Labombe by Trivet and Gracious Hospitality’s Cote 

0:11Hello and welcome to The Entrepreneurs on Monocle Radio, the show all about inspiring people, innovative companies and fresh ideas in global business. On today's programme, we celebrate excellence in hospitality with Michelin-starred restaurants on both sides of the Atlantic. First, we're pulling up a chair with the founders of a London institution to hear how they're expanding their horizons with a new restaurant. It took a lot of conversation to kind of draw that out of us, like what is it, what is our restaurant? And once we had that and then kind of then going to the more practical things of finding like where is it going to be and things like that.

0:47And later we'll cross the pond to hear from a restaurateur shaking up the traditional American steakhouse scene. People didn't know what to expect. You went to Korean barbecue because it was a casual and fun endover, not because it was refined endover or refined experience. This is The Entrepreneurs with me, Tom Edwards.

1:17You're listening to The Entrepreneurs. Johnny Lake and Isabel are the co-founders of the Two Michelin-starred Trivet, the acclaimed restaurant in the heart of London's Bermondsey. Their partnership began years ago at Heston Blumenthal's The Fat Duck, and today they're celebrating six years of Trivet while preparing to open an exciting new project in Mayfair. Johnny and Isabel are the best to be in the world. They've stopped by Midori House to reflect on their long-standing collaboration, the values that guide their work, and how they've redefined formality in fine dining. Johnny began by telling me about Trivet.

1:51This year we'll be celebrating our sixth anniversary of Trivet. But I think in a lot of ways, you know, the timing of when we opened, it's six years, but it doesn't feel like it because, you know, we opened in November 2019 and four and a half months later we were shut. So it was really weird, that whole trajectory. Issa and I met each other, we both worked at the Fat Duck, Heston Blumenthal's restaurant in Bray. We both started there in 2005, within two weeks of each other. I think maybe I started. Yeah, you started. A couple weeks before you or something. You know, that was a very intense and exciting period in the life of that restaurant.

2:36All of a sudden, like, all the world's attention was on this, like, really tiny restaurant. I mean, we, I think just kind of got along really well. We talk about it now as it was like an unspoken thing. I think it was, yeah, maybe meant to be. But I think for us, it was a lot of work just to figure out, okay, what is it? It's great. Let's try to have our own restaurant. What is our restaurant? And I think that took us quite a long time. A couple of years. Yeah. But I think we, plus we didn't really know what we were doing. So, like operationally. So there's the concept and then there's actually, you know, doing it.

3:14But, you know, we worked with some really good people and it took a lot of conversation to kind of draw that out of us. Like, what is it? What is our restaurant? And going to the more practical things of finding, like, where is it going to be and things like that. So, yeah, I mean, that took quite a long time. But, yeah, there's a huge element of being, you know, true to it, knowing that you don't know what you're doing. but just asking a lot of questions and trying to figure it out. We learned a lot through that experience. And maybe we would do things differently another time. But it was really valuable that time, for sure.

3:50It's amazing how many entrepreneurial folk we talk to here at Monocle on this program, sort of if they were to describe a superpower that is a facilitator, it's naivety. And they're like, oh my God, if I'd known, I never would have. Or actually it was liberating because I just didn't take no for an answer. I was just like, well, why can't we do it this way? How scary did it get, though? Did you have regrets or did you always have this confidence, a conviction? We'd said even with the pandemic comes this absolutely unprecedented thing. You still were happy you were on? I think it was more than being scared.

4:21I'm talking about myself. It brought out the fighting spirit in me. I used to think, no, I'm not going to let this one ruin it. And you just then do what you need to do. If it means you get up in the morning, go there and just toil, just do whatever, you do that. It's easy to say, yeah, this is happening. And I respect people who did that. They are saying, this is happening, let's give it up, fine, okay. For me personally, it was not going to happen. It's one way or the other, we were going to find a way to make it. And that was the mindset. And if you start with that mindset, whatever comes, you fight it off foolishly or just determinedly, whatever you call it.

5:09But sometimes you just ignore everything else and that becomes the focus. Well, you make it sound easy, but it is tough. But there's a real kind of steel, like there's a glint in your eye that you want to be messed with. Presumably, then we sort of ride out the pandemic. You stick to your vision. great response to the restaurant, I guess, from your local community and then more and more wide and the recognition flows and so forth over the next couple of years. What's the conversation, the pressure maybe from outside also, from friends or other sort of partners in crime and so forth to say, well, what's next, where next, bigger, bigger, more, more?

5:46Is that something, again, Johnny, that you have to be, you have to stick to your foundational principles, you have to shut out that white noise a bit? How do you navigate that? Because presumably, once it starts going great guns, there's all kinds of people knocking on the door saying, how about, how about? What was that process like? I think when the opportunities come, it's good to explore them. But yeah, within what you do, you know, and I think that's what was really important to us. Because for a long time, there weren't any opportunities, right? You need to kind of, you know, not take that for granted.

6:20that when there is interest, you've got to try to at least figure out if it's a good fit for you or not. But I think right from the beginning, we had ideas beyond just the one restaurant. Trivet is a very personal project. There's a lot of us in that. We could never do another one of those. And I think we knew that from the beginning. So coming off of that, there's other elements within that that we can explore. And I think over the years we've explored a few different ones of varying size, different projects. And, you know, they just didn't come to fruition for different reasons. And some were from like our point of view where it was like, OK, that's it's not going to be it.

7:04Right. And then others were, you know, the other way. But I think, you know, this opportunity we have now to open a new restaurant is it's actually worked and it's good for us and it's what we wanted to do. So we're excited about that. Well, let's talk a bit about that. Thank you for following my road signs there. Talk to me a little bit about La Bomme because it's funny. I think it's a really good expression of the values that we've kind of been alluding to already. And yet it is different. So it shows your appetite for innovation and change. It seems to adhere to a lot of these values. But you guys should do the telling.

7:39Tell me about what La Bomme is all about. It was, I think, around probably 12 or 13 years old, growing up in Canada, in French class. I, as like French language class, a project was to, you know, write a menu for a restaurant. I mean, I think just to understand like restaurant French and things like that. I don't really remember doing it, but I, you know, very like lucky, I guess, I found this project in my parents' basement a couple of years ago. No, maybe two and a half years ago. I'd gone there to move them from one house to another. And I didn't keep this thing. So I don't know. But anyway, found it.

8:24And yeah, I called my restaurant, Restaurant La Balm. And you were at what, like 12, 13? Yeah, I think about 13, yeah. And I was like, what is this? And there's a menu inside and a description. Is it any good? I mean, keep in mind, I've found, I obviously found these dish titles in books somewhere at the time. But when I actually look up what those dishes are now, like some of them are like dead simple bistro food. Others are like these crazy dishes that would have been served at, you know, like royal multiple day preparation type things. Prepare your swan this way. Yeah, so just in name. But I guess it fit and looked good.

9:06but, you know, and it was fantastic. There was very little other than that. There's, you know, prices and things like that, and it's all in, like, French francs and things like that. The one, this thing was just beautifully preserved, you know, and there's a Post-it note on it with handwriting in red pen from the teacher, and the only comments are, are où sont les boissons? So, like, as part of the project was, like, to, you know, basically, you know, my restaurant was only food. It listed no drinks. And it was so perfect because, you know, there you go. Like, you know, 35 years later or whatever, I've got the guy who can answer that question and, you know, put together the missing pieces of this project.

10:00You need to write back to that, track down that teacher. whomever he or she may be no idea and say he see here we go that's a great origin story i absolutely love that uh and he said tell me then obviously yeah here are the drinks but he he brought this folder back to london and then one day he brought it in front of me at the restaurant and as soon as i saw it i said that's it that's what we are gonna call the next one at the time we were also looking to do one more day at Trivet because we were shut for two full days at the time and but it wasn't possible to be honest for us to open another full day as a Trivet.

10:41We had to think about what we can do to make this work with less people less sort of work because Because to open one more day, it really puts a lot of pressure on the people who work there and everything. And then we always enjoyed sort of wine bars, sort of wine focus restaurants and things like that. Then we thought, okay, let's do Labom on Monday evenings at Truett with a simpler menu, which turned out to be quite complicated as we went along. And then we would always select a few wines to highlight but the whole list would be available and things like that. So that's how it basically started and from Monday evenings we are coming to the Como Metropolitan at Mayfair now.

11:42And did we think about it? It did cross our mind, I think, that one day this might have to be housed in its own shell, if you like, somewhere else. And here we are talking about it. And yes, it will be very much a wine and food-focused place again in a good sort of relaxing setting. Informality will continue. So, yeah, looking forward to it. Let me just ask a bit about your kind of approach to wine. This is a bit of your personality, which is this interest in the chronology of the story from the kind of origins of wine. Lots of sommeliers or lots of winests aren't at all designed that way. Often that's not even a reference point.

12:27It's just about a geography or it's just about one particular focus point that the given sommelier may have. But that seems to be something that underscores your approach for a long time. I don't know if you'd agree with that, but this idea of this history, the richness of it, going right back to, and these other markets in Georgia or Armenia, or if it might be. Tell me a little bit about that chronology, why that's so interesting to you. You know, when I was at the Fattah, I had this good fortune of trying wines that people sort of worship every day, to the point that it was getting boring, or it wasn't getting boring, I was getting bored.

13:08The wines were the wines, So they are either you like them or you don't like them or you are excited by them or you aren't. So it was coming to a point I was losing that excitement towards those wines. And it kind of worried me a bit as well. Because here's a thing I really love, but I'm getting bored with it. And then I look at it and I go, wine world is so much bigger. And I'm just focusing my entire sort of working life to probably three, maybe four regions and reduce it further to maybe 20 producers. And that kind of made me think, how can I make this more exciting for me? So I wasn't thinking about the people who would come to a restaurant and eat.

14:00I was being very selfish and thinking about myself and keep that enjoyment go on. And it took me a good sort of eight, nine months, I think, to think about how I would lay out the concept of the wine list. Many people, when they do wine lists, it's not so much a concept thing. You just list your wines, what you have, prices, anything else you want to do with it, you do it. But I felt there needed to be something done to make it more interesting for me, but to also increase the communication between the guest who is dining and the staff who is working in the restaurant. And then being from Turkey, it's got a long history of viticulture, very long, one of the oldest in the world.

15:03And many years ago, I listened to Patrick McGowan, sort of molecular archaeologist from the U.S. And he was giving a lecture in Turkey about the origins of wine and fermented beverages. That talk was the inspiration. I thought maybe I could list my wine in this order. I did a chronology, emailed him, asking him basically to check if the chronology was out or to the point. He said, it's pretty good. Add maybe these two regions in here and there. And that was it. And what then became, turned out to be a very sort of engaging and interesting informative wine list without necessarily pretending to inform people.

16:00It really worked very well for us. And that kind of approach will continue in the next restaurant, although in a slightly different manner. I love that. I guess, look, it's a bit like great storytelling, whether it's on the page or in wine or on the plate. It's about not burying people with stuff, right, Johnny? It's about taking them by the hand a little bit and taking them on a journey, whether it's through time or through regions, you've got to retain that curiosity. And sometimes it's about re-engaging your own excitement. Did you recognize that feeling of a bit of like, not inertia, but sort of ennui almost with food?

16:40Do you sometimes have to take a step back and be like, I need to recharge my own enthusiasm and experiences so that I can keep freshness coming to the plate? Yeah, I think, you know, you get inspired by anything. You know, ideas can come from anywhere and I think you know not just like ourselves like when we're developing new dishes and for any menus you know we always do it together quite early on but the ideas can come from anyone in the team it can come from but you know we work on them together and that always ends up being you know beneficial in terms of the end dish but I think you you draw you know inspiration from experiences, like you're saying.

17:24But at the same time, weirdly, like what we found is that we don't look outside of what we're doing that much, as much as we probably should. Like, you know, see what everyone else is doing. We don't keep up with that as much. And I don't know, weirdly, it's worked for us over the years. And I think, you know, what we've ended up with is a style of food that's ours without really thinking about it. You just, as challenging as everything has been and as scary as it's been to kind of go out on our own like that and do something on our own, there's a real, like, beauty in it as well in terms of, you know, I'm going to do this today.

18:11You just do it. There's no checking, you know. You've got to be really confident to put it out there and be ready to listen to any feedback that comes back. However we've got here, that's what we've ended up with. Listen, the next step is so exciting. Very, very quickly because we're out of time. What are you most excited about? Give me a moment when you welcome the first guest in. I don't know, you set down a particular plate. Somebody asks you for a particular selection. Maybe it's a little bit more of an out there selection you've made. What's that moment like? Do you visualize that and be like, oh, that first, on that first service or whatever?

18:47What's that sense of anticipation like? What are you most excited about? I really enjoy the process of getting it from idea into a sort of solid reality in front of you. And once you open the doors and you see the reservations coming and you see people walking in, that very moment you open that door and the first few people are walking in. And even before that, for example, if you have an opening party or something like that, then you see all your sort of colleagues, friends coming to toss the glass with you. And I think that's a sort of an amazing moment of realisation that it has become a reality.

19:31So that creative process is very exciting for me. Fab. And Johnny, what about you? When will you be like, yep, we're here? Is it after the first service? How does it work exactly? I know you've got, obviously, you are a team with whom you work. You'll be doing stuff day to day. But do you give yourself that moment of like, okay, a little pat on the back? I think we will this time. I think maybe look around a bit more. I think more than the first service, I think it'll be inviting people in that we've worked with before, friends, colleagues, to kind of just show them what we're going to do. I think that at that moment when you're really in it, maybe wearing a different uniform and kind of like showing people everything that you've kind of done, I think that'll be the moment.

20:23And that's pretty soon, actually. So I'm super excited for that. That was Johnny Lake and Isabel, the co-founders of La Bombe by Trivet, which officially opens its doors on the 16th of September. You can find out more by heading to labome.co.uk.

20:49You're listening to The Entrepreneurs, where we continue our celebration of restaurant excellence. Simon King is the founder and CEO of Gracious Hospitality. The Korean-American restaurateur sought to shake up the traditional American steakhouse when he opened Coat in 2017. The New York Original Plus outposts in Miami and Singapore are the first and only Korean steakhouses to earn a Michelin star. Along the way, Simon's challenged much of the conventional wisdom about Asian cuisine. Monocle's Gregory Scruggs caught up with this modern-day meat maestro and began by asking Simon what he loves about steakhouses.

21:27So American Steakhouse, I love it. It's a real place of decadence, you know. They double down. What it is is you get USDA prime beef, which is top 5 % of American beef cattle, which is really – and it's solely graded based on the amount of marbling. So it's really well-marbled rich meat. And then they double down with cream of spinach, which is rich, and mashed potato, which is rich. So what you have is a true fat cat experience, if you will. A Korean steakhouse is a little different. You know, we procure the best beef. You know, we got USDA prime beef. We dry-age in our house, and we get American beef, American Wagyu, which is crossbred between Japanese Wagyu and American Black Angus, which is also rich.

22:13And then we also get Japanese A5 Wagyu directly shipped from Japan as well. So we get this really well-marbled beef, and we serve that with leaf. So it's beef and leaf experience. So it's pickled vegetables that's cold, that's refreshing, that's crunchy. So it's almost like the umyang, which is a Korean word for yin and the yang, right? So you get something really decadent, pair that with something that is really refreshing and light. And what you have is a pretty well-balanced dinner. How was this concept first received, especially given a reputation in Western culture for Asian food as a more economical sort of cheap eats type of option?

22:57Yeah, when we first opened, people didn't know what to expect. And it was a fancy setting with a big wine list. So people were confused. But people caught on pretty quickly. And what's really ironic is people who didn't catch on quickly were Koreans. Korean-Americans had a lot stronger perceived notion what Korean barbecue restaurants should be. And they wanted something very specific. Whereas the New Yorkers, they were like, oh, wow, this is cool. And I think they really accepted it. When we first opened Kod, Asian food had a preconceived notion. There were no really fancy Korean barbecue available, right?

23:35You went to Korean barbecue because it was a casual and fun endover, not because it was refined endover or refined experience. So in the beginning, people didn't know what to expect, but ultimately they caught on very quickly. So the New Yorkers, they're open to fusion, to new ideas. maybe the Korean, Korean-Americans are a little bit confused. You take the concept global. You open a kot in Singapore, a global city, obviously in Asia and exposed to Asian flavors. How is this concept received on that side of the world? So going back to, going closer to Asia, we have thought that people would accept it even easier than in New York.

24:14I think in Asia, people also have a lot of preconceived notion of what Korean restaurant ought to be. And Western, like European fine dining. I think Japanese fine dining is also an exception. You know, that should be very expensive. But everything else, they have a conceived notion that it should be, they have a threshold of what they want to spend. So initially, it was a little confusing and a little shocking and a little new. But ultimately, once again, I think the common language of all humans are, you know, food. And slowly and surely, Singaporeans started to really love Code Korean Steakhouse Express.

24:51When you earned the Michelin star, was that a watershed moment for a certain kind of fine dining take on on Asian cuisine in at least certain food cities around the world? I mean, was that somehow a sign that you've transcended those perceptions around Asian food in Western cities as, again, a more economical option? Absolutely, Gregory. I think Michelin Guide is definitely the holy grail of our today's restaurant world, right? So in USA, there's five steakhouses with a Michelin star, and two of them is Goat New York and Goat Miami, right? So I feel like that was a giant triumph and gave steakhouse or Asian way of presenting the highest priced food item, which is, you know, the fine beef.

25:43They showed the potential. I think once our industry sees potential, there are many ways to get there, right? So I think it kind of showed what you can be, right? How our Asian food can be interpreted as or received as. And I think that I'm very proud that it opened a lot of possibilities. Korean fried chicken has taken the world by storm, and you have your own take on it. How do you approach the famous KFC? First, I named it Kokoda. C-O-Q in French means chicken. D-A-Q in Korean means chicken. So, Coco-Dak is, and then I put the Korean character for DAK in the middle of that O. So, it's chicken, chicken, chicken.

26:27But it also is a sound that chicken makes. Coco-Dak, Coco-Coco, you know. So, the mission of Coco-Dak was to create the cathedral of fried chicken. We wanted to elevate fried chicken. Fried chicken is one of the items, along with a hamburger and pizza, I think is the three trifecta of American food, if you will. So our mission was to really kind of take that, something that everybody loves, and evolve it and make a better version of it. And when I say better, it's better chicken. We found this farm in Pennsylvania that grows chicken in a regenerative agriculture way, pasture raised, no antibiotics, no hormones, certified humane.

27:09So it's a small farm. So we procure better chicken, and we made a batter that's naturally gluten-free. So it's a gluten-free batter. And we found this really unique oil called cultured oil. So it's a certified non-deforestation, a non-GMO sugarcane growing wild in Brazil. And they ferment it and they create this oil that doesn't have the negative qualities of a seed oil. And compared to seed oil, on average, it takes about 10 % only of the environmental footprint. So we use better oil. So together we create really amazing fried chicken experience. But it's not complete. The fried chicken experience is not complete unless you pair that with the largest champagne list in America.

27:56We have about 450 labels of champagnes. And, of course, you can't eat chicken nuggets without topping that with patrocinia and caviar. I'm just kidding. Chicken nuggets are great without, but that's one of our biggest sellers. So that's quite a juxtaposition of high and low, if you will, of food of the people and luxury goods, at least luxury food and drink. What do you derive out of pairing such extremes under the same restaurant roof on the same table? Yeah, Gregory, I think you hit the nail on the head. I think it's literally chicken nugget, I think, is the lowest of the browse of a food, right?