The Wilderness - an origin story

There is never a right time to start a business.  There is no amount of planning that will fully equip you.  Regardless of how well laid, your plans will inevitably fall apart the moment you open the doors and the fuckery begins.  The best plan you can make is a plan to fail. 

The Wilderness story started something like this.  I was working as an Exec Chef for a small vegetarian chain, splitting my time between Manchester and Birmingham.  The working relationship with the owner had soured.  Partly, I think, due to the challenges he was dealing with in the business.  Partly, because I had become disillusioned with his way of doing things, which didn’t equip me to give as much as the role required.  I can look back with kindness now, but at the time I thought he was the thickest human I’d ever met.  I remember him explaining his business to me in terms of an aeroplane – when he started drawing me a plane in wax crayons I began to have serious doubts. (Some years later this pales in comparison to the array of sketchy thought and creative models my team have had to endure from me.  Funny little rhyming moment that.  Now who’s the idiot?)

I was working with a fella called Brian on the Birmingham site and we planned on the back of a fag packet – quite literally – an exit.  The business would be called Nomad – a nod to both of us feeling like we were always searching, never settled.  I would lead on the business, marketing, branding side, he would lead on the food.  We would meet somewhere in the middle and hope for the best.  My mate Chris had made quite a lot of cash selling curly fries at the Birmingham German Market (the only good thing to ever come out that cesspit) and he agreed to bung us some cash for a few plates, frying pans, etc.  Lo-fi in the extreme.

Nomad began as a pop-up.  We were anywhere that would have us, but primarily based out of a garden centre, or my mate Hannah’s coffee shops in town.   We didn’t have a fucking clue what we were doing, but the benefit of timing played in our favour.  This was the start of Birmingham’s food renaissance and, as something a bit different, we pulled a crowd. 

With continued interest in what we were doing – be that active engagement or simply bemusement – we finally secured a premises. I use the word premises loosely.  We took over a coffee shop space within an up-and-coming art gallery.  We also had a sex shop opposite.  Pay peanuts, get an absolutely-not-fit-for-purpose space next to a brothel.  As the saying goes. 

To paint the picture, this space had no extract, no kitchen and an MDF partition wall with the gallery. We begged, borrowed, and stole what we needed to fit a kitchen that was largely an artist’s impression of a kitchen versus anything that substantially did the job of a kitchen. Our dry store was in an old post office vault with a monolithic metal door that if it shut was surely going to entomb any chef caught the wrong side of it. We couldn’t get extract in, so we had a recirculation unit that really just pushed smoke-kissed air around the kitchen, rather than provide any relief from the smoke and stress of it all.

I wouldn’t recommend this approach to anyone, but to me, it was perfect. To many others, it was entirely inappropriate for fine-dining, sacrilegious even. My conviction then was that interesting is better than obvious, and interesting is all you have to work with when you’re broke as hell.

We registered as a food business and satisfied the authorities that it was a safe space – even if it wasn’t a pleasant one to work in.  Before I “fitted” this restaurant, everybody told me you needed £100k to do it.  We did it for £15k(ish).  I’ve never taken truths at face value, I still don’t. (I sit and look at the gadgetry of our kitchens now and I can’t help but wonder if the modern chef has over-evolved. I’d urge young creatives of any discipline to remember that.)

Then we opened the doors.  And it was at that point that the real trouble began…

Whilst all my failings (learnings, if we’re generous) would take a book to unpack, on our 8th anniversary, let me gift you with five of the biggest lessons learnt in those early days.

1.     Avoid innovating at any cost.

As touched upon, Brian and I were united by a general inertia with what we considered to be the status quo of how restaurants ran.  Our first year was punctuated by incredibly irrational and reactive decisions taken for the sake of not doing the norm. 

When I hired Loubie – who is, inexplicably, still part of the family – I thought a smart way to smash hierarchy was to hire her as “Master of the House”.  You know, like the song from Les Miserables.   To this day, Loubie has assured me she hasn’t got a fucking clue what we were talking about in her job interview, nor what her role was supposed to be. 

When we didn’t have any idea what to cook, we did a format called No Rules where guests turned up with no menu, no price, and paid what they wanted.  It was carnage.  On another occasion I hired a coach and hid snacks under the seat – lost a lot of money on that coach hire.  We once did an event called Who is Margot?  Brian told us he had a back story about a mysterious Mexican woman and her family’s cuisine.  Just before service it transpired that (a) the food wasn’t Mexican and (b) he was making up a different story every time anyone asked him. Even more worryingly, we then went on to do a menu called Sexy Cod.  How we ever found an audience is a fucking miracle. 

Creativity is a marathon not a sprint.  I am now a massive admirer of the late, great Virgil Abloh, who built an empire on changing the existing by 5%.  Innovation needs a blueprint.  Smart innovators build something familiar and then hack it to purpose.  Idealistic knobheads throw the baby out with the bathwater…

2.     Don’t think that cooking well will be the biggest hurdle.

As is reasonably well documented, our maiden name, Nomad, was short-lived.  Less than two weeks after opening, solicitors acting for a well-known restaurateur got in touch and advised us that the name had been trademarked in the UK.  To this day, I think it was one of the most ridiculous instances of corporate over-reaching – I assure you nobody mistook our 18-cover restaurant for anything other than what it was (at that point in time, as documented above, an absolute joke run by two clueless upstarts).  Instead of backing down, I spent a number of months pretending to be a Scottish legal advisor called Barry on several calls with their solicitors.  My time was up when they invited Barry to London, because, well, Barry was just me doing a silly voice.  We had to settle and change our name, which cost me £5k or so – a cost I couldn’t readily afford. 

The devil is in the detail in all areas of business.  I was just a cook, so maybe I wasn’t to know, but in hindsight I should never have got to a point where I had to create a fictional professional advisor in a last-ditch attempt to save myself from a rebrand.  

3.     Don’t court controversy, cultivate a voice.

Point number 2 was an expensive mistake, but also the making of my career.  It was the first whiff of controversy attached to the restaurant.  I remember speaking to Jay Rayner on the phone in a little coffee shop in Bristol – I was there to visit a ceramicist – and thinking that this shitshow had opened a door that I’d thought was firmly shut.  A review from Marina followed.  Controversy and conflict put us on the map.  Controversy works, I thought.

Regrettably, what followed was a public rampage from me against any negative guest review.  I was called pretentious – I replied in French.  I was criticised for the décor – I offered to dress up as a horse for money.  I became consumed with the quick laugh and, indeed, I know a great many people did enjoy watching the mischief unfold.  I love a bit of mischief.  The problem is that for everyone who finds you funny, you’re not funny to an equal number.  There are still many who see me as frivolous and vapid due to my early days shit-housing.  If you look me or the restaurant up online there’s a sizeable tranche of rag press amplifying my tomfoolery – it doesn’t reflect me well, and it’s stuck on the internet in perpetuity.

I’ve since learnt the value of controversy when there’s a good heart or cause behind it.  This sort of meaningful controversy is the exact opposite of that which I courted in my youth, which was borne out of  a chronic anxiety about who I was and whether I had anything to say that was worth listening to. The canonical evidence of chefs being controversial and then getting talked about in the press is surprisingly meaty, but as someone who has played that game, I would encourage the next upstart to learn quickly that there’s a time and place for your anger. 

4.     Stop keeping up appearances.

I used to spend far too much time looking outwards.  Perhaps the most frustrating thing about our lo-fi beginnings was being lumped into the same bracket as the established fine-dining establishments.  Both by guests and the industry – many of our early beloved haters were industry veterans threatened by this great pretender.  To me, fine dining is an unhelpful shorthand for any restaurant serving a tasting menu, at least in this city.  Simpsons have run for 20 years; I couldn’t afford more than 6 dessert spoons – we were not the same. Comparison has always been the scourge of what I have done; it’s rarely useful and a terrible barometer on creative and business choices.

There are many suppliers I took on in the early days that we couldn’t afford.  I did it to keep up appearances, because I didn’t want to look like the poor kid on the block – I absolutely was.  I made decisions based on what others did, not what worked for our business.  It made making money very hard and slowed our progress as a business.

All restaurants are different, and we became a much better example of a restaurant when we stopped using analogous thinking.  There is nothing wrong – and much right – with being aware of the contemporary landscape around you, but do not lose sight that the only question should be how it relates to what you do.  The first step to higher calibre choices is putting the blinkers up. 

5.     Don’t try to fit a square peg in a round hole.

I will be eternally grateful to Karen who runs the gallery that took us in – it gave us a start, and all stories need that.  I will also never get over how mental it was trying to jostle for creative autonomy in the space, and how long I let that go on. 

Every exhibition change brought more challenge.  The exhibition that relied on absolute silence led to a frustrating shouting match between one of my chefs and a gallery attendant – culminating in her calling Ollie an arsehole to an entire dining room of lunch guests.  The installation in the toilets of an audio art piece by my mate Gemma Marmelade (who, for the record, I adore) meant that our guests had a tasting menu accompanied by deep childhood trauma in the bathroom.  An open plan co-working space above the restaurant meant many dinner services were punctuated by “keep it down” from unseen artists working above us.  

The determination of youth to make it happen with what I had made me blind to the obvious limitations and stipulations to my creative vision.  I created the limitations that then led to me running an experience that I didn’t love.  As I am today, I would have never put my business in that venue or location – it wasn’t right, and the friction caused for the 18 months of trying to fight that was idiotic.  I’m fairly positive Karen hates me (who could blame her).

I threw so much money at the first venue to try and make it perfect for us, rather than confronting the reality.  If it ain’t rationally right, there is no amount of effort or denial that will change it.  The best decision we made with the restaurant – and for the benefit of all involved – was taking the pain of moving to the JQ.  Get better at recognising when your gut is telling you no.  Listen to it.  Don’t try and rationalise something post-event, it won’t work.

So, to Warstone Lane…

After all that fuckery, we were loved and hated, mostly for ants, a little bit for TripAdvisor.  We were rapidly outgrowing our makeshift little restaurant.  The art gallery was trying to grow too and having a busy restaurant next-door, open all hours, wasn’t exactly helping them. I also wanted to push our food in new directions that were increasingly difficult with just two induction hobs and a fryer.

I’d never moved a restaurant, got out of a lease, found another space.  None of it.  I had already relied on a dash of serendipity and the universe granting me a break in the clouds.  Fortunately, a space had just become available in the Jewellery Quarter – previously home to a cracking, but not-long-for-this-world restaurant called Two Cats. My angel Chris negotiated taking it over for £10k and we planned our exit from our first little restaurant.  Suffice to say, removing all that moss from the walls was significantly less fun than its application.  Some of our regulars came by and took handfuls of the stuff – as if a blood-sodden rag of Christ – most of it went in the bin along with all the progress we’d already made.

It struck me then how quickly a space can return to its quiet, dormant form – it struck me how temporary restaurants and businesses really were and how insignificant my own battles might be to the wider rhythm of life.  The universe kept turning, the art gallery took the space back and sold vegan sandwiches and carrot cake to visitors.  1 Dudley Street was no longer mine.  I’d have little occasion to see this curious part of the city again. The same drunk lost souls shouted abuse at passers-by under the bridge and men kept on nipping to the sex shop across the road on long lunch breaks from their crisp corporate offices, telling the same sad lies to their wives in restaurants that could afford starched linen and more than 6 dessert spoons. “I heard that ugly little restaurant that served ants has closed darling”. “Good riddance, I told you it wouldn’t last”.