What It Takes to Run One of London's Most Popular Pubs

23:29And most of them are great, but some of them can be quite burdensome for businesses. I mentioned at the beginning, I really was not trying to put my wife on blast by mentioning that she got scolded for her pouring. But, you know, I take it that labor is an important factor and skilled labor is an important factor. Talk to us about like the market for that and the supply and the ease with which one can hire not just a bartender who's capable of the poor, but someone who's happy and someone who if you put such an emphasis on making the customers feel welcome and warm and so forth, what does that look like today?

24:05We really look for people who will feel comfortable in our environment so people who've got great skills at relating to others great skills at wooing people to have a nice time people who will work hard and you know are able to believe what we believe in terms of hard to find if i like if if you found a skilled bartender today would you be like yeah come in absolutely um we find ourselves quite lucky and anecdotally i don't see that issue that people keep saying that young people don't want to work our best workers are between 18 and 23 years old, we've got a dozen amazing examples of that who are so reliable, so hardworking, incredibly happy, very efficient, and thankfully really well looked after by us.

24:46And I'm really proud of that. And it's great. And a lot of my colleagues in town and some of the better restaurants are saying the same thing, that the kids really are all right. How competitive is your pay in the world of pubs to this point? And then also, were you affected by Brexit at all in terms of your labor supply? I think Brexit was once again a little bit of a shock in that we did lose a lot of our sort of casual Italian, French, German, Spanish and Greek team. A lot of those were able to apply at the time for a right to remain and stay. And a lot of them did. But we lost a few. But then the tap turned off to them.

25:27However, we are finding that there are other nationalities and other channels of people coming through. And a lot of our very best employees are British now. And we're very proud of that. The£10, the£10 pie. What's going on with that? And is it just a few locations? And what are you seeing pricing like? I think prices have gone up. And that's gone up because of the cost of production, the cost of transport, the cost of the raw materials, the cost of everything going on ahead. But I think it's rising at the same steepness that it always has. And I can never remember a year when public house people, you know, pub people all got together and said, oh, we've been amazing.

26:06It's smashed to this year. There's always an element of doom and gloom. And, you know, I try to avoid it as much as I can. And we try to give people great value for money. We keep a pint on that's less than a fiver always. Our biggest seller is Guinness, which is 720 now. I think that's fair. But I think it's true. You can, if you want to, go and find a pint for£10. But is that the place you're going to really want to drink? I don't think so. How does it work with your suppliers? How much pricing power or negotiating power do you actually have when you're putting in orders for your drinks? So what we try and do, and I think what most of the industry does, is to fix our prices for a long period of time.

26:42So we'll know what volume we're going to do. We'll speak to a load of suppliers and tender out our purchasing. They'll come back to us with a price. We'll make a decision and then we can do the budget. We try and keep it as simple as that. And, you know, with some of our suppliers were fixed more or less now for three years. So I'm pretty happy with that. On Guinness specifically, people are very weird about, oh, you can't get a good Guinness in the United States. And then you're in London. You can't get a good Guinness in London. I can never know if that's just like one of these things that's in people's head, etc.

27:14Where do you stand on the question of is one even capable of getting a good Guinness? like within is there a certain diameter around Ireland in which the quality of your Guinness pours declines all of the Guinness in the UK now is made in Dublin it's exactly the same as what you get in Dublin all right when it arrives in the pub however there's probably 30 variables that can make a difference as to what it tastes like when it gets to the glass and you taste it okay so in order to get those 30 variables spot on is really really difficult what are some of The key one, of the 30. The key, the temperature of the keg, the temperature of the room it's in, the width of the line it comes through, the mixture of gas that you push it through with, the temperature of the cooler, the speed it comes through the line, the kind of tap you've got, how clean your glass is, lots and lots of things.

28:04Do you do a lot of testing on these things? All day long. As someone who at one point was envisioning going into food science, talk a little bit about that science of how you figured out for the dev the optimal temperature, mix of gas, and so forth. What we actually do, I've been selling Guinness for 40 years, so I knew that most of the way it's done in the UK is different and not necessarily the best way. So before we did the Devonshire, me and my business partners went to Dublin, and we spent some time having a look around. So we went into the cellars where the beer was being stored and we had a look at the temperatures, the pressures, the gas they were using, the night of time that they left it to sit, how wide the lines were, what temperature the coolers were, how quick it was coming through at the top.

28:52We looked at the nozzles, the taps and all of that and we did a big study on the best way to do it. And we put together our way of doing it, which might not be exactly the way anyone else does, but somehow it works and people think our Guinness tastes great. And I'll believe that if they tell me so. I'm very pleased about it. Can you explain, I guess from a cultural perspective, why the pouring of a pint looms so large in the UK psyche? Because this is something like you don't really have this in the US, right? People are not going to complain that the foam was like... The foam is like a centimeter or two, yeah.

29:26Well, I'll tell you what I think it is. I think it goes back to that timelessness and that there's a performance that happens behind a bar. If you think of the best pubs you've ever seen, the bar is always kind of in the space where you can see it from everywhere. So it becomes like a stage in a theater and the staff are like the players. So the customers want to know that they're doing their very best and that they can talk about something that's banal and won't cause offense. So the great thing about talking about your Guinness with someone you don't know is you know you're not going to fall out because you're not going to get into any political territory.

30:03you're not going to talk about religion or race or anything like that you can go well i know a place where there's slightly better one and they do this and i can split the g and this tastes really great and this is my favorite one and it's kind of a gorgeous beautiful banal sociable thing to be able to banter about and know that you're not going to cross any red lines and know that you're going to have a fun time and i think that's really important there's both the theatrical and performance part and then there's the sociable part it's a really lovely thing to be able to talk about. I think British people also love to complain.

30:34And so having, and I can say that because I'm married to a Brit, but like having something to unite around and complain about. Yeah. That makes sense. It's such a piece, like talk to anyone, you're never going to get in too much of a fight. It's never going to be too much. I've literally never seen someone fall out about a Guinness or a conversation about Guinness. It's always fun. Yeah. That makes a lot of sense. So speaking of speaking, as I've gotten older, I've become very sensitive to loud places. I walk by a place and there's booming music. I'm like, I don't want to walk into there, obviously.

31:10I want to have a conversation with someone. Talk to us about sound design and building an environment that is conducive to a conversation. I think that's really important for pubs. And I have a particular view on this that people might not always agree on. I don't think that having sports and TVs in traditional pubs is a good idea. I also don't think that having background music on speakers is a good idea. And some do. Some do and some disagree with me. But for me, I think it's best to leave it out. And I think that the sound you should hear is the sound of convivial chat in the background and the clink of glasses and people having fun.

31:47And I think that's a very calming sound to have. And we think also really carefully about how sound would travel through a space. I think the very best post, and particularly the old ones, if you look at them, they've got screens and little places you can hide and sort of textured wallpapers on the ceilings and on the walls. So the sound doesn't bounce around as much. It's a much more dead space. And they use really thick old carpets as well so that, you know, you can have a private conversation and you can't be overheard. and there's places you can hide and places you can sort of not be seen.

32:22And I think that's really important. And, you know, having, you know, a lot of, sometimes places are great big square boxes where if you say something, the sound travels everywhere. And we really avoid that in our design. I love pubs with little like hidden nooks and crannies. They're the best, aren't they? There's a great one, which I recommended to one of our producers yesterday, the Cheshire Cheese, just down Fleet Street. It's a great pub. Love that place with all the little rooms and things. So, you know, we mentioned the headlines about pubs closing. Can you diagnose the problem here? Like if you had to give us a summary of what exactly is going on, what is it?

32:57I think a lot of it is down to historical stuff. The pub was, you know, 100 years ago, the place where people spent all of their leisure time. Whereas leisure time has now been carved up with sport, with live music, with concerts, with TV, with Netflix. Scrolling on your phone at home on your couch. You can do that at a pub. Yeah, but I think the best pubs are up there fighting alongside it for those occasions. And I think we're entering a golden age for pubs because, you know, while the world is saying that we're all going to move into this two dimensional AI space where we'll be, you know, playing games and looking at stuff on screens.

33:36I can see anecdotally that people are coming in and really loving the shared experience of the chaos of being in a room full of other humans. And I think that that's going to translate into all sorts of stuff like sport, into being able to go to musical concerts, into going to the zoo or, you know, spending time in spaces with real people. It's far more exciting than what everybody's banging on about with AI. Don't the Sam Smith pubs, I'm sorry to keep going on about them, but don't they ban phones or something? They certainly do. And that's a really interesting company and worth digging into because old Humphrey Smith, who runs that firm, he's a bit like Willy Wonka in a good way.

34:16And all of their beers, you know, they still make them themselves. They make their own vodka. They bottle their own wine. It's a really closed company and very interesting. One of the things you hear is that young people don't drink as much as the older generations do. Another pretty contemporary trend that is not young people per se is the rise of GLP-1s, and which supposedly also curtail people's desire to drink alcohol. I can't imagine Guinness is an attractive proposition if you're taking Ozempic or something. But what do you see in terms of like consumer tastes among newer, younger people right now?

34:55I think this whole story that young people don't drink has been massively exaggerated. I see loads of people, you know, between 18 and 25 still piling in and, you know, having pints and having fun in the same way as I did when I was that age. and yeah maybe they are overall drinking a little bit less and maybe being a bit more healthy which is a great thing but they certainly enjoy a few beers and i think if you if you start off in business thinking oh young people don't drink anymore so i'm not going to look after them they they certainly are not going to come in i think we need to look after those guys and make sure that they feel comfortable and safe and keep the pub as a center of community for them so that they can use it in the same way we did this is a very cliched journalistic question but what's the hardest part of running a pub?

35:44The hardest part, I think, is deciding you're going to do it. Because if you do it and you do it well, it's a real vocation and you do it all the time. It's not a part-time job. What are your working hours like, actually? I never turn off. So I spend six or seven days a week in the pub. I'll be there at least a few hours a day, sometimes the whole day. And to do it well, I think you've got to be there. What are you doing when you're there? Like when you're on site, what are you doing? Is it management yelling at people gordon ramsey style we don't we don't yell but no it it does we've got 165 staff so just meeting and looking after them and making sure they're feeling good is a really great thing i obsess about details about making sure that everything is clean and there's no visual noise around the place and that people know to keep that stuff correct i'm always looking at you know, paintwork and finishes and where stuff is placed and making sure things are like that.

36:41But to me, it feels a little bit now I've moved on in my career. It feels more like conducting an orchestra so I can see what everybody's doing. I love catching my team doing things correctly and right. I love them going above and beyond. And I just love working with these brilliant people that I work with. So, you know, just spending time with people is what I've put my life to. and it's really great. Sorry, I'm laughing because I'm thinking about the story that you told about your wife not being able to pour a pint. Can I tell you, that was not her fault. That's a training issue. Because if she had been properly shown how to do it, then that would not have happened.

37:18I think she was just thrown in there. This is exactly what I was going to say. So my husband very briefly worked as a bartender at Weatherspoons, got zero training, was basically thrown into it and made all sorts of mistakes, including pouring everyone like the top shelf gin before he was actually told about the cheap stuff and also mixing up hoisin and barbecue sauce at one point and things like that. But what I was going to ask, actually, working in pubs or restaurants is sort of a notoriously pressurized environment and sometimes kind of an abusive environment. Has your management style changed at all over the years?

37:57Do you find the way you manage people now is different to what you would have been doing in the 1990s or early 2000s? I don't think it's markedly different, but I am super aware that managing people well and making sure that they feel empowered and that they know what's going on and that they feel comfortable, safe and happy is everything. Because when our employees feel that, I know that the business accelerates. And that has been really what I've concentrated on. In terms of having seen, you know, unpleasant things in the past in kitchens and around, once again, thankfully not in my places, but certainly I think there was a lot of that around.

38:38And I hope there's not much of it about now. Just, you know, just on the business question, having started, you know, the inflation that happened in 2021, 22 exploded everywhere. Yeah. You mentioned that you're always going to have a pint that's under five quid. But talk to us just about like when you think about menu design or when you think about beer selection or just when you think about the business in general, managing a pub today with today's raw input prices, et cetera, versus if we had been having this conversation in the mid 2010s or in the mid 90s. Like how different is it because of the reality of just the high cost of many things?

39:19I think footfall has been hit the most in pubs, and that's the big killer. I think if you're selling hundreds of pints a day, you're not so much worried about the margins. Okay. And, you know, I always have flipped it on its head for us in that we've always gone for volume. So when we're full, we're not so worried. Yes, of course, our costs are really high. But, you know, when you have margin, it kind of balances itself out. And what's the key in finding a business partner? This is always a really difficult thing in any business, right? Going into business with someone or two people or finding the right investor that will be aligned time-wise and margin-wise and return-wise.

40:01Having done this now, what are some of the important things to know, whether it's a pub or even anything, about the type of person you're willing to go into business with? I would say don't go into business with someone who has got the same skills as you, because you will both be doing the same thing. You need to find someone who has completely different skills to you. And in the case of me, Ashley and Charlie, it's a perfect example. Charlie is a big picture guy. He's set up his own restaurant chain, Flatiron, and was incredibly successful there. He thinks really from the top down. He's very commercial.

40:37he's brilliant in meetings when it comes down to the financial side of things and great like that we've got ashley who spent 20 years working alongside the best chef in the world earned five michelin stars in that time his attention to detail on the food and product and purchasing side is second to none and he's also a wonderful guy and i think you're going to be speaking to him which is great he has the best palate for tasting things i've ever seen He knows ingredients inside and out. And he was able to really choose dishes that we could do all year round so we don't have to change them. So we don't have to be seasonal like everybody else.

41:15And that makes a big difference on the impact of cost. And then there's me who's the, you know, front of house guy. I'll front the business, talk to everybody, operate the thing. So we're like three corners of a working triangle. And for me, that has been unbelievable. And, you know, we do have some similar skills, you know, in terms of the business, but the main ones are all very, very far apart. And that has made us really strong. This is actually the perfect segue into the next segment of our conversation and our next guest. But one other thing I would love to ask, and I apologize in advance for asking it so directly, but what are the margins actually like for a pub like yours?

41:56We're pretty happy. I think because we're a private business and we don't necessarily have to say, I'm going to keep that discreet. But we're certainly at a similar level to the marketplace, if not maybe a little bit higher. And I think good pubs are still converting at, you know, between 15 and 25 percent. But, you know, it's a great position to be in if we were at that. Osh, thank you so much for coming on Oddloss. That was great. Joe, I'm absolutely delighted to be on the podcast. I listen to it all the time. And seeing and hearing your voice at the same time, same for you, Tracy, has been a great pleasure.

42:32So thank you so much for having me on. No, thank you. I'm glad we made this happen. Cheers, buddy.

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45:46All right. So that was our conversation recorded in our London studio with Oyshan Rogers. And now you're going to hear our live episode recorded with Chef Ashley Palmer Watts. I love the Devonshire, by the way. It's a great spot. That's a good start. Yes, a good start. Now, I'm going to ask you to expose your trade secrets and give us in the most excruciating detail possible the conditions to serve the perfect pint of Guinness. How long do we have? We have half an hour. So pre the pub, I asked my now partner, Oisin, what were all the myths busted and what were the truths? He said, look, it's going to take an hour.

46:26We don't have an hour, so I'm going to top line it for you. Basically, it starts with, obviously, the beer coming in. And then you need to let it settle. And you need to bring the temperature down. Really, I mean, slowly, but I mean, it takes a couple of days. Okay. So it'll come into the sort of corridor. I mean, we sell a lot, so we've not got enough space. So it's everywhere. Every door you open, it's there. It sits in the corridor, comes gently down. Then it goes under the street in the sort of old caves in there. Okay. And it comes down. That's all chilled. That comes down. Then it goes into the cellar.

46:59So about two days later. Okay. It then sits there, doesn't get disturbed again until you tap it and you start serving it. The pipes from the cellar to the tap are the shortest it can possibly be from the cellar to upstairs. So it's directly underneath the bar. Then you have the right circumference of the pipe to allow the right flow. Okay. Then it's about pressure. Okay. Let's talk pressure. You need to put enough pressure through to pour it in about 13, 14 seconds up to the top of the harp. Okay. And then you have that 90-second rest on the font. The pressure of the gas, there's two gases. There's nitrogen and CO2.

47:41Okay. Now, in Ireland, they do an 80-20, 80 nitrogen, 20 CO2. In England, we're kind of made to buy a pre-mixed gas, which is 75-25. We actually mix our own and our own little magic number is 8218. And then from there, it's about the type of, there's a little plate in the pourer with five tiny holes, like pinholes. Okay. And depending on which one of those you choose, gives you your texture. And then it's a balance. So it's pressure, gas mix, temperature and time. and then trying to get everyone to follow that and really understand it and respect that. And there you go. That was awesome.

48:28Can I just say, this seems like a lot of work. I asked your partner this question, but I would be curious to get your thoughts as well. And I'm going to play the role of like ignorant American here. But why does pouring a good pint loom so large in the British consciousness? because in the U.S., you know, someone hands us a bottle of Bud Light. We don't really complain that much. Maybe we should. I guess it's quicker, I suppose. But I mean, you know, the thing about pubs is they're so British. It's part of our heritage that I think it is for literally everyone, right? It doesn't matter who you are, how rich you are, how poor you are, what you're there for, whether it's catching up with friends or you're sad or you're happy or whatever, or just on your own with your own thoughts in your head.

49:14I think, you know, it's about taste and appreciation. And I often ask myself, why is it that we love beer so much? And I don't know the reason because, you know, you can only drink so many before you fall over. So maybe that's the lovely tension between the two. Let's just stick on the technical questions for a moment. How did you figure this out? So like, OK, like you've optimized something. How did you go from, OK, you're going to start a pub. It's going to be a big investment up front. You want to get it just right. Was there A-B testing? Was there taste testing? Like, what does that process look like of making sure that the final mix of gas, everything, that you know you have it right?

49:57Well, I would say it's probably not finished. And I'll tell you the reason why. The question comes, and a good friend of mine who's very, very clever. He's an American guy, scientist, food scientist. We're actually talking to him at the moment about the solubility of those gases. in the liquid. So at the end of the night, the gases are turned off on those kegs. And what that means is that if you leave the pressure on, the solubility takes too much of that gas into the beer, the beer becomes too foamy and too frothy. But my question to him was, and we don't know the answer yet, he's coming back in June and we're going to try and figure this out with Osh as well, is that as the volume of beer in the keg reduces, the relative gas saturation to it could be, have a sliding scale of the solubility, but then there's the thing of saturation of the solubility of the gas.

50:53So it's a really complicated thing, probably a little bit above my understanding, but we're never happy just going, you know what, that's finished. And I think that's key with anything to do with the restaurant. But you get to do lots of taste testing as you go along. Well, it has to be done, to be fair. Yeah, it's not a bad place to be at work. Okay. So I know you've been at a bunch of different restaurants, including famously the chef at the Fat Duck with Heston Blumenthal. When you go about setting up a menu, when you first like go to the drawing board and say, this is what we want our menu to be, How important are the actual economics and the price points?

51:35Like, would you say this dish sounds phenomenal and I would like to do it, but actually the unit economics don't really work for it? When I joined Ocean Charlie, originally they just wanted one recipe of a dish that we used to serve in Bray. I said, yeah, this is no problem. I can, you know, you can have it. It's fine. I said, you know, why don't we make something synonymous with the pub? And it was more about creating things. the economic side is is really really important but it's more about what is it you're coming to experience what are you going to feel what are we what are we doing for you why are you coming to us so after the hours Guinness chat we then brought Guinness into the beef cheek and suet pudding and finished the sauce with some Guinness and it became synonymous with the pub the process of the menu they had an idea of the framework of what this menu would be I came in quite late obviously just over a year before we opened.

52:31What year did it open for those in the audience? November 23. Okay. So November 22, we started talking. And then in January 23, we sat down in Oshin's flat in Soho. And we just talked about food for three days straight. And it was based around that framework. So we went through. And there are a few things that were left off and a few things that were added in. and I sort of was the conduit of almost like two parents uh input on what they loved and what they didn't love about certain things of what this thing could be you know so you know we wanted to do a scallop dish and if we could buy scallops from this diver up in Scotland and I don't know maybe we'll make our own bacon and maybe if we could use malt vinegar somehow so I would distill this down into a plan, add my sort of, I don't know, 25 years, 30 years experience in creating things, but then creating things that we could replicate on large numbers.

53:32You know, we'll do 650 covers today in the restaurant, for example. So it's great making it for 50, but you need to do it for a large volume. So that's really where there's a lovely tension between that. Actually, talk more about that. I'm sort of fascinated by the idea of, okay, you have a recipe, it might be good, but that doesn't necessarily mean it's going to be able to scale for and do it in volume. I still like, in my mind, I don't understand how restaurants work. How do they get so much food out so fast? I don't really understand how steakhouses work. Talk to us about building the repetition process.

54:07Yeah. So, I mean, it's about experience. Experience and knowledge is probably the most powerful thing that you gain through your career. You know, you think you know everything at 25. Reality is 20 years later, you know a lot more. I think it's about understanding how things work and where mistakes can happen, where gaps are that allow those mistakes to happen and fix in the root cause. So reducing down mistakes gives you greater consistency. So when I am building recipes around a dish, you want to put as much measurable control in there as possible. clear simple step-by-step approach you know no information is stupid really because you don't want to assume that people know something that you don't make clear to them in the first place and then it's about you know for example the all the beef that we have here we have a room probably a bit bigger than this stage where all the beef is aged downstairs we have a grill in one of the dining rooms called the grill room and we burn oak and beech in a massive kiln it runs at eight nine hundred degrees we knock the wood down into embers and then we lift them onto the the ember beds and we cook at different heights and temperatures and so you can cook the whole way you know if you wanted a medium steak or a medium you know um beef chop you could do that the whole way but it would be a much more gentle process slower because you've got to allow that heat to transfer in.

55:36We've set it up slightly differently. We cook very quickly and quite hot so that we create the crust, we create the sear, then it goes on to the next person which is in the kitchen and they control medium, medium well, medium rare, rare and they look after it from there because to do that for this many covers all the way on the grill would be impossible. You'd need a grill five times the size. Joe, why did we decide to record this conversation at dinner time? I know. You were talking about beef just then, and clearly earlier in the conversation, we were talking about higher beef prices. How much of an issue is that for someone who is actually serving that meat at the restaurant?

56:16Yeah, I mean, it is a challenge. I mean, it went up quite a lot over the last couple of years. Yeah, and you specialize in beef. You have a whole room dedicated to it. It doesn't come down. Nothing ever comes down, to be fair. Occasionally, fish will come down, but pretty much we're now seeing the effects, like the guys were saying earlier. you know the fuel and prices are going up you know another 30p on a scallop it's quite a lot you know I think you just got to be clever I mean we buy direct from abattoirs because of the scale that we can and and Charlie's relationships with different beef producers but it's about having an entry level so we use skirt steak you know which is on our 29 pound menu for three courses It's steak and chips, prawn cocktail, and then sticky toffee.

57:00And it's about utilizing the right cut at the right price for accessibility. And a sort of anyone can come to our restaurant. It's not expensive. But then you can come and spend£100 on a beef chop, for example. So there's that range, you know. It's top and bottom. Wait, this actually, I forget who we were talking about this earlier, but we need to clear something up. Is it true? Oh, this was with Francine this morning. Is it true that it's a really bad idea to order the second most expensive wine on the menu? This is a thing that they always say, that that is there for suckers and that that's the one at the highest margin.

57:36Can you talk about wine pricing? Is it true that you're a fool to buy the second most expensive one? Well, I'm sure in some places he could be right. But, I mean, I can only talk about, you know, what we do. And, you know, we have a nice list and it does range, but it really does focus on that entry level. So instead of, you know, that old thing of, you know, having your house wine and it's the cheapest one and no one orders it because it's the cheapest one and go for the other one. We actually work with one of Osh's friends in Portugal and he makes our Devonshire wine. Now, it's not our house wine.

58:09It punches a little bit higher up the list than that. But the prices are down where house wines are because we don't want to penalize people for coming in at an entry level. but I think when you construct the wine list, the higher you go up in the value, the sort of better value you get, the margins are less. We don't apply a whole, you know, three or four times across the whole thing and, you know, hope for the best. You want to be smart. You want to reward people and encourage people to drink better. How do you actually source new, drink better, that's right. How do you source new wine or new new ingredients, new suppliers, are people pitching to you all the time?

58:49Do they come to the Devonshire and they're like, we have some great scallops from, you know, the following origin at this particular price, or do you go out and try to find them? A bit of both. But I mean, a lot of suppliers, when you do, when you do speak to someone, you say, you know, you sure you can do the volume? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, we're going to need like 3000 scallops a week. Yeah, yeah, it's not a problem. And then you order 3 ,000 and they're like, you actually do want 3 ,000. I'm like, of course, I'm not trying, I'm not telling you 3 ,000 to get them 10p cheaper. It's, you know, it's all about paying the right price, a fair price for the best quality.

59:24And that's what we're about. You know, if you're trying to drive the price down on everything all the time, you're never going to have the best relationship with the people that either are farming it, catching it and giving it to you. Wait, actually, this is really interesting about that relationship. How often are suppliers changing? You know, like when you come to an agreement with a supplier, let's say, okay, you find your scallop provider who can deliver that volume. Do you lock it in? Do you say, okay, we're going to do this for six months? Is it for a week? You come to an agreement, maybe you come to a price.

59:59What is the duration of that agreement? I mean, it varies massively. You know, the scallops, for example, it was last week, You know, the fuel went up and, you know, I'm going to have to put, you know, 30 pence on a scallop. Listening to the guys on before me, you know, we'd listen to those guys. So when it comes down again, you know, fair is fair. But I think there are people out there that take the opportunity and, you know, exploit that a little bit, I would say. We like to build relationships that last and mean something. And we bring a lot of our suppliers in to the Devonshire. Most people come and enjoy it as a place to come.

1:00:34and you just hope that you have this really great honesty and integrity with these guys and that everything's fair.

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1:04:03When something does happen, first of all, you have to say whether or not you think the bear is a realistic take on the show, if you've seen it. But secondly, when something does happen, like if a supplier fails to deliver or if, you know, you expect to get, I don't know, a load of spinach one week and it shows up and it's terribly wilted and you can't use it. What happens? How do you respond to those kind of issues? Generally, I mean, I let the team deal with most of it, but we have a... It's an honest answer. But with the caveat that when I step in or Osh steps in or Charlie steps in, you know, it's pretty serious.

1:04:41And if it's repeated, there's always going to be mistakes. It's how we rectify those and make sure that it doesn't happen again or we minimalize that. But I always keep an eye on the messages that go in between all the top chefs. We've got a group called the Top Dogs in the kitchen. And you step in when you need to step in. And if I only need to phone the fish supplier or whatever, you know, it's a serious conversation. But it's not I don't blast them down the phone. It's just like, hey, look, what is going on? And there's often, you know, there's two sides to everything. And, you know, it's just the way it is.

1:05:16In terms of the bell, I've not really got past episode two. Really? That probably says something. Did you hit too close to home? No, I don't know. I think there's one of these things. I mean, it would be like these guys watching a trading film, you know. Yeah. Or a racing driver watching a Formula One film. It's never going to be 100 % as it is. But, I mean, you've got to make something that people are going to be interested in and watch. And that's going to be sensationalized and it's going to be dramatic. But restaurants are hard. Pubs are hard. You know, we're in a hard business. Do you yell as much as the chefs on the bear?

1:05:50I don't yell, to be honest. It's much better to be silent and, you know. Oh, that's more intimidating. Considered and, you know. Have the gravitas. But I try and do things a different way, encourage people to, you know, you get young chefs that are a little bit afraid when you're around and I can't compute why. I just want to make them, you know, happy and do a great job, which is what we're all about. All right. I totally believe you that it's, no, I totally believe you that, you know, you want the menu, that you want to be accessible to rich and poor and that you want fair relationships or fair agreements, all this stuff you want to be accessible.

1:06:28It's part of the ethos of the pubs in general, et cetera. Okay. All that being said, at some, there have to be times where, okay, your prices, your suppliers' prices go up. So you have to raise menu prices, right? How do you decide when to make that decision? This is the question that people from the Bank of England might be listening because they're trying to understand about how much inflation pricing power retail establishments have. How do you think about when to make that decision? It's like, you know what, we're going to have to adjust to higher prices. We've only done it once on a few things since we opened.

1:07:03Wow. Yeah. We operate slightly. We're not a massive group. We're not run by the accounts department. we're run by giving people the best time. What do we think that's acceptable to pass on in it? And it won't be at the rate of inflation. Some things haven't changed. But it's, you know, can we put 50 pence on a side order? You know, it's 10%, but it's 10 % over two and a half years. And that probably won't change this year either. How do we become more clever with our purchasing? Do we need to look at it? How can we be more efficient in production? How can we waste less? You know, these are all things.

1:07:38How can we look at labour in a slightly different way? You know, if we make this small change and someone comes, we have two people in at six o 'clock instead of one at five and one at seven. Is that more productive when it comes to making bread, for example? So it's really not run on that economic side. It's more about what are we comfortable charging for that? And we never want to be thought of as expensive or, you know, exclusive or excluding people from coming in. Hmm. That's interesting. So some of the most important levers you have to offset higher costs don't have anything to do with actually raising menu prices.

1:08:14No. Huh. Talk to us about, I don't know if you like this label or not, but the rise of the gastropub in the UK, because it does feel like you have this sort of division now between pubs that are all liquid that don't sell food except for bags of like Walker crisps or something. and they're not doing very well. They're closing a lot. And then you have the successful pubs and all of them seem to serve food. Yeah. I mean, you know, there's a big range there. I mean, wet lead pubs are really popular. You know, our local is in Soho and it's really busy. It's a great place to go, but it's really kind of old fashioned in a way.

1:08:54I think the danger is when you have people driving the economics of menus, examples, purchasing departments are dictating to, you know, maybe small, mid, large groups that have, let's say, chefs that run the kitchen with some sort of autonomy. But actually, they're being told what to have. And actually, this comes from a central kitchen. And I do understand it. I'm lucky I don't live in that world. It would be very painful, I'd imagine, and probably not how a real chef would want to do it. And I think those things are very difficult because it's easy to cut quality, cut cost, put the price up.

1:09:34And none of that, that's a race to the bottom. But I think depending on who those people are and how your little microclimate of a business is, it's hard to fight against that when you're just a chef, when you've got a big group and you've got a board and returns, et cetera. So we're lucky we're not in that at the moment. And And we will never be, which is good. And that's the way we focus on why people want to come to us. And that's why we've got 650 people in for dinner, lunch and dinner today. They want to be there. It's the right price. And they have a great time. We make them feel good. Is there a difference between just sort of, you know, conceptually or menu design or anything between, you know, how you think about the business of a true local, where it's the same people day in and day out and it's their pub versus a place such as yours where yes of course you have regulars but also you're going to have people who are just only going to be there one time in their life yeah i mean the one surprising thing with the devonshire is i thought there wouldn't be this local thing you know because it's london it's busy you wouldn't see those locals there are so many locals that come you know as part of our inner circle but then also customers from all over the country, from Europe, even Australia, the first place they come when they come here every year, they come to Devonshire.

1:10:57So I consider them a local when they come, you know, when they can only come once or twice a year, they're in as well. And I think it's about a real eclectic bunch of cool people that just want to have a bit of escapism time, you know? Wait, how are the locals getting reservations consistently? Because when I told everyone, we were going to interview you. The first question they had was, oh, can he like get us into the Devonshire? Yeah, it's a bit of a tricky one, this. Well, the best way is to book online. We release tables every Thursday at 1030 in the morning. We release a whole week's worth in three weeks, but you need to be ready, card ready, et cetera, et cetera.

1:11:38If you can't do that, we do take about 100 walk-ins a day, which is quite a lot, you know? So if people are patient, they're polite to the team. They're happy to have a drink, wait 10, 15 minutes. We will take as many people as we possibly can. We hate saying no. So those that persist a little bit more than others, they do get in. We recorded earlier with your co-founder, Oyshan, and he told us to ask you this question. And I'm not sure he thought we were actually going to ask you it or if he meant for us to actually ask you it live on stage, but I'm going to give it a go. He said that we should ask you about gifts for the guys from Apple while you were at the Fat Duck.

1:12:18Oh yeah. Oh, that's a good one actually. Oh, Sheen loves all the, he loves all the stories, right? And I think that's a big part of what we do is about storytelling. I'll come back to that on the menu. Oh, what was it? I was in the office one day. I was in Bray. So we have this corner office, Fat Duck's over there, Hindshead's there, The Crown's down there. And we got a call in from Johnny Ives, PA, saying, listen, Johnny's just finishing his British holiday. He's going back on his private jet. We'll be able to buy some food from Dinner by Heston, which was my restaurant in London. The Heinz head, and we serve it on the plane on the way back.

1:12:56And we're like, yeah, why not? Let's do it. So I had about a week and a half. And I thought one of our famous dishes at dinner was is called a meat fruit, which is from the 1500s, when Victorians used to make meat and fish look like fruit so when you cut into it it's something else so we put a duck liver parfait inside a mandarin jelly and it even had the dimples on and everything the most incredible texture pate but of course it was an orange so i thought it'd be amazing if we could make an apple and so i went into the development kitchen i had one guy working with me on a day-to-day basis i said look we've got to make an apple in a week and a half and it's going to be served on this plane for Johnny Ive.

1:13:37This is going to be brilliant. But as you know, apple, as soon as you cut into it, it discolours the oxidises. So how do you make a really green apple that doesn't taste oxidised or look oxidised? Anyway, we made this thing look like a Granny Smith with even the air bubbles, like the little dots on it. And so I sent five oranges and one apple in the middle. And I thought, this is it. He's going to be on the phone going, this is bloody brilliant. You need to come out, see apple. Didn't hear a word. So I'll see him one day. I'll remind him. Maybe one day he'll come on. If he ever comes on our podcast, we'll bring that up.

1:14:16Back to that menu thing. When we were doing this, when you construct your menu and you lay out your stall of your restaurant and what you want to give people, it's really important to look at 10, 15 things that you really want to drive home. So there's a bakery downstairs, you know, For the bacon sandwich, which is on the bar menu, we make the bread, we make the bacon, we make the butter. That's a great little story. And it's not groundbreaking or anything, but most people aren't doing that. So it becomes real, there becomes this value in the storytelling that you're actually doing. It's no good making up fake things that you don't do because you will get caught.

1:14:56But it's about what are those stories. Yeah, I can't imagine there are many places making their own butter and making their own bacon. And you're talking about the designing of the apple and the oranges actually reminded me of a question I wanted to ask. In the pub context, how much creativity can you have in the food beyond which is like this isn't pub food anymore? Like is there, you know, there's so much tradition bound up in the concept of a pub. How far can you push? How do you think about like pushing what the edges of what is pub food? It's a real tricky one that because like for me, I grew up in Dorset and pub food was scampi and chips, fish and chips, sausage and mash.

1:15:37That's not what we do at the Devonshire, but we're in a completely different time. You know, food is always evolving, obviously. I think it's about simplicity. It's about quality, boldness with hidden things that make things taste good. So, for example, if you come to Devonshire and you order the lamb cutlets, for example, we hang the lamb 14 days. So you get really great flavor. The lamb comes from Cornwall, beautifully French trimmed. And then we take the fat from the bone and then we render that down. And then I don't know if it's an American thing or not, but it definitely is here. English, we have mint sauce with lamb, right?

1:16:17Oh, yeah. So we take the lamb fat and then we pick mint leaves. And then when the lamb fat is cool, we add the mint leaves in. So it's cold infused. You get all the sort of volatile aromas from the mint into the lamb fat. And we simply brush that on to the lamb just before serving, right? So you can imagine it's this fat, this lamb, this mint, this salt, and there's a bit of pepper. That's it. It just looks like a lamb chop. But the actual impact of that is so much greater than what you see and feel, you know? All right. Everyone go see this man for reservations at the Devonshire. Ask for Roisin.

1:16:52All right. Yeah. Ashley Palmer Watts, that was amazing. Thank you so much. Thanks very much.

1:17:09All right. That was our special two-part episode recorded in London, all about the Devonshire Pub. I'm Tracey Allaway. You can follow me at Tracey Allaway. And I'm Joe Weisenthal. you can follow me at The Stalwart. Follow our producers, Carmen Rodriguez at Carmen Armand, Dashiell Bennett at Dashbot, Kale Brooks at Kel Brooks, and Kevin Lozano at Kevin Lloyd Lozano. And for more OddLots content, go to Bloomberg.com slash OddLots. We have a daily newsletter and all of our episodes. And you can chat about all of these topics 24-7 in our Discord, discord.gg slash OddLots. And if you enjoy OddLots, if you like it when we talk to publicans, then please leave us a positive review on your favorite podcast platform.

1:17:49And remember, if you are a Bloomberg subscriber, you can listen to all of our episodes absolutely ad-free. All you need to do is find the Bloomberg channel on Apple Podcasts and follow the instructions there. Thanks for listening.

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