You’ve got to be mad to set up a restaurant, says restaurateur Rowley Leigh
Restaurants thrive on disfunction and misery. Sensible, successful people, happily married and with 2.4 children, a cleaner twice a week and a foreign holiday at least twice a year, don’t go to restaurants. Apart from anything else, they can’t afford them, what with all three boys destined for Radley. There are no smart restaurants in Richmond or Hampstead exactly because the residents are too posh. Restaurants thrive on Tolstoy’s unhappy families, each being unhappy ‘in its own way’. They thrive on disfunction and divorce, acting as cover for the lack of a happy home. They thrive on diversity and dodgy dealing – the use of a restaurant is to persuade somebody to something they might not have agreed to without the help of a couple of margaritas and a rather good Oregon Pinot noir. The reason restaurants thrive on diversity is that they present themselves as neutral spaces whose only...
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