Onside Issue 3 - Summer 2015 - 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
Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Onside Issue 3 - Summer 2015
Contents
Onside Issue 3 - Summer 2015 - Cover1
Onside Issue 3 - Summer 2015 - Cover2
Onside Issue 3 - Summer 2015 - Contents
Onside Issue 3 - Summer 2015 - 4
Onside Issue 3 - Summer 2015 - 5
Onside Issue 3 - Summer 2015 - 6
Onside Issue 3 - Summer 2015 - 7
Onside Issue 3 - Summer 2015 - 8
Onside Issue 3 - Summer 2015 - 9
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Onside Issue 3 - Summer 2015 - Cover3
Onside Issue 3 - Summer 2015 - Cover4
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