Onside | Page 9

ONSIDE / INTERVIEW Nicholas Lander, restaurant critic of the Financial Times and owner of the legendary L’Escargot has literally written the book on how to run a restaurant business. Michael Taylor met him with Craig Bancroft, a good friend of Seneca and a regular host to our Onside lunches and dinners and the co-owner of Northcote Manor and Ribble Valley Inns. Nick provides the ten ingredients – Craig offers his opinion on each one. 1. A good sense of humour. Some of the things you hear over the years require you to have a good sense of humour. My business partner and chef Nigel Haworth has had people telling him that duck we’d shot ourselves was tinned. We’ve had a customer, in the middle of a power cut, complain that a steak was overcooked. We’ve also had all kinds of incidents leading to stories I couldn’t possible repeat that require you to smile and move on gracefully. apprenticeships running for 30 years and there are people all over the industry who still call me and say, come on Mr B, let’s have a drink after service. 2. A love of food, wine and one’s fellow man. 3. Have a nose for the right location. It really is essential to have all three. One of the thing’s I learned early on was to look and see if the customer’s eyes are locked on each other or are they looking around for your staff to serve them. I don’t think location, location, location is the case anymore. A good restaurant can actually change an area. We didn’t pick where we are at Northcote. We have made a few mistakes in the past, but on the whole it’s about creating something that can make a difference to a location, not the other way round. You have to love what you do. I grew up around food, we made our own jam, we skinned things, I started drinking wine when I was about 4 years old. We’re in the hospitality business, if everyone is having a great time then the food and the wine is easy. You have to like people, if you don’t then frankly you’ve chosen the wrong career path. You have to guide people on a beautiful journey and some people just need a little more help than others. When it comes to picking staff I always ask myself, would I take them home to meet my mother. I don’t go in for this shouting and bullying you have in some well-known restaurants. You have to break the chain – it was the same when I was at school, I was bullied and it was expected that we’d then pick on younger kids when we got older. But when I was made head of school I told the headmaster I’d put a stop to it. Same in my restaurants, I’ve had 4. Understand the financial arithmetic. Boy have we had some learning curves on this. We’ve just come through 23 months of building work and the advice I can share from that experience is the maths has been imperative. If you look after the hospitality, the front end, the pleasing of the customer, then the rest follows. But you really need to get yourself a good finance director. Not a bean counter, but someone who can really see into your business and help to leverage it properly, to look very closely at non-customer facing costs. We’ve also treated our builders well and made sure they wanted to do the job for us and not make another job a priority because they didn’t want to come on site. We sat 9