What do you do if you’re 73, don’t have enough on and just so happen to be routinely referred to as “one of the founding fathers of Modern British cooking”? Well, if you’re Rowley Leigh, the answer is self-evident: you open a new restaurant, of course.
Though in 2019 lightly involved as a culinary director of Sam’s Riverside, Leigh hasn’t opened a restaurant in London since he sold Bayswater’s Le Café Anglais in 2014. What prompted his return after almost a decade away?
“I was bored,” Leigh says, his public school drawl making it sound terribly obvious. “I went: I want a project.”
When your career takes in Joe Allen’s, cooking with the Roux Brothers and, more importantly than either, the 1987 opening of Kensington Place — which, along with the likes of The River Cafe and Marco Pierre White’s Harveys, is considered to have revolutionised London’s restaurant scene — it turns out finding a project isn’t very difficult at all.
And so, on September 13, Leigh will open Chez Rowley inside Notting Hill’s Laylow, offering an Italian-leaning bistro with room for 65 in the Golborne Road celeb-magnet (and former bordello). It will replace Adam Rawson’s present sharing-plates concept.
“I also,” Leigh says after a moment, “fancied the challenge of trying to create a restaurant in these very, very difficult times.”
Those challenges – of rising costs, rates and rents – are by now well documented. Staffing too, I wonder? “Staffing is difficult,” he says, “but one can usually overcome that sort of hurdle.”
Well, obviously; you’re Rowley Leigh. “Most of the young kids working now would have never heard of this old fossil,” he demurs, half-chuckling. Though Leigh made his name with modern British and later Parisian cooking, the Italian bent of the menu will be no surprise to those who read his weekly Financial Times column. The country has long influenced his cooking. “My food has slowly gravitated that way, if you like, perhaps as I spend most of my holidays in Italy. And Italian [food] is the lingua franca of modern times,” he explains.
The menu at Chez Rowley will be “very, very simple”, he adds. “Though it’s not about being rigidly ‘back to basics’ – I don’t believe in being ossified. I still think I have plenty of creative juices in me, I still cook very seasonally.”
Accordingly, dishes will centre on a handful of ingredients: the likes of tomatoes and stracciatella, cuttlefish and clams on toast, or seared mackerel with bread sauce and pickled gooseberries.
“I like it to be holiday food in terms of being simple and joyful,” Leigh says. The most joyful of all will apparently be chicken roasted with anchovies, black olives, garlic, onion, thyme and white wine, all be plated with hispi cabbage and pangrattato. Like much of the rest of the menu, it’s designed to shared among a group. It will likely be the highlight on Sundays, which is the only day the bistro opens for lunch; it offers a supper-only service otherwise.
Leigh suggests he’s had fun putting the restaurant together: “You have to feel creative and sparking; if one isn’t, I don’t think you belong in the kitchen.”
And, although it would be easy enough to lend only his name, face and ideas, the chef will be there cooking himself, visible at the open kitchen.He seems buoyant at the prospect, though perhaps this has something to do with the project being, initially at least, a brief residency (“we’re going to give it a run until Christmas and see what happens”). This lessens the boredom further, he explains. “I want to make it profitable, but I don’t want to do spreadsheets. And I have no appetite for running a business myself; I’ve done that, I’ve got the bruises to show it.”
Besides, it takes the edge off the entire thing. Leigh will focus on the food; Laylow’s team have taken care of the drinks menu (heavily into tequila and mezcal), and the looks (artwork includes pieces from Frank Auerbach and John Lennon). It sounds a straightforward partnership.
Leigh almost sounds sanguine. “I like them, and they like and respect me,” he says. “The whole thing is in the chemistry.”
