It is more than a quarter of a century since Algerian-born restaurateur Mourad Mazouz set eyes on the then dilapidated Georgian Mayfair townhouse on Conduit Street that was to become one of London’s most talked-about — and Instagrammed — venues. Sketch is now an institution, one of only six London restaurants to hold the supreme honour in gastronomy, three Michelin stars, for the Lecture Room and Library, and home of the most famous toilets in the West End, the celebrated white egg-shaped space pods created by French designer Noé Duchaufour-Lawrance.
Sketch’s success and longevity is being celebrated by the publication of a £75 doorstopper of an eponymous book, which chronicles the ups and downs of an avant garde destination now known as much for its often changing art as its food.
But it would be an understatement to say Sketch got off to a rocky start; indeed the project so nearly ended in tears before it ever got up and running.
Mazouz, now 61, left Algeria for Paris when he was 15 and opened his first restaurant, Au Bascou, in the French capital when he was just 27. A move to London with his English girlfriend in 1994 led to the launch of celebrity-studded North African eatery Momo — described as the Chiltern Firehouse of the Nineties — in 1997.
A year later the charismatic and mercurial Mazouz started on the project that would become his crowning career achievement, alongside chef Pierre Gagnaire. The venue was originally saddled with the name Rubik’s Cube because Mazouz wanted to change the decor “every week” before he realised the financial and practical impossibilities and settled on the less frantic Sketch.
The job of restoring the Grade II listed building — a former London atelier of Christian Dior — was an out-of-control money pit from the get-go.
“The work started in 1998 and it took four years,” he recalls. “I was an idiot, I didn’t do anything properly. I forgot to ask for the licence to put the earth we were digging out on to the pavement. That cost us two months.
“After a year and a half in charge of the building I realised it was completely rotten from top to bottom and we would need to change everything. I remember standing here and seeing water pouring through every level of the building. It was terrible.
“My budget was for £3.5 million but it cost us £12.5 million. I had only just finished paying that off when Covid hit and I had to borrow a whole load more.”
Despite being the most expensive restaurant launch ever seen in London at the time, the business has once again generated enough cash to payoff its debts and is finally making respectable profits in what is still a tough market for the West End’s fine dining sector.
The last set of financial results filed at Companies House by parent company Sacred River show turnover rising by 12.5 per cent to £16.45 million last year, with pre-tax profits a healthy £775,000,up from £661,000. Mazouz puts a lot of the credit for the fact that they came through the early travails down to the appointment of the third member of the Sketch triumvirate, longstanding chief executive Sinead Mallozzi, after six months of floundering.“We were sinking, but she came to the rescue of the Titanic.”
But when the long-delayed opening finally arrived in 2002 with a glitzy magazine event, Mazouz walked into a storm of criticism and some of the worst reviews ever written about a London launch. The stinker of stinkers came from the keyboard of The Guardian’s Matthew Fort, who rated Sketch zero out of 20, mainly on the grounds that spending £143 “on food and drink” is “obscene”. In the light of prices now prevailing in the West End, that observation has perhaps not aged well.
“I had put my heart into it and suddenly there was a lot of criticism. Today I understand better, you don’t make people feel small, it was all very grand and suddenly people were saying, ‘What is this place?’ That wasn’t what I wanted to do.”
But soon the magic of word of mouth, in the pre-social media age, did the trick and the celebrities were queuing up, with the likes of Damien Hirst, Tracey Emin and Damon Albarn among the early regulars to its different spaces — the Parlour, the Gallery, the Glade, and the East Bar — as well as the flagship restaurant.
One diner recalls seeing burly secret service agents lining the stairs leading up to the Lecture Room. Bill Clinton was in town and taking his daughter Chelsea out for a quiet dinner.
Mazouz is a famously perfectionist boss who treats his restaurant like a painting that he can never get right. He told me how he spent two years working on the redesign of the cheese trolley for the Lecture Room before he was happy with it.
Every year the restaurant hosts an annual Art & Design exhibition, this year called Dreamscapes, including a remarkable “gravity chandelier” installation created by designer Paul Cocksedge in the downstairs Glade room; as well an installation celebrating the achievements of the Suffragette movement which has historical links with the building.
Although Sketch is now profitable and three Michelin star-garlanded, Mazouz, who lives in Marylebone, is gloomy about the prospects for the West End. He says it has lost much of the vitality that made London the most exciting major city in the world in the mid-Nineties.
He fears that the planned pedestrianisation of Oxford Street will only make things worse. “I hate it, it’s terrible, look what happened to Les Halles [fresh fruit and vegetable market] when they did it in Paris, it doesn’t work. Oxford Street is already just buses and taxis — so what is the problem? The traffic brings a bit of life and if you take it away you get more crime.”
But Sketch has been through far worse. It was filling up nicely when I was leaving at tea-time after our interview. Its shock value may have long gone — after more than 20 years it is now part of the West End’s dining establishment.
