesting and i suppose what i loved about your book is when you say because just for context like adrian or A.A.

1:39:33Gill was like he was my inspiration for starting everything so I write so I write newsletter every week his his style I think I got table talk probably about 2016 2018 and I've read like literally every single one of his books multiple multiple times his writing style was just extraordinary extraordinary like and just and I think poor me is just a beautiful book as well like even just that it's just a beautiful book um but I think with writing you get into different you can writers can get into different layers by because it's quite a solitary process but you are kind of digging through the you're questioning things what is hanging out with Adrian with Lucian Freud like I know at all your restaurant I'd love to sort of talk about art literature and how it coalesces with being a great restaurateur because I think I think

1:40:26Jeremy King:that's that's a beautiful place to explore yeah I think I've always enjoyed being with create creative people yeah I would love being a creator a creator the notion when I was young that I would ever write a book it was impossible and even now when people say really really lovely things about it because my mother made me suspicious of anybody complimenting me. But I think one of the fundamental things is that I believe restaurants and what attracts me to restaurants is that they are the catalyst for so much. And that might be relationships or whatever. When it comes to the arts, and why I particularly like Grand Café, Brasserie-type operations, is that my contention is that no great movement in the arts, whether it's literary, musical, painting, or indeed political or revolutionary, whatever it might be, I challenge that they didn't all start in restaurants.

1:41:41Jeremy King:because I think people coming together and then engender creativity and the creativity gets better. If we're all working in silos, and, of course, people have learned this now about working from home, is the work can be good, the work can be applied. It's always because of other people. other than a few absolute geniuses that makes the creative process so much better. And I've been thinking about it recently. I like meetings rather than Zoom. Zoom's okay, but I prefer a meeting because I think people being one-on-one or in a group creates a much, much, much greater result. that restaurants are the catalyst for so much gives me the pleasure that my belief that there is no great artistic movement, whether literary, music, painting, whatever it might be.

1:42:50Jeremy King:What are some of those movements? What are the big movements that you witnessed? Well, I think I've witnessed a lot of people coming together to have creative partnerships. I've seen a lot of the shows over the last 40 years, which have been great successes in the West End, have their genesis in one of the restaurants. A composer meets a lyricist, whatever it might be in the musical. I've watched the post-rehearsal creative process happening um i the advertise funny enough the advertising world and which i was always quite fascinated by i used to participate sometimes particularly at the ivy which had quite a lot of a lot of uh artists uh advertising creatives in there and they would say we've got to come up with a an idea for this campaign to prove that and i i would always love to be able to solve that And do you know, have you met Sir John Hegarty?

1:44:00Jeremy King:Oh, yes, very much so. So I interviewed him last summer, and he was talking about why the creativity in advertising has kind of died. And he said one of the examples is because he says creativity is a generous and convivial act. Yeah. And basically because of budgets and the no alcohol stuff, the long lunch has kind of died. But he was saying to me, it's like we'd go into a lunch, and I really believe creativity needs conversation, generosity. Lubrication. Lubrication. Yeah. But also it needs a deadline because it forces you to, and he would say, you need to solve this by 4 p.m. Are there only like delicious examples of you at the Ivy or the Wolsey of the ad guys coming to you with a problem?

1:44:40Like you could imagine like this part of the conversation is like a page on a book. What does that look like when all these people are there?

1:44:49Jeremy King:I've got involved in many of those and said, why don't you try doing such and such and walk away? And they go, oh, God, I actually don't know. Really? Well, I think it's bringing objectivity into it. And that process, I was with my son yesterday, who's an actor and a screenwriter as well, and he wanted to, it was complicated to the extent that he was writing about a father and son relationship, which had gone wrong, and he's quick to say it's not our relationship, and the background was the town which I grew up in, in Somerset, Burnham-on-Sea. And so we went to Burnham-on-Sea yesterday. Where's that?

1:45:36Jeremy King:It's near Western Supermare in Somerset. Okay, yeah, yeah, yeah. And we spent the day, you know, way reliving my life. and it was interesting that part of the narrative was the son, they're reconciling and the son teaching the father who doesn't know to swim and this is a tiny, tiny example but indicative is that the son happens to be a lifeguard and swimming teacher. So he's teaching the father how to swim at Burnham-on-Sea. And the thing about Burnham-on-Sea is that it's only second to the Amazon for the largest rise and fall of a tide. Oh, wow. So it becomes a river at low tide, and then it comes up and becomes a sea.

1:46:34Jeremy King:And he said, so the father panics in the water. And I said, well, then you use the mud from Bernamette See's famous mud that is going out, and then you sink into the mud, and it's quite scary. He said, perfect. Now, that's a tiny, tiny thing, but two people coming together who need to have that interaction in order to sort out a very small element of that story. And what I'm thinking about a lot at the moment is that generally people are either proactive or reactive. And there's something really good when proactive and reactive people come together, and whether it's in a personal relationship or at work, because the proactive person is organized.

1:47:30Jeremy King:The proactive person in your story about John Hegarty is the one who is saying, we've got to make a decision. We have to have it today because we have to develop it next week and so on. And they're the producer and we need it by 4 o 'clock. And the reactive person goes into that meeting without necessarily any idea what they're going to think of. the coming together of the people suddenly engenders it and this is what i find is that and in many ways the strength of chris corbin's and my relationship was that he was the formerly trained restaurateur and put it up how things should happen and how how they'd always happen and i and then my brain would say we don't need to do that i know everybody's done that for 50 years or 100 years or something but actually we could do it better if we if we do this i wanted to ask about um so books that you know harold pinter and adrian like what are some of the books you discuss with them i know you've talked about i really believe like rereading books is one of great life's most underrated luxuries yeah what are some of the books or literally because i'm i asked the self-says i want to go and read them you know but like what what are some of the books that you guys were discussing or art that you guys were discussing if you can remember vaguely we would talk about books actually a favorite question that um how bingerman tony fraser would ask me was um what are you reading at the moment and uh sometimes sometimes they they might be a bit surprised or it stimulates a discussion i think I mentioned in the book when I made the mistake of saying I was reading The Dance and Music of Time, and forgetting that Antonio's uncle was Anthony Pohl, who wrote that book.

1:49:34Jeremy King:And I was asked, was there anything else? And I said, well, there's the, I can always forget whether it's in the Heat of the Night or the Heat of the Day by Elizabeth Bowen. and I wrote a book I love and I said, do you know that? And Harold said, what do you mean do I know it? It's the, I wrote one of my best fucking screenplays. And I'm even more in trouble now and said, really? Of course I did. And then it was never produced. And he said, what do you mean the never produced? Of course it was produced. I said, no, I think I know every film in your genre. And he said, well, it was made for TV.

1:50:31Jeremy King:I said, ah, that explains, because I don't watch that much TV. We would have a book, and that would lead on sometimes discussion with Adrian. Adrian used to, for somebody who it would take at least twice as long to read a book as you and I because of his dyslexia. He was incredibly, incredibly well read. But I mentioned the Dance the Music of Time, which I find fascinating because when I spoke to him on that occasion, I think I must have been about 50, and I was reading a Dance the Music of Time, but I gave up on it for some reason. and that was the third time of reading. And why I mentioned it.

1:51:21Jeremy King:Is it a big book? It's actually 12 books within one. Oh, wow. A bit of a mouthful. Yeah, and I read it first when I was about 19, and I thought it was a loaded tosh and a sort of toff tosh, as I'd call it, that life wasn't like that, and it was all, it was really, really irritating and alienating to me. And then I read it again when I was about 35 or so, and I realized that actually life was like this, and it was, and I changed, and I appreciated and understood it and enjoyed it so, so much more. Then I was reading it for the third time, but only got through about three books, and I got distracted.

1:52:10and now I'm just on the 12th book, but I'm listening to it as opposed to reading.

1:52:19Jeremy King:And part of this is because I wasn't keeping up with my books in any way, shape, or form because it just didn't have time. But if you listen on Audible, I put it on in the car. I put it on wherever I've got time. It might be. And it can be anything. So when I was sick recently and I was making sure I was steaming my Vicks, steaming, et cetera, instead of it being a chore, I looked forward to it because that would give me another 10 or 15 minutes listening to the book. And so I fill my life around the book, and I actually feel that I'm going to be bereft when it's done or 12 books. But most importantly about it is that the reason I started reading is that with my own book people were being very complimentary and one of the greatest compliments which i also didn't entirely understand was that people would say i didn't want it to end which is a massive compliment and very gratified by it but i also didn't entirely understand it because i realized that when i read a book i do want it to end i i thought that's maybe because I'm a little bit too narrative driven that I'm not enjoying the language or the writing as much as I should do.

1:53:41Jeremy King:Cause I, I want it to be resolved by listening to a book. You then are forced to go to the right cadence and of the reading. And then you hear the language and understand the language. You can't suddenly, you can't rush it. You can't speed read it or skip anything. Do you like books for the intensity or complexity of the prose, or are you more narrative? I'm more narrative. And so that's why on Audible you get much more. So the only good thing about finishing Dance to Music at Time is that I will finally, through Audible, properly read, so to speak, the Proust remembrance of things past kind of shit what are your like because Proust is like the Madeline moments isn't it well that's part of it the Proustian moments yeah so the smell of Madeline yeah yeah yeah coming out what would you say those are from your early moments in your career those moments that come to you just those kind of experiences it could be you know the colours and the smells or whatever those beautiful periods at the beginning of it's a fair question i think there really is so many and and i get surprised by them and yesterday particularly because i there i was in the town i grew up as every every turn every corner every everywhere there was something which was reminding me of uh of my youth and uh i find that very poignant difficult to define what exactly what i read something do you do Transcendental Meditation?

1:55:24Jeremy King:I learned TM, yeah, and I think it's incredibly important. I'm not a good practitioner because with TM you're meant to practice twice a day, 20 minutes twice a day, and I, so I'm not fulfilling that, but I use it as a tool if I'm tired and I, times when I set up in the morning and driving through France, and within 15, 20 minutes, I'm tired and want to fall asleep. If I meditate for 20 minutes, it enhances everything. But my kids were taught a simple version of TM when they were at nursery school, and it stood them in good stead. And, in fact, if you look carefully into it, and there's a lot of bad things said about TM, is that schools which properly utilize TM perform so much better, but people get scared of it yes and i think the um if they change the word transcendental then it would have a much greater movement it needs a rebrand well because the beatles did it when they went to when they went to india and then a lot of writers and artists yeah so i've done it i've been doing it for 10 years in the morning just so you yeah that's why i wanted to ask you but i feel like what it does is it helps you notice things non-obvious things or sorry obvious things that are non-obvious to other people and so i just wanted to understand how as a restaurateur or being on the ground like does that give you kind of a i don't think just makes you the noise in your head the ambient kind of just i just kind of dissipates and then you're in you're in the moment of just more i think i think yes i think you're right those who practice are more attuned to what's going on around and i think for me calmness is a is a major, major element of it.

1:57:19Jeremy King:And even five or 10 minutes, I would use it quite a lot with, you're asking about Lucian Freud, is when I was sitting for him, because that, when I was sitting for him for a portrait, the room is often quite warm. I might be quite tired. It's easy to fall asleep. if he left the room for five five minutes or so i would use tm to give me a burst of energy just on on link i when i love the bit when you say like is it was your headmaster said warming the bottle of claret by the fire and you said you really understood restaurants through literature yeah how just i love i love cross category like learnings when you take kind of two similar things and how they see how they coalesce and that's really interesting to me uh how's a love of literature or like indulging in lots of literature made you a unique or better restaurant or do you say like the parallels differences to to a degree i i answer it's a it's a big question which would need a more considered answer the but literature It literally wasn't part of my younger life.

1:58:37Jeremy King:I wasn't led by my parents on it. And that's one of the most important things I got out of my schooling was understanding worlds which I didn't realize exist. And food came into it in a large way for that very reason, that it was such a big part of life. And stylistically, a lot of writers would never include a meal because that was sort of dirty almost.

1:59:05Jeremy King:But it was fundamental, and that's where I suddenly realized there was an immense amount of enjoyment to be derived from the coming together of people to eat and talk and discuss. Is it the escapism, the link of those two things? To a degree. It was just it was another world, another life, which I hadn't really understood. A few more things, Jeremy, then we'll begin to wrap this up. I've obviously loved our conversation. Just what are some of the business principles, one or two, the main salient ones from the book or from your life that you think are really important for people who may be listening to this?

1:59:50You can only pick two or three.

1:59:52Jeremy King:Well, funnily enough, the lessons which people keep quoting back to me which are domestic and business in ways, is that one particularly liked is when I said to people, never accept to do something in the future that you wouldn't be happy to be doing tonight because soon what you're doing in the future will become tonight. And we all do that. Somebody invites us six weeks in advance, feel we can't say no. And out of that then, so how do you deal with that? will make it a very quick no and say no straight away and then never give an excuse or justify, as that wonderful old saying is that your friends don't need it and your enemies don't believe it.

2:00:42Jeremy King:And when you give that excuse or apology. And the happy problems I think is really important. because and just detail that a little bit more so we kind of we surface skin that but i think it's really it's really the happy problem yeah just like the re how you reframe things well because when if we're leading busy lives and and varied lives there are a lot of things which give us stress and it could be in any number of ways and the first time i realized the early 80s when Caprice was starting to get busy and I was cashing up and the phone was ringing more than normal and it was interrupting me counting the American Express vouchers which were more than normal and and so it went on and I got really tense about it I thought hang on and almost begrudging the phone ringing begrudging having to count I thought so I'm complaining about the fact that the more people want to come to the restaurant that I'm counting more receipts and I'm getting stressed about that this is not a problem it's a happy problem and i do believe that when we're feeling under pressure if we if we divide up our things which are oppressing us or worrying us actually analyze them most of them are happy problems if if we're getting too many requests from friends to get together surely that's a happy problem the unhappy problem is when i don't have any friends and nobody wants to get get together and and so it goes on i got i was getting on the tube earlier in the week and i ran into an actress friend i've known for years and she was talking a few things generally and she was saying that um the And she was upset about her tax return, how much tax she said.

2:02:45Jeremy King:I said, how can you be upset about that? Would you rather you didn't have any income to be taxed on? You're working. You're doing all sorts. This is a happy problem. And suddenly all of the tension falls away. interestingly what probably probably the most repeated is either that one or the happy problems one or don't do something in the future and but the other one which really captured people's imagination i'm surprised how much there's a story i told of having tea with ruthie rogers and her granddaughter so that's when my mom called me uh two days ago so i bought her the book we went to Arlington the other week but anyway so that's her favourite story but yeah I'll let you because we were sitting together and they were having some tea and the waiter left the table and Ivy the granddaughter turned to Ruthie and said Brown and Ruthie said well done, very good and I said what was that?

2:03:59Jeremy King:what was Brown? and he said the she's been taught that she didn't she's not allowed to be served by anybody unless she can tell us afterwards the color of their eyes because it means you engage you've looked people in the eye and um not disdainfully and and there's a proper human reaction into reaction and uh we both benefit from it and i it's interesting and it's not just children who need that. Adults need that. Especially with our phones. We're either looking, or if you look amongst a particularly wealthy section of society, they won't look you in the eye. I've had plenty of people who will engage me to the point that I'm the person to talk to about something, but then will turn their head and ask the question.

2:04:56It's so true. The one I loved is questions over statements and i've one that's what i've used personally because i'm with the team running this is if something's not working i'd usually be like not like go go ballistic but i'd be like ah like kind of like that i'm kind of a high energy person whereas now i've just been like so why do you think that like what firstly if you could just quickly detail that and then what are some of your favorite questions to ask your team to get the best out of them because i feel like it's

2:05:22Jeremy King:it's really working for me that one well i think questions are really important because they diffuse situations and yes um you know when somebody makes an assertion uh i've watched a child say to their mother um you don't love me you don't care about me and all those things never argue with the child it's an irrational argument anyway but ask it if you ask the question do you really believe that why do you think that is or well suddenly the whole thing is is dissipated and i think with staff a lot of a lot of the questions are have you done enough what could you do to help them uh can you see a different way of doing it it's rather than saying you should have done it such and such way because the more we learn for ourselves the more it sticks because there's two things in life and when training staff uh people don't realize there's a difference between teaching and training and teaching yeah it's different teaching is when somebody stands and tells you the theory of how something is done training is when you actually go out and show them how it's done and work with them and it and it makes all the difference because the classroom is in important to learn the theory but then you try and do it and i go back to that analogy of the car if you can you can stand for hours on end telling somebody how to drive a car but until you put them in the car and say try it they won't really learn interesting final thing i wanted just to wrap up on is i love the story of when mick jagger was coming to the restaurant and you fill out the tables you repapered the tables so so because i think obviously now again with the retrospects a wonderful thing in and like you've had this huge glorious success in all your restaurants but but that early day kind of hustle and competitiveness i love the idea of studying the rise not necessarily the result because the result people will say different things once you're up at the well not the hills kind of a at the top of the mountain is a very kind of uh and never-ending kind of thing anyway but like those that first bit that first bit of getting your um was it was that look at priest that that was that that was it looked at free well i think in those early days it's very easy first of all it's easy to forget um how long it takes to get a restaurant going not always sometimes and people would talk about the Ivy, which did become extraordinarily busy.

2:08:18Jeremy King:And I would, without in any way wanting to sound arrogant, I would say it was the sublime restaurant of the 90s without any question. And it was just a lot of things came together. Right. And the perception is it was busy from day one. The first night we opened, we did 46 covers, and the IRA bombed the Junior Carton Club, and everything was subdued. I've done, at the Ivy, I've done zero services. I remember when we opened Saturday lunch, and doing a service of zero covers is quite surreal, because unlike the theater, if you haven't got anybody booked in for the theater, you just don't perform.

2:09:02Jeremy King:whereas a restaurant you have to stand there sort of with rigor of the smile on on the face and hope maybe somebody will come through the door perception changes and um it's very important to see that and then there often are tipping tipping points um in those days it was all about word of mouth and and i do think of social media as being a version of word of mouth. And like any of the phenomena, you can enhance your public persona by social media and so on, but you can't maintain it. There are ways of stimulating the market to ensure you're full, but will you be full in two or three years' time?

2:09:52Jeremy King:And the whole thing about restaurants, and a lot of people open a lot of restaurants, and I firmly believe it's a massively enjoyable opening restaurant. It's also incredibly hard. The really hard thing is maintaining a restaurant and keeping it going, keeping it successful, and it goes back to that whole thing of constantly trying to improve it. And what were you doing just to get the people in originally? Maybe that Mick Jagger calls you. Well, it was Marie Helvin who actually made the call because we knew them. We knew a lot of people. A lot of the theatre people that I knew from Joe Allen days helped us.

2:10:36Jeremy King:A lot of the artists which were coming out of the Royal Academy, they all helped us. And the beauty of that Marie Helvin story is that we weren't particularly busy that night. We papered it. But the people who were legitimate customers look and see Mick Jagger, Mick and Bianca Jagger, and Brian Ferry, and all these people coming. They talk, and they will talk. And then there's the point where you have to have discretion that you don't publicize, you don't want to publicize that these people are in because it attracts a clientele for the wrong reason, perhaps, or attracts the paparazzi. and ask the paparazzi on one hand, help you fill the restaurant because people say, oh, I've got to go there.

2:11:21Again, you lose control.

2:11:23Jeremy King:So that's why I always talk about the fact I don't really like broadcast. I much prefer narrowcast. Final question. What's one truth you believe that most restaurateurs would disagree with you on? What's the one thing that? One truth, one thing that you believe most would disagree with you on? I'm not sure entirely. I know that when I was trying to get a hotel and I did an interview for the Financial Times, I was persuaded to do it. And they wanted me to go and lecture there. I'll start that again. I remember when I was in the search of a hotel, my architect-to-be did a piece for the Financial Times.

2:12:12Jeremy King:and they asked him, what's the most exciting project you're working on at the moment? And he said, oh, a hotel with Jeremy King. And they said, oh, really, where is the hotel? He said, we haven't found the site yet. He said, but I like the thinking. I like the approach. And so they persuaded me to do an interview for the Financial Times. And at the end of it, the journalist phoned me back a couple of days later and said, the editor's really happy but they want to put do a box on this article make a feature of these articles and ask for the six your six key points for success i said please don't ask me to do that it's just it makes me look will make me look smug and arrogant and so i said no please because otherwise the article might not happen so do you want a few days to think about i said no i'll do it now so i reeled off what i thought was six it actually turned out to be seven points of interest and he said that's great and i said fine i couldn't even tell you now what what i said until we heard from the big hotel and catering school in switzerland saying and they said we want mr king to come and do the keynote lecture for uh for the end of year i said why and they I said, well, basically because all your key points of success are actually at odds with what we're teaching the students, and they want to make it their study work for the next year.

2:13:51Jeremy King:And I think it's the important thing is that we must all learn there's more than one way of doing it. And what underlines hospitality is care, love, attention, generosity, all these things how you do it can be argued about as to what people disagree with me now i don't i don't know it's um we're all different i love like just what i've taken from you today is different scorecards different games and just not believing everything that face value dig a little deeper and nothing is is right jeremy that's been an absolute joy thank you so much thank you thank you it's amazing hey guys thank you so so much for watching this video i hope you're loving the episode i'd appreciate a very small yet significant favor por favor please may you click the subscribe button get in the comments tell me what you think about the episode tell me you think we did on the show um it may not seem much but it really helps us grow and helps us get bigger guests thank you so much