Des Gunewardena of D&D London
(Picture: Glenn Copus)The décor in Des Gunewardena’s most recent London restaurant opening is so fancy, even the plug sockets have a different shape to yours. They’re circular instead of rectangle. I presume it’s something to do with the lamps they’re using at Haugen in Stratford, because you can’t even see them hidden under discreet lids in the floor. It’s the kind of tiny detail that suggests Des’s former business partner, the late designer Sir Terence Conran, still has a touch of influence.
Think about it for a second: you want a specific kind of light in your restaurant but it has a weird plug. Instead of getting a different one, you change the wiring in the building. Why go through the trouble; or the cost? Who notices the lamps when they’re having dinner? The answer is: you would if they weren’t right. It has to be perfect.
They’re not much use when you need to plug in your dying laptop though.
I alert Des. Des tells his staff. And while he and I have a casual pre-recording chat, the problem is swiftly and silently solved. The computer is charging on the table again, but I haven’t done a single thing. Didn’t even see them do it. Even when it’s happening right in front of you, the problems are dealt with backstage in a D&D restaurant. Des himself has the air of a man to whom chaos doesn’t happen. But chaos has come for him and all the hospitality trade. It’s come for them hard.
“The pandemic has taught us the fragility of the business that we’re in,” he says. “Some people would say hospitality has been well financially supported. I would say compared with the other countries with which we trade, France and the US, we have not been as remotely well supported (in England) as we have been in those countries.”
We’re talking in January after a brutal Christmas period during which some reports estimate the hospitality trade as a whole lost 60% of normal business as people tried to avoid Omicron. That’s around £4 billion pounds wiped out through party cancellations and reservation no shows. Des says his restaurants in central London were operating half-full, but his staff were getting all their wages. D&D raided its own pockets to avoid the “ludicrous situation” of having to let workers go for two months, then ask them to come back.
He’s dismissive of the £6,000 grants the government’s made available to hospitality businesses to get them through the winter. He suggests they’re not enough for a company with more than 40 restaurants in three countries, which was hit for around £2.5 million pounds a month during the lockdowns. He thinks it might be useful to smaller firms, but when I ask if any budding restauranteurs should put their plans on hold, he pauses and says “if you’ve never opened a restaurant, I don’t think it’s a good time.”
Listen to him on the podcast and its sounds like saying those words hurts a man who himself was told he was “nuts” to open his first restaurant. Le Pont de la Tour welcomed diners through its doors near Tower Bridge in 1991, with the country still in recession. It was a venture with Sir Terence who had some experience in the trade following Bibendum and the Soup Kitchen, but was hardly a restauranteur. Des admits he “was just a finance guy” and doubters wondered “what do you guys know about restaurants?”
He quotes the owner of a nearby rival at the time who told them they were “totally, totally stupid,” and would “definitely go bust,” possibly taking his own place down with them as customers divided between the two, making both unable to fulfil their covers. “He was completely wrong,” laughs Des, still enjoying the memory more than 30 year’s later.
After Le Pont came Quaglino’s, a revival of the restaurant where the Queen became the first monarch to dine in a public establishment in 1956. Its 1993 re-opening under Conran Restaurants was an enormous success. Continuing the link with royalty, Princess Diana used to sneak in through its Bury Street kitchens. Customers stole ashtrays as souvenirs. More recently the likes of Kanye West, Gwyneth Paltrow and Angelina Jolie have savoured its dishes like slow cooked Gloucester Old Spot belly of pork.
The company only rose further, spreading out in London and venturing further afield. A business started because Terence Conran couldn’t find a decent French restaurant in the capital and opened in Paris. They moved into New York, in part because Des read a letter in a newspaper from a woman who had to get her own kitchen redecorated because someone said it “looked like a Conran restaurant.” “She was very upset,” he says with a smile. “I said to Terence, oh maybe there are too many of our restaurants (in London)”.
Des and his business partner David Loewi eventually bought out Sir Terence, who advised them to change the name as he wasn’t involved anymore. They picked one after “lots of chatter” in the office, taking the first letter from their first names. They didn’t realise someone in a completely different trade had laid claim to it.
“It took quite a few years where you Googled ‘D&D’ to get ourselves up there being as popular with Dungeons and Dragons,” he laughs. “And people did make some not complimentary comments about: ‘D&D? Sounds like you’re a bunch of plumbers...’. Other people thought we sound like a hairdressers.”
The good times gave the company the financial cushion it needed later when Covid-19 closed all their restaurants. But when they re-opened, they found a staffing shortage already known about in the hospitality industry was stifling their recovery: You can’t fill a restaurant if you don’t have the people to create and serve the meals. In London, though, there’s a particular problem:
“Without a doubt, London has got big challenges ahead,” he says, comparing the capital’s situation with Manchester and Leeds where D&D also operates. “People returned to the centre of those cities, and people returned to shopping and eating out. London? That did not happen.”
He thinks it’s a combination of factors from hybrid-working to fewer tourists. What he’s most worried about is the long-term implication. He worries there’s a lack of a plan for what to do next in the city.
“We have got to have a strategy to replace this lowering of demands from office workers, potentially from tourists, with other things,” he says saying those with an “interest in the city” should be investing in “more culture, more restaurants, more activities which bring people together.” He warns New York is having the same “existential” crisis, with Miami now pulling businesses away from that city.
He doesn’t go so far as to say somewhere like Manchester could poach London’s talent, but it’s an interesting scenario. I ask the man who did so much to inspire London’s now world class restaurant scene what the city would be like without them?
“Maybe you want to attract the banker, or the technology guy, who’s going to be building a great business in your city,” he says. “But that technology guy wants to live in a city that’s liveable! That’s got culture. That’s got coffee bars. People that can do your garden. All these things are an important part of life. Restaurants are an important part of life! And that is how your economy works.”
You can hear all of Des Gunewardena’s interview in our “An Invitation to Meet…” podcast, available in the player above or wherever you get your podcasts.
