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HUNGRY is THE podcast for Challenger FMCG & Hospitality Founders wanting to pour gasoline on growth.
We chat with the industry BIG HITTERS. We ooze out the HIDDEN success secrets they’ve never told before and dive deep into their gut-wrenching failures, so you avoid them.
We help you grow bigger, faster, stronger.
Over the last 6 years, we’ve chatted to some insane guests on the poddy:
Rory Sutherland, Seth Godin, Jamie Laing, Spencer
Matthews, Tom Kerridge, Sir John Hegarty,
The founders of SOHO House, TRIP, The Devonshire, Tony’s Chocolonely, Vita Coco
Look, I’ll be blunt,
HUNGRY is NOT your normal podcast.
HUNGRY is NOT scripted and sterile Q&A interviews.
HUNGRY is for pretty much no one.
HUNRGY is a deliciously fun, wild and crazy, ADHD rollercoaster of free flowing conversations.
got what it takes?
Buckle up. Strap in.
get ready to… FEED YOUR HUNGER
00:00:00:00 - 00:00:02:19
Intro
00:01:09:09 - 00:01:13:04
Jeremy King
...That is the excitement of it, is learning and
00:01:13:04 - 00:01:16:15
Jeremy King
one of the worst things which happens within the restaurants.
00:01:16:15 - 00:01:42:17
Jeremy King
And I always warn senior people they come is that we I have guardians who've worked for me for years know how I want it done and very good at applying, but they can't see the change. And so I will. I will tell a new member of staff when somebody says, when you put up a suggestion and somebody says to, you know, we don't do that, you might say, why?
00:01:42:19 - 00:02:13:13
Jeremy King
And if they say, oh, Jeremy doesn't want that or Jeremy doesn't like that, that's when you come and talk to me. Wow. Because the well though I like discipline and and all those things, I remember there was a wonderful the wonderful guy who became manager of the Ivy after we left and he was gone. He was getting more and more upset because the changes which were being made and he came, he said to me, I find him.
00:02:13:13 - 00:02:37:07
Jeremy King
And I said, look, I hear you're really, really getting upset and annoyed. And you're saying things like, If Jeremy could see this now, he'd turn in his grave. And by the way, I'm still alive. And I said, yeah, this is going to end in tears. And you let me help you. And so I said, tell me of the sort of things which are upsetting you.
00:02:37:09 - 00:03:00:13
Jeremy King
And and he gave me, as it happens, five examples is it isn't that terrible? Isn't it awful? Can you imagine? I mean, you'd never have done that. I said, well, let's look at it now. These five, I think. Yes. Decision one and decision five. No, it's wrong. Decisions two and three.
00:03:00:16 - 00:03:03:08
Dan Pope
What were they specifically? Can't remember.
00:03:03:10 - 00:03:37:00
Jeremy King
They were in innovations and change and people are scared of change. And I quote in the book and I quote the stuff ad nauseum, is the Prince crazy quote in his novel The Leopard, when a retainer is is, complaining to the prince that everything is changing. Initially, it's going from a, through to become a federal, having been a very much a authoritarian set up.
00:03:37:00 - 00:03:47:03
Jeremy King
And why is it have to change? Why can't it stay the same? And ten crazy answers with in order for things to remain the same, everything has to change.
00:03:47:05 - 00:03:47:18
Dan Pope
That is.
00:03:47:24 - 00:04:11:01
Jeremy King
Yeah. And you don't change the ethos, you don't change all those things. And and I said, look to the skies and look two and three. I'm I'm going to adopt. They're actually really good ideas. New shot as it. And for I'm going to think about that may be clever. And he was incredulous I said if you unless you change, you fail.
00:04:11:03 - 00:04:33:08
Dan Pope
It's so this is the one quote from the whole book was I've written, made countless notes, read it a couple of times. Is that quote because I'm hopeless with change, and I and I like change in terms of reinvention, in terms of work and stuff. But in terms of like relationships, I'll just cling on to stuff in the past, not very good at like cutting things off and just don't it.
00:04:33:09 - 00:04:39:24
Dan Pope
It's a kind of I'm very similar as you in the sense I'm quite naturally quite shy and don't like to don't like change, basically.
00:04:40:02 - 00:04:41:05
Jeremy King
And most people don't.
00:04:41:05 - 00:04:52:21
Dan Pope
And so what would you say is the most surprising change you've been through, and how did it sort of change you and and will transform you in surprising ways? Would you say,
00:04:52:23 - 00:05:15:13
Jeremy King
There have been an awful lot of changes in technologies? Is is the big thing? I think I quote in the book is when I had a group of eight managers in the previous group, and I wanted to bring in a new tech innovation, and the I said, I'd like to hear your thoughts and I think there was eight people.
00:05:15:15 - 00:05:46:05
Jeremy King
Anyway, everybody in the group disagreed with me and said, no, we didn't need it or any and all those sort of things. And I had them out and I thanked them and I said, that's, that's great. I'm going to go ahead. And I'm one of them. I'm very happy to say, because it's not an authoritarian setup. I said, they said, why, if we all think you're wrong, would you go against it?
00:05:46:07 - 00:06:21:16
Jeremy King
I said, well, first of all, it's not a democracy. It's a benign dictatorship. And you have to understand it's an the if I listen to you and I had done in the past or in groups like you, I let's, let's go back to the early 80s when other managers said we didn't need computers and then didn't need voicemail, didn't need email, didn't need point of sale systems, all that because they're all scary.
00:06:21:20 - 00:06:48:01
Jeremy King
And it was all about change. We didn't need the job of a the job of a manager and a leader is to listen but lead if they feel very strongly that it should change. Otherwise we atrophy. I mean, how if you when I grew up in 60s, 70s, the biggest, biggest names in industry, particularly coming out of America, Kodak.
00:06:48:03 - 00:07:02:03
Jeremy King
Yeah. IBM, and any number or in China Tower Records or something like that. Who, you know, are you are you doing doing anything with Kodak yourself now?
00:07:02:03 - 00:07:04:05
Dan Pope
Not 9 or 9 or IBM.
00:07:04:05 - 00:07:05:11
Jeremy King
Have you got an IBM?
00:07:05:13 - 00:07:24:15
Dan Pope
What's because the other quote you have is maintaining, I think it's maintaining your standards as fast as of the bankruptcy. Yeah. That's beautiful. I think that kind of. So just kind of riffed on that. Please, Jeremy, like maintaining your standards. And maybe we can go into the Woolsey or the Ivy. Say your standards were higher in year three.
00:07:24:17 - 00:07:34:02
Dan Pope
What did you do to change it by year five to to actually maintain your standards or like or like to, to save you from bankruptcy?
00:07:34:07 - 00:07:47:16
Jeremy King
Well, in many ways it's the difference between, I'm a restaurateur and a restaurant owner and yeah, I mean, there are really clever restaurant owners if your figures are looking really good.
00:07:47:21 - 00:07:49:16
Dan Pope
So just to define what's difference, the.
00:07:49:16 - 00:07:55:04
Jeremy King
Difference for me as a restaurateur does it from the floor on a restaurant owner does it from a from the boardroom.
00:07:55:09 - 00:07:55:24
Dan Pope
Useful.
00:07:56:05 - 00:08:35:19
Jeremy King
And that that is the fundamental difference. The and when your figures I can go back to statistics performance etcetera are looking very good. Why would you want to change it? Brave people change. So somebody, like a golfer. There's been famous examples of golfers who top of their game winning, winning, major, major tournaments, then rebuild their swing because they'll get a it's the same fundament is that they will get overtaken by other people who and the rules.
00:08:35:20 - 00:08:55:15
Jeremy King
The the Wheel Zoo is a good example. When we'd won restaurant of the year for I don't know which publication, and we had the managers around the table, I said, so how are we going to win that next year? And the people would be me with me for a while. Keep quiet because they know they know what's coming.
00:08:55:17 - 00:09:19:11
Jeremy King
A new manager, very capable manager, said on this occasion by maintaining our standards. So thank you that, appreciate that. And you should know, that's the route to bankruptcy. And I said, but how can that be? We've just won with our standards. Restaurant of the year. Why? As long as we maintain that we can win it next year, it's a no.
00:09:19:11 - 00:09:32:13
Jeremy King
Because if your aspiration is purely is is purely to maintain the standards, they actually go down, you have to constantly check.
00:09:32:15 - 00:09:37:24
Dan Pope
So is there any specific examples of that when you have these standards and they began to drop or.
00:09:38:03 - 00:09:50:13
Jeremy King
Yes as any number. And also it complacency and arrogance is the enemy of, of of restaurateurs. I mean anybody in life is doing well. If you.
00:09:50:13 - 00:10:09:08
Jeremy King
What would be in microcosm in make a great Bloody Mary. And everybody thinks it's a wonderful Bloody Mary. Yep. And that same bartender continues to make these wonderful Bloody Mary's until somebody complained and said, this is terrible.
00:10:09:10 - 00:10:37:18
Jeremy King
And you look at it, I think I've been hearing so much recently that it's a great Bloody Mary. But we haven't had complaints. But then some these complain the reason being is because when he made his he or she made that wonderful Bloody Mary, they won the Tabasco each time they make it. If they put in 1% more Tabasco.
00:10:37:20 - 00:10:57:13
Jeremy King
Which for the first 1015 probably the out then with it within a fairly short time there's much too much Tabasco. Oh there's too little Tabasco or too. And now as far as their concerned they're making it to the same recipe in the same way they've done before. And they've been commended for it. So what do we have to do?
00:10:57:15 - 00:11:04:24
Jeremy King
I have to check that we're doing it correctly, and B ask ourselves, could it be better?
00:11:05:01 - 00:11:06:07
Dan Pope
Yes.
00:11:06:09 - 00:11:15:21
Jeremy King
The danger is, is that people often think that you make it better by by. Using gimmicks.
00:11:15:23 - 00:11:17:07
Dan Pope
Or gimmicks.
00:11:17:07 - 00:11:46:21
Jeremy King
Gimmicks in terms of presentation or whatever. Yeah. I have to ask yourself what the Bloody Mary should. Shouldn't you know, should I introduce the rather bit of horseradish, maybe a little bit of mustard as well? Would that help? And try constantly trying to make it better. Better, better, better. And you see, it's in an all the judgment whereby a restaurant puts on a nice a salad and people say this, I really enjoy it.
00:11:47:01 - 00:12:15:14
Jeremy King
And of course they use tinned tuna and chefs that are not using tinned goods and they, they do it with fresh tuna which has been grilled. And so people aren't enjoying that because yes, it's a good dish, but it's not when, when that brain when you say salad this was the brain conjures up salad and swans, which has always been with tuna.
00:12:15:16 - 00:12:31:03
Jeremy King
Yeah. However, you can also say make your search for the best possible tuna to put in that side. And as far as rather than just going to fresh tuna, which is not the dish you want.
00:12:31:05 - 00:12:50:08
Dan Pope
Okay, so I love this quote. I think you told me it was like, good is the enemy of great. And as soon as you settle on good, you know, this is going good. Like you can get into this hubris and, and before you know and you see this, you see this in a myriad of different industries, you know, football like as soon as, as soon as the team Liverpool now like they were at the top.
00:12:50:08 - 00:13:12:06
Dan Pope
Now they're coming down like and it's that kind of it's the hubris. And I talk about this a lot on the podcast. But my favorite band of all time with The Beatles, because as soon as they got the one album, they ripped up the whole thing and started again. And I did that again and again and again. And it's like, if you start from that first kind of album versus I think not the what the Why album, they're just completely different things.
00:13:12:06 - 00:13:38:05
Dan Pope
Same soul, heart and soul, but completely different, which I love. The world's also just going back to the kind of, the divine stuff, the divinity. When you're in a restaurant setting, like there's a really good book by an FBI agent called What Everybody Is Thinking when you go up and like, go in, walked through the hum and the restaurant.
00:13:38:05 - 00:13:47:21
Dan Pope
How is it then that you pick up body language to gauge the temperature of of guests? As I think of your own experience, what are some of those specific things?
00:13:47:21 - 00:14:15:21
Jeremy King
Yeah, candles. And the fun of it is, I a recognizing that some somebody is uncomfortable. The first the first problem with restaurants is that if somebody is uncomfortable and unhappy, the restaurant gets defensive and so in the way of a review, watch restaurant staff when a review comes out, which is,
00:14:15:21 - 00:14:24:15
Jeremy King
criticizing, we go defensive and we say, I don't know what they said about that dish with the with the cream.
00:14:24:17 - 00:14:44:24
Jeremy King
So will anybody knows that was cream fresh. It wasn't cream or they, they try and put them down. The what I will say to them is that good reviews are just as inaccurate as bad reviews. But we but we choose not to choose not to notice.
00:14:45:01 - 00:14:45:16
Dan Pope
Yeah.
00:14:45:18 - 00:15:14:18
Jeremy King
And suppose we accept the compliment and we are in. We are in a country with, with a national traits. It's fair to say I was feel that if we did an analysis of the lexicon of the English language, you'd find far more words of negativity than you do. Positivity. So we're working with that, a great tool. It's easier to to be negative.
00:15:14:18 - 00:15:50:13
Jeremy King
And we are a country where and he was John Lanchester did a is a really interesting writer is no right like he he he's written books like The Debt to Pleasure. He's written about food. He's very, very obsessive and, but he's also done not novels and touched on immigration and so on and so forth. And he wrote a piece for The New Yorker magazine, which was Caught my imagination, where he said, talked about the difference between complaining and moaning and that the British, kind of a nation of owners.
00:15:50:13 - 00:15:51:01
Dan Pope
Yeah.
00:15:51:03 - 00:16:01:19
Jeremy King
And that and it is very salient from for me, because I believe that complaining is a positive thing, whereas moaning is entirely negative.
00:16:01:21 - 00:16:02:17
Dan Pope
Right.
00:16:02:19 - 00:16:20:08
Jeremy King
And it's, so and there's all these things within restaurants. I think I mentioned the book, The Story of a chef at a, at, the Ivy who, when, when the.
00:16:20:08 - 00:16:32:03
Jeremy King
Head waiter brought down a steak and and and this immediately the chef this particular chef is defensive and and, so what's the problem? And I said, well, they say it's inedible.
00:16:32:05 - 00:16:47:04
Jeremy King
And, so they. And what the chef will always do with the steak is they start prodding it to make sure that it's cooked the right way. And so and I happened to be there and, I said, he said.
00:16:47:04 - 00:17:01:03
Jeremy King
I don't understand. And I said, try it, cut a piece and try it. And so he cut a piece, put it in his mouth and started chewing and chewing and chewing and chewing and chewing and chewing.
00:17:01:05 - 00:17:10:16
Jeremy King
And eventually he he with quite a big swallow it. Well, I wouldn't say it was inedible.
00:17:10:18 - 00:17:10:22
Dan Pope
So.
00:17:11:01 - 00:17:35:08
Jeremy King
But is it right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I think that's the life lesson is that in, the, the statement may be inaccurate, that it's inedible. But is it. Right. And this is and this is where we go wrong. And you were saying about, good. And so I it's like, if things have gone wrong on a table.
00:17:35:10 - 00:17:51:10
Jeremy King
Yeah. What did you what did you do to, remedy it? I did this, and, I did that, and I said, do you think you've done enough? Yes. We'll go and do some more because enough is never enough. Wow.
00:17:51:12 - 00:18:18:10
Dan Pope
The I love the chapter. And I discussed this with Rodney Gill about the empathy. I think it's the empathy chapter when you talk about like a full four people coming into the restaurant and you almost describe the first scene is that I can't remember the exact word, but it's like having a bit of a barmy. They're angry, they come in the kind of the temperature of them is kind of like, and cantankerous and just, and you play that you of scenario and then you reverse it.
00:18:18:10 - 00:18:26:09
Dan Pope
Yeah. And I think it's just a wonderful way of demonstrating empathy. You're like, whoa, wait. Hang on. What is there one of them is having I don't know if one something you said.
00:18:26:11 - 00:19:11:17
Jeremy King
Of people arriving. Yeah, at a restaurant. One couple ahead of the others. They're always late. There's tension and so on, and they don't even want to be together. And the truth of the matter is. So somebody takes it out on the person on the desk because the table's not ready. So if they stop for a moment and say and thought about it, and it's where I step in to be the objective person and is that they want to go to a, a, a buzzy, prestigious restaurant on a Saturday night, the restaurant can't guarantee to have their table ready the moment they come through the door.
00:19:11:17 - 00:19:36:10
Jeremy King
The what makes the place busy is unfun, is that there is a bit of time, change. In fact, we can have a really busy night. And if we're anticipating everybody's going to be in and out in 2.25 hours, if everybody's out in an hour and 55, you got a dull restaurant. Strangely enough. And there's no. And and it it doesn't work.
00:19:36:12 - 00:20:06:21
Jeremy King
And I say to people that this is part of what the restaurant is, but we are a little bit selfish as society is that we we might understand why we have to wait for a table or why something happened to why me? Why me? I mean, and we don't we don't mind. I mean, there's the the I it's, a in microcosm out of that age old, dilemma question is that if you.
00:20:06:23 - 00:20:52:02
Jeremy King
If you were put in a position where you can push a button and kill somebody on the other side of the world and receive 1 million pounds for doing it, would you would you do it? And because it and a lot of selfish people would and and certainly in prevailing attitudes in America at the moment is, that, too many people only too readily the lack of empathy for people, the, the, the word which I miss and try and use and try and teach is, altruism, the notion of doing something for somebody else without anyone expected or anticipation or reward for doing it.
00:20:52:02 - 00:21:16:02
Jeremy King
So an act of generosity that in fact, altruism doesn't truly exist because there's so much pleasure to be, to be and derive from generosity. And we're not it's not. And I don't just mean generosity of things. I mean generosity of spirit, generosity of attitude. And so.
00:21:16:05 - 00:21:36:21
Dan Pope
Yeah, 100% so, so when, when it specifically when a table does come in, who is, how do you how do you transform them from that, that state of almost like fight or flight to kind of a peaceful relaxation state and maybe like specific examples of do you what you, what you would personally do.
00:21:37:00 - 00:22:13:09
Jeremy King
Well, I, I've spoken to to people over the years. I'm very lucky again that if you're a restaurateur and the way the staff behave and my staff know that they they have my support. So, unless they transgress. But and it's, it's it's very it's very rare that I call it. There's no. And I will say to people, somebody like the person who's shouting at the maitre Toto because the table's not ready, I will step in and say, we're not going to do this.
00:22:13:11 - 00:22:34:03
Jeremy King
And I said, what do you mean? I said, I'm denying the, the booking. No you can't. You're under contract. Said no, I have no obligation. I have no obligation. I haven't taken money off you or anything like that. I can't give you a good time. Is is the point. You need to have one to have a good time.
00:22:34:03 - 00:22:48:11
Jeremy King
And then we can work together. And, too often people are taking out on restaurant staff the their own problems and and the quite often you.
00:22:48:13 - 00:22:48:17
Dan Pope
Yeah.
00:22:48:17 - 00:22:51:15
Jeremy King
It is are you making your issues my problem.
00:22:51:17 - 00:22:52:02
Dan Pope
Yeah.
00:22:52:05 - 00:23:22:17
Jeremy King
Or I making even more. In fact, I say you are making your issues my problem. And I'm not going to allow you to do that to the staff, I won't I, because I have a pathological, dislike, almost hatred of bullies, that I will always, I always, confront it. And the great thing is, is that sometimes, I mean, when I do call it with, with the guests who say, no, I won't I won't have this, unless you change your attitude.
00:23:22:17 - 00:23:52:17
Jeremy King
We're not going to do it. And sometimes somebody will storm out and it happens very rarely. But over the years, it aggregates the or. It's not necessarily, but often it's the men who are tricky and then the, their partners wives, etcetera become moderators or it might be to men, to women what have become moderators saying, you know, I'm really overreacting.
00:23:52:19 - 00:24:05:22
Jeremy King
The trouble what happens in restaurants generally is if you have a confrontation with the with the customer and it's begrudgingly sorted out, then restaurants punish.
00:24:05:24 - 00:24:08:01
Dan Pope
And or restaurants punish.
00:24:08:03 - 00:24:34:23
Jeremy King
You used to happen so, so, so much more. But some of the grizzled old waiters in the 50s, 60s and 70s is that they will punish. So if somebody complains that the dish was cold or the plates were cold or something, they'll go and grill that plate so it's red hot and then put it on down on the table with the edge of the plate too far over the edge of the table.
00:24:34:23 - 00:25:00:11
Jeremy King
So automatically the person will push it away and then burn. Burn their fingers. The the number of people in the 70s and 80s who who used to go home from a restaurant where they'd been a bit difficult with, gravy down the back of the that the jacket or whatever. It's a terrible you can't have it, can't have that situation because it's a miserable existence to to live like that.
00:25:00:13 - 00:25:09:13
Jeremy King
So making the best of a situation, it is so, so much gratifying, more gratifying.
00:25:09:15 - 00:25:28:10
Dan Pope
What if someone comes in like not who is not like a egregious and aggressive, but is more, I don't know, like feels a bit, looks a bit sad or you can they're not coming in with this. They're not bringing their issues, making their issues your problem. But how would you transform that that experience? When they walk in, you sit them down like what is.
00:25:28:10 - 00:25:29:22
Dan Pope
And I've learned about that.
00:25:29:24 - 00:26:06:16
Jeremy King
Well, I think going back to our instinct and intuition, if if I work in the room, I'd like to think that I can pick up on, the problem? It's amazing. Amazing how many people go to restaurants either to fight or to avoid life. I so remember going to the Mirabel and, Monica pier, waste time and I went by myself because my wife and kids had got snowed in, and, I was due to go to the airport, so I diverted, went to my room and sat down.
00:26:06:18 - 00:26:08:14
Dan Pope
Where was that? Sorry, that was Maribel.
00:26:08:16 - 00:26:29:22
Jeremy King
It was very famous on Curzon Street. So is actually in the. We very nearly took it when they changed the building. That's another story. And it was a grandiose it was one of the old grand restaurants. And I was sitting there, in my least favorite table configuration, which is a row of twos of people sitting opposite.
00:26:30:03 - 00:26:35:10
Jeremy King
So you, you and sometimes you're close to the person to your right, left. And you are so excited.
00:26:35:12 - 00:26:38:17
Dan Pope
And so to not me and you and then another one, but.
00:26:38:19 - 00:26:44:07
Jeremy King
And very close to each other and it which works and funnily enough in Paris, but doesn't really.
00:26:44:07 - 00:26:46:03
Dan Pope
Work. Why would you say it works in Paris?
00:26:46:03 - 00:27:12:06
Jeremy King
No, it's the I think the people are more animated and in restaurants often and it's, it's weird that a Parisian, those Parisian brasseries and places like, the Imago cafe floor. So on a lot of the big brasseries, the tables are really close to each other, and somehow it does. People are used to it. I mean, culturally we get used to all sorts of different, different things.
00:27:12:08 - 00:27:42:10
Jeremy King
And I, I was sitting at a table and I had, a couple, an American couple to my left who wanted to talk to everybody but the other anyway, just fine. And they, they took up with the two guys on the other side of them. And I was trying not to listen because they started talking about restaurants. And I heard them talking about mine, and I'm trying to read and I'm perfectly happy.
00:27:42:10 - 00:28:07:01
Jeremy King
And there's an empty table next to me and, and filled by a couple, and I'm stealing myself to ignore their come, to not listen to their conversation so that I can just carry on reading with what was much more unsettled is that they weren't saying anything. And the silence from the table next, next to me, this is a it was a very, very good, life lesson.
00:28:07:02 - 00:28:07:15
Jeremy King
The.
00:28:07:15 - 00:28:35:05
Jeremy King
Just said nothing. And it went on for quite a while, I'm saying. And there's more. It was more distracting than them talking. And then the woman said, middle aged couple. And the woman said, why won't you talk to me? And the husband said, Because I've got nothing to say to you. And I'm saying, I'll say, I mean.
00:28:35:05 - 00:28:46:00
Jeremy King
And there's continued silence. Then they took that. The order was taken, which was a diversion, so they could talk to the the waiter taking the order, and they went back to silence.
00:28:46:02 - 00:29:16:05
Jeremy King
And it was unbearable. And why are they staying together? Why in this relationship? And then suddenly the man said, God, what does she look like? And there's a woman who, you know, coming by the old, old fashioned, saying was that that one could say that she was and he used it, a little bit later, which was mutton dressed as lamb.
00:29:16:07 - 00:29:43:06
Jeremy King
And it was a woman who was in a and then the wife looked and then they had common person purpose together, slagging off this other customer and being negative about people. And people take solace and refuge in negativity. And it's such a shame and is at that point I felt like getting involved and and challenging them. And that's, that's the risk taking.
00:29:43:06 - 00:30:00:21
Jeremy King
I yeah, might into this what why are you treating each other like this? What's the point of going to a restaurant if you're just going to be silent and stare at each or slag off the other? I mean, the temptation for me is because that.
00:30:01:01 - 00:30:18:19
Dan Pope
From as a, as a restaurateur, when you sort of see that from not like kind of being observed on the table next door, is there anything you can do to, would you try and get them to be more convivial and generous, or is it sometimes it's too far, but how would you do that? Was it bring them more drink like I don't know.
00:30:18:23 - 00:30:23:12
Dan Pope
Is there something you could specific tactics you can do I appreciate not this is ethereal but.
00:30:23:13 - 00:31:02:05
Jeremy King
Yeah I like the staff to to give as much love as possible. And the biggest is somebody there's no question, as far as I'm concerned, that we all need more love recognition. We need to be heard all these different things which humans depend on. So if we can offer that, so much the better. And, in fact, not long ago I was talking to to a group of managers and, about looking after people, and I said, if if we had a coat of arms.
00:31:02:07 - 00:31:20:03
Jeremy King
And you always have a Latin inscription on the coat of arms. I, I think I would want it to be a more a generosity to us, which is you, you can work you down, is based in Latin, is love and generosity. And I think we.
00:31:20:03 - 00:31:24:05
Dan Pope
All I thought I was more generous say that. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Interesting. Yeah.
00:31:24:07 - 00:31:45:15
Jeremy King
Or as, as in the French are more, In Italian, the more a l'amour is, the French is a is a. But I think we all need love and generosity. So if the restaurant goes some of the way I find it, and I think with those, those unhappy couple, sometimes it's not our business. You have to stay away.
00:31:45:15 - 00:31:50:07
Jeremy King
It depends slightly. I will say if it's somebody I know.
00:31:50:07 - 00:32:08:20
Jeremy King
Is, you know, very quiet tonight. Is there anything I. Anything I can do, annoy you, make you laugh. But yeah, I mean, it depends on. And sometimes that goes down like a little sort of thing can go down like a live balloon or can be, can be very effective.
00:32:08:20 - 00:32:38:21
Dan Pope
And I wanted to ask you about, like, Arlington and, so you're most of the black and chrome and white, almost like the sort of the poetry across the whole restaurant and the David Bailey pictures, which are like, arresting and kind of just, yeah, enchanting. But then you have the, those is like the, the, the almost like it looks like a globe of sort of red and pink, you know, the, the, the candle thing on the table,
00:32:38:23 - 00:32:40:14
Jeremy King
With the, with the flower in it.
00:32:40:14 - 00:32:46:11
Dan Pope
Yeah. What's the what's the why behind that in terms of creating the home. Because it's again, it made me really notice and I haven't.
00:32:46:11 - 00:33:09:15
Jeremy King
Read I think is definition. And in fact in the book, it was quite, it was quite useful because the photograph, which had been taken for the book cover and I, we looked at various options. It was good. And it's when I said if we colored the flower, it would just lift it or give it another, another dimension.
00:33:09:20 - 00:33:27:04
Jeremy King
I happen to like monochrome. I like black and white. And I particularly like that photograph, because above my shoulder in the photograph is two men. And that's, Mario and Franco, who were the revolutionary restaurateurs of the 60s, late 50s through the 60s.
00:33:27:06 - 00:33:28:11
Dan Pope
What do they do?
00:33:28:13 - 00:34:00:06
Jeremy King
Mary Franco? They opened they all worked with the various Italian restaurants which are there. And you've got to remember, in the 50s and 60s, Italian restaurants meant badly painted murals of the view from Capri or escape, or wherever it might be. And can to bottles in baskets and in, in basket weave and a particular type of restaurant.
00:34:00:07 - 00:34:31:23
Jeremy King
They changed it. I always think that they help democratize restaurants and they start they broke away and opened the first real Italian trattoria in Soho. And the Soho is full of Italian restaurants. But terrazzo was groundbreaking and it introduced, different crowds. You'd have royalty with EastEnders. The factor? I mean, the EastEnders might be David Bailey or Terence Donovan and people like that.
00:34:32:03 - 00:34:53:20
Jeremy King
The other photographers might be, Lord Litchfield, Queen's cousin and so on and so forth. And the for me, there were wonderful restaurants because they were egalitarian as long as you could get in and it didn't matter, because the whole thing about British restaurants is they were based on a on a class structure.
00:34:53:22 - 00:35:15:01
Dan Pope
I was going, that's one thing I was going to ask you is, so like I've been recently, I just was kind of like one of the class structure, really fascinates me in this country. Because when you speak to Americans, I, you know, Americans that doesn't really exist there. And it's almost and I was looking at it in terms of new York versus Paris versus London.
00:35:15:03 - 00:35:32:18
Dan Pope
And so in Paris, like off the wall, they sort of cigarets all the rich in the middle. And then on the outskirts they have the, less wealthy people. And then in New York there was, there was doing the thing. It's like they kind of goes up in the sense it is kind of, it's very slightly different.
00:35:32:18 - 00:35:53:07
Dan Pope
Whereas in London they were sort of saying that because it's, we decided not to segregate things. You have like, for example, you go through Chelsea, you'll have like estate blocks next to 2 million pound homes. And I think there's this, this melding of different status and, and classes is utterly fascinating. Like, how was that played out for you in restaurants?
00:35:53:07 - 00:35:55:20
Dan Pope
And why does that give British restaurants a uniqueness?
00:35:55:21 - 00:36:33:15
Jeremy King
Well, I think the best restaurants are are egalitarian and, piddling and always used to talk about. He liked brasseries and restaurants where the taxi driver could sit down with the Duchess. And it is it is really important, the living. But the interesting thing about you was saying about London and the, the difference between the estate and the the Georgian house as to remember that whilst that sort of played out that there would be barriers and then it's an American thing as well.
00:36:33:15 - 00:36:53:13
Jeremy King
When you talk about born on the Wrong Side of the tracks, and often that would be where people live was defined by the railway. And one side of the tracks you have the good House know on the other side you'd have, you'd have the bad housing. Yeah. In London that was shaken up somewhat because of the World War two two and all the bombing.
00:36:53:15 - 00:37:31:22
Jeremy King
And post World War two, you then of course had really important labor government. And so there's, and there's a lot of housing required and a lot of land which had been bombed out. So the councils and no money in the councils would, would acquire the land. So and so it went. It went from there. It does fascinate me and I it's one of the reason I have an egalitarian is because I went to a charity school in a school, and that would have people from the East and, sitting in classes with fallen aristocracy.
00:37:31:22 - 00:37:45:13
Jeremy King
And I really liked that. Yeah, we all wore the same uniform. So the only thing, which defined us was our personality and our brain and our, achievements, not, wealth.
00:37:45:15 - 00:37:50:17
Dan Pope
That's the who was a swimsuit. That was, and so I need to answer that.
00:37:50:19 - 00:37:54:14
Jeremy King
I'm just. No, I'm just going to check. Oh, no. I'm fine.
00:37:54:16 - 00:37:55:13
Dan Pope
Oh.
00:37:55:15 - 00:37:56:10
Jeremy King
You start again.
00:37:56:13 - 00:38:13:12
Dan Pope
That's all. Good. So, I've got an Irish friend, and he was saying the great thing about if you're Irish and you come to London is obviously there's very subtle nuances in the lexicon and the way they speak the dialect, but it's hard to know if someone's from like, North Island, sort of north Dublin or south Dublin.
00:38:13:12 - 00:38:35:06
Dan Pope
That is the divide. There is, I think, south traditionally richer. And he's like, you have an unfair advantage because there's no real estate. It was here. We've got the different accents, which I think is fascinating, but it, it all melds together in terms of like restaurants in New York versus restaurants in London. How would you say the, the the class?
00:38:35:07 - 00:38:45:19
Dan Pope
Because I'm obsessed. This idea of restaurants as microcosm of humanity. How would that play out, say, in like a New York brasserie versus a London browser? What's the similarities and differences?
00:38:45:19 - 00:38:55:12
Jeremy King
I don't think the class structure was so defined. And of course, for a lot of people, New York was important because.
00:38:55:14 - 00:39:48:20
Jeremy King
The class was a different sort of class, which is the class, of somebody behaving well, somebody whose aspirations were to be more articulate, more literary, dress better, all those different things. And, and there wasn't privilege before. Unfortunately, there's there has to be that element to that. It becomes about money. My sadness about New York and one way, and I celebrate in other ways is that there was a housing period in New York where all the money was on the Upper East Side and all the, all the creativity was that it was downtown and the and although that that's wrong in some ways it it actually rather worked and it became a cauldron for
00:39:48:22 - 00:40:18:01
Jeremy King
downtown for really great creativity and uptown people were becoming more snobbish and, in class structure. And then the Upper East Side, I always loved the Upper West Side because that was a much more egalitarian society in creative society. And you get restaurants like, the, cafe des artists and places like that, which had a different nature to them.
00:40:18:03 - 00:40:55:24
Jeremy King
The and then the Upper East Side started to move downtown because it was cool. And they saw those lofts, being developed and so on. And they thought, quite right is a bit boring here on the Upper East Side. They went downtown and none of that's wrong. And the only thing I didn't like was that the once the art is mixed with with the money, that you it was felt that unless you sold paintings for a lot of money, for instance, you couldn't be really very good.
00:40:56:01 - 00:41:16:09
Jeremy King
And, and I, I always bemoan that. Is that, yes, it inevitably is an indicator of somebody's talent, potentially if if they're selling for lots of money or Van Gogh might disagree because he hardly sold a painting, went his life and it was a mess.
00:41:16:09 - 00:41:18:10
Dan Pope
Yeah, yeah.
00:41:18:12 - 00:41:53:10
Jeremy King
The my lament is always when things are, quantified by money. I remember being told by somebody in the Ivy when I think it was James Cameron, the director. And this is, I think, pre Titanic. But he'd done some, some big films. They say he's the best. He's the best film director in the world. I don't really I mean clearly very, very capable.
00:41:53:10 - 00:41:57:10
Jeremy King
What makes him the best. And this, this was fairly early in his career.
00:41:57:10 - 00:42:14:00
Jeremy King
But what other criteria are there? He's he's got the biggest box office and, that's where we're different because I wouldn't judge that to be the best. And there's been this interesting thing about what makes the best and,
00:42:14:02 - 00:42:17:04
Dan Pope
Links to the score stuff. We're saying, you know, that, like measuring it.
00:42:17:04 - 00:42:51:10
Jeremy King
Yeah. How did how do you measure this? And, and I remember in the early days of, Charles Cameron when, as a critic, he was really, really mean about the Woolsey and his review and had a very good review from Adrian Gill and who said, one of the best things ever about critics in he said, before I commence this review, some of you would be right to point out that I've written books for Chris and Jeremy, and I'm a friend.
00:42:51:12 - 00:43:15:18
Jeremy King
So you might ask, can I truly write an objective review of the Woolsey? And so, I'll start by saying they know me well and, enough that should they not do their job properly, doesn't mean to say I shouldn't do my job properly, which I was a very, very Giles came in and slagged off the place, terribly.
00:43:15:23 - 00:43:49:14
Jeremy King
And although we did laugh out loud, one turn of phrase, because Giles, of course, is brilliant too. And he said it was the worst. It was the worst, castle I've ever eaten. And I've eaten Castle in Miami. And I thought that, well, that was that actually very, very clever and funny. And then the point of the story is that he then slight us off, because it was the first year of the San Pellegrino best restaurants in the world.
00:43:49:20 - 00:43:50:10
Dan Pope
Yeah.
00:43:50:12 - 00:44:11:12
Jeremy King
Which of course now got a lot of credence. But at the time, the Woolsey went into the top 50 and it hadn't been open that long. And Giles earthy, talking about the best restaurants in the world. But what is the best is the and the restaurant. Is that the best restaurant to have fun? Is that the best restaurant to eat?
00:44:11:12 - 00:44:34:12
Jeremy King
Well? Is it the best restaurant to do business? Is that the best restaurant? True to date night or is it define it and they hadn't defined it. Eventually they define their criteria and everybody's title I happened to. For me, the best restaurants are the, I mean, there's the famous quote is the your best restaurants, the restaurant you're known best.
00:44:34:14 - 00:45:00:10
Jeremy King
And then is the restaurants, which are countless, what any of us want. And I always, I always talk about fact. If I walked into a full restaurant and was able to track my hands and say, right, we're going to come around, do a survey and ask, why are you here this evening? Oh, I'm I'm here. I'm here with my wife.
00:45:00:12 - 00:45:23:08
Jeremy King
Yeah. Husband. I'm here for my family. I'm here to celebrate. I'm here to seduce. I'm here to divorce. I'm here to do all the different reasons we use restaurants. And the best restaurants are the ones which allow those things to happen. Because the elements are not too strong. If it's a really expensive restaurant, those things aren't all going to happen.
00:45:23:08 - 00:45:49:05
Jeremy King
You're not going to have an interview. You're not going to have an office reunion or whatever it might be. If the music's too loud, that that won't work. If the service is too fussy and intrusive, that that won't work if, I always think that the some of the most boring restaurants I've ever been to, restaurants with a great view.
00:45:49:07 - 00:45:51:11
Dan Pope
Because that's what it.
00:45:51:14 - 00:46:15:00
Jeremy King
Okay, so if you've got a fantastic view, first of all, everybody wants a table with the view. Yeah. So you've got two thirds of the room pissed off anyway because they didn't get the view. And there's a rather begrudging the people who got the view hardly say anything to each other and boring it not nothing happened. So this is the alchemy.
00:46:15:02 - 00:46:42:03
Jeremy King
What was the best? So if Giles is right to say, well, he shouldn't be in the best restaurant unless the criteria have been have been stipulated. And that is always the big argument because it is fair to say a lot of the best restaurant lists of some of these restaurants around the world, which I'm largely I've never been to and probably I'll never go to, I.
00:46:42:03 - 00:46:59:07
Dan Pope
Love I just that and I have that with this, with this podcast because there's there's the score again, this book that's just come out recently. But the philosophy is that it's more about playing your own game. So there's ways to to, you know, cut this off and make sure it like goes for the algorithm. But I'm like, I want to have a real conversation.
00:46:59:07 - 00:47:27:00
Dan Pope
And it may not do as well as others, but it's about what's right for you. And I love I love that, I love, so when you say, like all movement start in restaurants, I love to detail from sort of a more 70s, 80s, 90s, noughties that I feel like you were kind of at the epicenter of cultural movements or seeing how culture has changed, like how has it changed for you?
00:47:27:00 - 00:47:43:16
Dan Pope
So starting in sort of the 70s, 80s, because you must have seen all the different movements, whether it was, you know, like punk or, you know, like the rock and roll and, you know, Britpop and all those kind of things changing for a restaurant lens. Could you sort of detail some of that?
00:47:43:17 - 00:48:13:18
Jeremy King
Well, I take great pride in the fact that a lot of these different movements, which often were incredibly important people didn't have much money. And my assertion is always that the restaurants depend on talent. And they because often the most interesting people in a restaurant are the least affluent. And we need the affluent people because they might they might buy the champagne and so on.
00:48:13:18 - 00:48:38:20
Jeremy King
But often the really the people that the affluent come to see, all the creatives. And so my maxim is always we give people the opportunity to spend, but we don't make it mandatory, so that if you want to just come in and have a small pasta and a beer, fine chop that. And whereas a lot of restaurants hate, hate that.
00:48:38:22 - 00:49:08:22
Jeremy King
And so early 80s and, a Caprice, we were very sustained by, the artists, a lot of whom were academicians from the, from the Royal Academy, and they would come a lot and they'd what was interesting is because they'd seen shortly before the emergence of restaurants like Odeon in New York and so on, which was for them as a new star on the Odeon.
00:49:08:24 - 00:49:39:02
Jeremy King
Suddenly you've got, Andy Warhol and, Philip Glass and Laurie Anderson and people like that all going to the diner type restaurant. And that was fascinating because and they were breaking down the notion of what's a good restaurant for them. It was what's about so fun restaurant? We saw big, big, big changes there. And we we followed on in this country and the,
00:49:39:02 - 00:49:43:11
Jeremy King
story in terms of change is, very early 80s.
00:49:43:13 - 00:50:08:10
Jeremy King
Not long opened Caprice and I was taken out for dinner to, to a hotel. And I came back and talked to the head waiter about it. The next year, I went to this hotel and it was fascinating because we ordered, and once we'd ordered, we never got interrupted about the food. They knew where to put the cutlery, they knew where to put the dishes.
00:50:08:10 - 00:50:19:11
Jeremy King
And so how do they do that? And he said, well, that's straightforward. You, you number the seats and you always you always basically.
00:50:19:11 - 00:50:35:14
Jeremy King
Start the numbering. And it's, it's like the 10:00 effectively on, on a, on a clock dial and you number from there and then you, then you also put I forget what they were used in those days, a square around the number of the host.
00:50:35:14 - 00:51:01:10
Jeremy King
And then you put a circle around the female guests because kitchens meant to send in those days, female dishes before the male. And so I said, oh, yeah, that makes so much sense. That's great. Right. We'll do that to oh no no no no no no no no no no. We you wouldn't do that in a restaurant like this because we were a middle class restaurant.
00:51:01:10 - 00:51:32:00
Jeremy King
That was an upper class, right? I said, that's the whole point. We learned from the those people. I'm never, ever going to know my place. We we have to innovate and change. And so it was impossible. Anyway, you need twice the number of stars. No. It's not. Come on. You just have to get used to it. And one of the things people hate about change is that it it's often a retrograde, step in terms of quality of service or whatever it is.
00:51:32:00 - 00:51:42:18
Jeremy King
The golfer who is changing their golf swing will probably go back, go backwards for a bit. Before they, they get they get really good. And it's.
00:51:42:18 - 00:52:04:06
Jeremy King
When when you open a restaurant, the analogy I often use is it's like learning to drive a car because there's so much to remember and so many things. And whether you're in the way to station looking for car repairs and or all these different things, or when you're driving a car, okay, I've got to have the handbrake.
00:52:04:06 - 00:52:32:10
Jeremy King
I'll go look in the mirror. I've got to check my side mirror. I've got. And so it goes on all things which are really easy to mess up and take a long time initially and yet very quickly. We do it without even thinking. And that's what happened there. And so if, if you're very comfortable going in a to take that analogy further, you're in a car which is an automatic car, and you need an automatic and that's fine.
00:52:32:14 - 00:53:04:05
Jeremy King
And then put somebody into, a manual car, which is and is much, much better. Let's say it takes a, it takes a while. And it's all the myriad of reasons we don't like change. And I've talked before is when we went for the new E-Power systems remain codes, the one at the time where you could you could order a dish on a keypad.
00:53:04:07 - 00:53:22:24
Jeremy King
But there was no screen. And the keypad, you if you wanted a espresso, you typed in 101. And if you wanted to, you know, you wanted and and know a lot of the dishes would be full figure. And people were brilliant and they would they would know hundreds of of, dishes.
00:53:22:24 - 00:53:44:16
Jeremy King
And off by heart. And when I saw on the BBC one time that on the news that there was this amazing innovation that soon people would have screens which you could touch and go nowadays most, most people don't even remember what it was like, not on screen.
00:53:44:18 - 00:53:53:01
Jeremy King
You could hit the the screen and it would respond. And so I went through mankind so bright, we I, you know, I'll help you develop it. Let's do that for the restaurant.
00:53:53:01 - 00:54:06:24
Jeremy King
The reason we've gone to the other is that it's it was efficient. And also you could print originally on the keypad so you could print the bill very quickly, as opposed to manually adding up all the mistakes that would be entailed in that.
00:54:07:01 - 00:54:26:16
Jeremy King
But the staff didn't want it. They didn't want it because they were used to the keypad, even though it was going to make their life so much easier. And what I noticed every step of the way is that when I finally got them to have keypad, to to have more than keypads and have a screen, eventually, begrudgingly, you got to use to it, that's fine.
00:54:26:16 - 00:54:31:18
Jeremy King
And then the next innovation which came along. No, no no, no, we don't want to change. That's,
00:54:31:20 - 00:54:50:14
Dan Pope
Yeah. That's so yeah, it's this resistance to try and change in like, so, so like the big changes in sort of bigger culture, like music and stuff. I love this idea of not speaking to my friend. Andy owns a brand called dirty. Yes. He's like a mushroom, like this sort of functional mushroom brands, which are kind of over.
00:54:50:16 - 00:55:19:19
Dan Pope
He thinks. Attention. Now people want to reduce coffee. I mean, he's he's really good at sort of saying works that don't work with John Heinz yesterday, where the cultural tension is and when that tension happens, he believes the change happens. Yeah. Again, we went through everything today, loads of restaurants. What have been those big sort of cultural other than technology changes in maybe that you've seen in restaurants and spawned into arts or.
00:55:19:21 - 00:55:26:23
Jeremy King
I mean, in the arts as well? One of the great sad things is.
00:55:26:23 - 00:55:43:13
Jeremy King
it's safe for nowadays to pigeonhole. And whether you're making a film and you're here to film pictures on the basis that they will say, well, it's it's like a combination and I'll name three different films because that's, there's proof of concept also.
00:55:43:13 - 00:55:46:04
Dan Pope
Right? So instead of doing Pulp Fiction, they'll do Avengers four.
00:55:46:04 - 00:56:19:06
Jeremy King
Yeah, exactly. And then this is what we're seeing more and more. Yeah. And and that and that's the way it works with, the fine arts. If an artist, has achieved success with a particular style, if they try and change that style, it really unsettles people. They don't they don't know how it works. And you find people standing in the gallery and they wondering whether they should, which is a terrible word, whether they should like this or not.
00:56:19:06 - 00:56:48:09
Jeremy King
Is it is it good? And what that opens up, and it's very prevalent in the art world, is that if you a lot of people in the art world, scared of change, and, and if they get scared, then pronounce so they will look at a look at, say a photograph over there. They won't say, gosh, friend, you know, horse p horse changed his style with that photograph.
00:56:48:09 - 00:56:49:22
Jeremy King
And it's really interesting.
00:56:50:00 - 00:56:51:11
Dan Pope
Mostly horses just. Yeah. Yeah.
00:56:51:11 - 00:57:15:14
Jeremy King
Who did did the and it's really interesting and this sort of slightly surrealistic etc.. It's a, it's a move away from what he was doing before. I have to think about it. They don't do that. This society more will say that is a great photograph. And somebody else might be thinking, really? I don't think so. But you can't be wrong if you pronounce.
00:57:15:14 - 00:57:16:02
Jeremy King
And this is why.
00:57:16:02 - 00:57:17:14
Dan Pope
We when you say pronounce as in.
00:57:17:14 - 00:57:20:00
Jeremy King
Pronouncing, that is a great photograph.
00:57:20:00 - 00:57:22:07
Dan Pope
And so and that's a danger for art.
00:57:22:10 - 00:57:28:04
Jeremy King
That's a danger because you either say that's a great photograph or it's a photograph, right. Can't be wrong.
00:57:28:08 - 00:57:30:02
Dan Pope
It's okay. It's a story again.
00:57:30:02 - 00:57:35:14
Jeremy King
But yeah, and you can't be wrong because if you if you do that and somebody says, yeah, it's a.
00:57:35:14 - 00:57:38:24
Dan Pope
More nuanced way to approach stuff like that, would you say, well.
00:57:38:24 - 00:57:57:16
Jeremy King
It's because that and touching in the book is about authority to be able to do that. So the person has the authority. So that's great. Sure. And if anybody argues against them and says no, everybody thinks that's a terrible photograph, it's gone in the wrong direction.
00:57:57:16 - 00:57:58:13
Dan Pope
Yeah.
00:57:58:15 - 00:58:09:16
Jeremy King
Then and so just wait, that's maybe what you feel now. Wait for ten years and you'll see the truth. Or if you say it's a photograph.
00:58:09:18 - 00:58:11:00
Dan Pope
Oh, God. What's this?
00:58:11:02 - 00:58:20:07
Jeremy King
So then there's the person will say, well, we think we all think it's good. And so let's see what it looks like in ten years time.
00:58:20:09 - 00:58:43:01
Dan Pope
There's a thing called the, review of the Lindy effect, which is by Nassim Taleb. And Lindy was a cafeteria, a cafe in, in New York, where a lot of script writers, comedians would go. And then it's on. There's a whole thing of AC where if a writer had been around for two weeks, the chance of them doing well would be this is what Nassim Taleb called it, Lindy effect.
00:58:43:03 - 00:59:03:09
Dan Pope
And the chance of them doing another three months would be X if they if they'd done two months, the chance of them doing two years, being on a two year time was much greater. And he basically says, you're looking for like to buy to buy literature or books, use a Lindy effect as a heuristic, i.e. anything. It's been around for 50 years or 100 years is likely to be around.
00:59:03:09 - 00:59:23:15
Dan Pope
So like, if you read Fitzgerald or Tom Wolfe that's been around for so long that it's likely to still be good. But anything any of this, these vanilla thrillers that are coming out in Smith again, it's like just you wait. And I think there's a it's a really good way to pick what you read, what you watch.
00:59:23:15 - 00:59:29:11
Dan Pope
Because I think, as you say, it's just, what do you say? Is it, what do you say, proclamation or proclamation?
00:59:29:13 - 00:59:31:17
Jeremy King
Yeah. So. And to.
00:59:31:17 - 00:59:32:20
Dan Pope
Proclaim. Proclaim. Yeah.
00:59:32:21 - 00:59:49:20
Jeremy King
A proclamation to proclaim it. You can't be wrong. And what way? You only can be wrong is if you prevaricate you lose a people say, oh, they don't, they don't have a strong fit because we love, we love strong strength of assertion. So if we.
00:59:49:22 - 00:59:50:12
Dan Pope
Yes, if we're.
00:59:50:12 - 00:59:55:18
Jeremy King
Lost in the jungle. Yeah. And we're, we're trying to get out of the jungle as a group.
00:59:55:19 - 00:59:56:23
Dan Pope
Yeah.
00:59:57:00 - 00:59:59:08
Jeremy King
And we come to a fork in the road.
00:59:59:08 - 01:00:19:09
Jeremy King
You don't want somebody saying, Well, we could go left. And I think that might work because it looks like high ground over there. Oh, there again, there's an argument going right. We're worried we don't like it. Somebody steps to the front and says, unquestionably, we go right. People will go with it.
01:00:19:11 - 01:00:45:05
Jeremy King
And that's the human nature. And sometimes if you've got a strong leader, if you have 2 or 3 strong leaders there, then you have just a big argument and nobody knows which way, which way to go. And there's rancor and, and, and disagreement. There is no definition as to what is great. There's no definition as to what is the best restaurant.
01:00:45:07 - 01:01:09:14
Jeremy King
In my mind, we can tell whether restaurants restaurant's doing things well because the quality of the cooking. But it's all in the eyes of the beholder. And in the book, I tell the story of one of my best meals ever was in a closed restaurant where I joined the family on a on a Monday. And and just to, I mean, I had a wonderful time.
01:01:09:19 - 01:01:53:19
Jeremy King
Now, by the same token, I think that was it was amazing. I have been in the 80s to Joe Robinson's restaurant in Paris, where I had an all white truffle menu. Which is amazing. I can't tell you what we hate. I can tell you exactly what, what I eat on, on the forecourt of that restaurant, on the Mistral started off with, they brought out to Reims and they brought out some seasoned and they, then they brought stuffed mussels and then we had lamb and then and, fresh goat's milk cheese and and everything about it was was wonderful.
01:01:53:19 - 01:02:17:10
Jeremy King
Yeah. I can't remember what. I had to roll the shot even though it would have been impeccable, impeccable, quality. However, there are people who that relish a meal might be the best meal they ever had in their life and would be miserable as hell sitting where I was in the south of France on on the deserted terrace.
01:02:17:12 - 01:02:19:20
Jeremy King
That's what I love about it. There is no.
01:02:19:23 - 01:02:20:16
Dan Pope
There's no right.
01:02:20:16 - 01:02:30:16
Jeremy King
There's no definable. And but we try as a society to moneyball the whole thing. This is the right decision. This is the right verdict.
01:02:30:18 - 01:02:50:13
Dan Pope
Yeah. I think it just all boils down to like, a, evolutionary fear of, like, if you boil it, I love, like, sort of, evolutionary psychology is like our whole innate fear is essentially death. Like, we really go to, like, deep oneness. So we always want some, some sort of authority to basically and anything to make sure we're doing the right thing.
01:02:50:15 - 01:02:53:23
Dan Pope
We're not we're not going back to that, to that innate fear.
01:02:54:00 - 01:02:55:14
Jeremy King
But but having said that.
01:02:55:17 - 01:02:56:11
Dan Pope
Yeah.
01:02:56:13 - 01:02:59:24
Jeremy King
In the mind of a good intellect.
01:03:00:01 - 01:03:00:16
Dan Pope
Yeah.
01:03:00:18 - 01:03:51:15
Jeremy King
That death actually is not the great fear anyway. Because and particularly if the, if that intellect has had a fulfilled life because that they rationalize on the basis my body is failing, my brain is failing. I've had a brilliant life and I would always like to, the way Richard, Richard Rogers, Lord Rogers, the the great architect, I can't remember who it was, whether Socrates or so he quoted, the fact that we should all aim particularly architects, but we should all aim to leave the city or the country where we've been domiciled better than when we are when we arrived, and that we have an obligation to try and improve society and the
01:03:51:15 - 01:04:02:02
Jeremy King
environment in which we live in. And he was a great exponent of that. Most people are too selfish. They want to leave with themselves. Better not.
01:04:02:02 - 01:04:20:02
Dan Pope
So. So this is, this was that was the book. The book was referencing there. I think it was I think back in was a rather unique, like the denial of death. We had to read it. Really interesting book is basically building like all this, all this stuff we're building with like, you know, naming someone's golf courses, all this stuff to build status when we're gone.
01:04:20:02 - 01:04:36:03
Dan Pope
And it's quite a selfish act that. So it's like the Trump Tower, the working like whatever. And it's actually and it's all and it kind of I think it does linked to some of this scoring thing. Interesting. Do you fear death?
01:04:36:05 - 01:04:37:11
Jeremy King
The moment.
01:04:39:23 - 01:05:02:22
Jeremy King
I feared impending death because I didn't want I don't want to experience what it's like to regret. And I I'm perfectly happy death if if I'm at. But I'm one with that. So what? I'm motivated by is trying is actually preparing myself for my death as opposed to running away from it.
01:05:03:01 - 01:05:13:23
Dan Pope
So no. And the way you prepare yourself for death without running away from it is by having or trying to have as little memory. What was some of the greats, your regrets you're trying to rectify, would you say?
01:05:14:00 - 01:05:15:21
Jeremy King
Well, the thing about regrets, I.
01:05:15:21 - 01:05:46:06
Jeremy King
If you read any of those big interviews with captains of industry and so on, leading business people, a very common thing is that when they're asked, do you have any regrets? They say, no, I don't understand that. I have regrets every day of the week. I have almost every hour I regret things and but there is no harm in regretting because hopefully one learns from it and constantly trying to improve that defensiveness of saying no, I have no regrets.
01:05:46:06 - 01:05:48:11
Jeremy King
I find that I think me self.
01:05:48:13 - 01:06:13:07
Dan Pope
Yes. Wow. Okay. Yeah. So just so just like just swim, swim down that channel a little bit more, please. Yeah. Because I think this is fascinating. So in another contrarians you in the sense that I think is it what's the thing is that your happy problems in the book, which I love, which is and I actually wrote about this in one of my newsletters, which is when it's like, you know, everyone is everything okay?
01:06:13:09 - 01:06:15:24
Dan Pope
Is that what could you detail that? Because I think that.
01:06:16:01 - 01:06:40:10
Jeremy King
It's something I, I do, and it's often irrational when I utilize somebody and be in the restaurant and say, hi, Jeremy, everything okay? And sometimes I brush it off if I know them a bit. I quite often say no and they and they panic all know what's wrong and it kind of help. But tell me, tell me what?
01:06:40:12 - 01:07:06:07
Jeremy King
Oh there's nothing. Nothing to you serious? And then you say, why did you say no? I said because you asked me if everything is okay. It isn't there. I said, oh, last time I seem to remember everything being okay was for a couple of weeks in the summer of 1964, when I was ten years old, and life seemed pretty, pretty good.
01:07:06:07 - 01:07:29:17
Jeremy King
Then after that. As for me, it's is enough of my life. Okay, now of course I said earlier on, enough is never enough, but it can never be. And, there are books on the shelf, the books on the shelves of my library, which I haven't read. I regret that, yeah, and I would be a better person, perhaps, if I had read them.
01:07:29:17 - 01:07:31:03
Jeremy King
There's any number of things.
01:07:31:03 - 01:07:43:00
Dan Pope
There's a Japanese word I think it's called. Like I own a butcher. Couldn't could to. Cindy, this girl I've seen told me about it. And, it's it's the Japanese word for the, like, the joy of collecting books that you'll never read.
01:07:43:03 - 01:07:44:09
Jeremy King
Yes, I saw that. It.
01:07:44:09 - 01:07:59:22
Dan Pope
Yeah. And I actually, I think that was really interesting because there's, I just sometimes will look at a book of it's on my bookshelf and just be like, just seeing the look of it will make me interest. There's a book I've got called In the Miso Soup by Murakami, which isn't the other Murakami, and just like the look of it just makes me interested.
01:07:59:22 - 01:08:00:24
Dan Pope
And I've never actually read anything.
01:08:00:24 - 01:08:02:05
Jeremy King
It is stimulating.
01:08:02:05 - 01:08:03:11
Dan Pope
It's really stimulating.
01:08:03:11 - 01:08:14:24
Dan Pope
Any any sort of is anything you haven't specifically talked about on other interviews before or conversations before? I mean, I think in your book is enough. This is yeah, I mean, I've been given it. I gave it to Rory Sutherland. Oh.
01:08:14:24 - 01:08:16:23
Jeremy King
Did you for his birthday.
01:08:17:00 - 01:08:30:16
Dan Pope
And then I had lunch with him and then. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Because that was his. And we were discussing it and just. And then my mum was reading it now, and it's just. What made you decide to like, write it and why now
01:08:30:16 - 01:08:32:10
Jeremy King
Okay.
01:08:32:10 - 01:08:58:08
Jeremy King
The fundamental thing to know about me is probably that, surprisingly, I'm very shy person and a natural introvert. So a ni, free evening. It's probably just as much or more enjoyed being by myself than being in company. And so it might seem an unlikely career for to be in restaurateur.
01:08:58:10 - 01:09:30:06
Jeremy King
And I did kind of fall into it, although it has to be said that walking into a room, a full room in a restaurant, is is, for me, exciting and challenging. Walking into a full room at a cocktail party is, is very debilitating in in truth. So when the notion of me writing a book is anathema and the person who.
01:09:30:09 - 01:09:30:24
Dan Pope
Supports that, I.
01:09:30:24 - 01:09:38:02
Jeremy King
Mean, so naturally is completely, completely against what I would normally want to do, because.
01:09:38:02 - 01:09:38:16
Dan Pope
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
01:09:38:21 - 01:09:48:19
Jeremy King
I have a little bit of an abhorrence of narcissists. And therefore to write a book about oneself would, qualify me as being narcissistic.
01:09:48:21 - 01:09:51:03
Dan Pope
I mean, we've been this less rich yet.
01:09:51:05 - 01:09:54:23
Jeremy King
We did books, previously. The first book
01:09:54:23 - 01:10:17:04
Jeremy King
Chris and I did was, the Ivy. And that's because we were fortunate enough to to have, Adrian Gill come on board as the writer. And actually, that was a groundbreaking book in its way. Adrian continue to do books, varying degrees of success.
01:10:17:06 - 01:10:46:14
Jeremy King
There's no question that Adrian is brilliant. So it's just a question of did it always come out in the the right way? And he did Caprice book, which was about scenarios in a, in a restaurant, whereas the Ivy was a day in the life of a restaurant, which is very cleverly done and, and and although without being able to actually mention who the customers were, the customers had to be fictional for privacy reasons and, and so on.
01:10:46:16 - 01:11:13:03
Jeremy King
He also did as a double book, then another one, which was actually funny, and I mentioned because it was possibly the Genesis of me writing, is that we were doing breakfast with the Woolsey as a book, and originally I went straight away to Adrian, and so we did do it, and he said, no, no, no, I'm too busy, too busy.
01:11:13:05 - 01:11:37:12
Jeremy King
And we ended up through and Victor, the agent hiring somebody who's the head of a book of the food Writing Federation of some. So I can't remember, and it just didn't work. And, so I've, I phoned up the incredibly busy you have no time, Adrian Gill, and found him on a grouse moor. And said they didn't.
01:11:37:14 - 01:11:49:05
Jeremy King
I miss you. I need you to come and write this book. He said. Okay, okay. And then he wrote a really, really good book, an agent of change.
01:11:49:08 - 01:11:52:07
Dan Pope
And this this bit, this book is the idea of the wolves.
01:11:52:10 - 01:11:53:10
Jeremy King
The wolves, the.
01:11:53:12 - 01:11:53:18
Dan Pope
Best.
01:11:53:19 - 01:12:03:06
Jeremy King
Movie. And he wrote an excellent book, and it's a smaller format book. But he he's a lesson in being thorough and.
01:12:03:08 - 01:12:04:07
Dan Pope
He's a lesson in being.
01:12:04:07 - 01:12:28:04
Jeremy King
Sarah. Yeah, he's a very a though he has a brilliant a brilliant wit. And he can extend theories particularly well. He is very dyslexic. Yeah. And which makes life harder. It made life hard for him as a, as a writer. But he is very thorough. And at the time we had a tour here at, at the Wolves.
01:12:28:04 - 01:12:57:07
Jeremy King
The tour is anything to do with effectively with yeast, right. The dough and yeast. And they will make the quests on and, and all the other the inventory based items like that. And he would come at 2:00 in the morning, 230 to watch him make those, those questions. And he wrote the book and it was really good. And then it suddenly stopped and it was an abrupt ending.
01:12:57:07 - 01:13:13:09
Jeremy King
I, I there's really, it's wonderful, but it's too abrupt. This ending. Why is that? You said sorry, darling. Meta ran out.
01:13:13:14 - 01:13:14:14
Dan Pope
Yeah.
01:13:14:16 - 01:13:45:00
Jeremy King
And I said, well, maybe I can put a few more shillings into the meta. But you haven't done an introduction, and it was meant to be an introduction. You said. Oh, yes, darling, I can't be bothered to do that. You do that? Yes. So I wrote the introduction to breakfast at the wall. The original way. It was an interesting exercise because it had to be in keeping with the rising of Adrian, but of course not mimic, even if I even if I could.
01:13:45:02 - 01:14:37:00
Jeremy King
And from there on, Ed Victor, the Asian dude raised, you know, not with us anymore. He, he kept on saying, when are you going to write a book? You know, memoirs or whatever it might be? And I declined and declined and declined. And the baton was passed to Caroline Michel after Ed died, and who's a wonderful agent and a wonderful friend, and then finished the that shy boy because and inherently we were often, in our boyhood or as men and you can often recognize that she gave me the confidence and fourth estate part of Harpercollins is, Louise Haynes is a very good, editorial director.
01:14:37:00 - 01:15:12:15
Jeremy King
And she's produced books for, Nigel Slater and many and many others. They showed confidence in it. And I thought, how do I write this book? And the catalyst was the Graham Norton story, which is in the book of him saying, the youth of today does not need the proposed national reinstates, stating international service. What it needs to do is spend six months front of house in a restaurant.
01:15:12:17 - 01:15:14:03
Jeremy King
You learn so much.
01:15:14:03 - 01:15:17:14
Jeremy King
About teamwork.
01:15:18:12 - 01:15:47:05
Jeremy King
Communication, dispute, reconciliation, any number of things, you learn during that period. And it's absolutely true, because having watched a lot of the the children in my friends or in not so much my, my own children who are very, very private, so many kids grow up either looking at a screen or that or their feet. And to be in a restaurant that completely changes it.
01:15:47:05 - 01:16:11:22
Jeremy King
And my own children talk about the fact that on this when they the proudest thing on the CV in the early years was the fact they'd worked in The Wolseley, your fishers or whichever restaurant, and they said the most interest in them was engendered by the work in the restaurants because the interview would say, oh, tell me about.
01:16:12:01 - 01:16:12:18
Dan Pope
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
01:16:12:20 - 01:16:42:23
Jeremy King
And so many people, of course, either eat in restaurants or even worked in restaurants at some, some points in their life. An interesting you, Rosie Rogers, told me that at Apple where you can imagine the number of applicants they get for each job, if somebody showed shows, I don't know if it's still an extent, but if somebody shows that, they worked in a restaurant, that enhances their chances because of what you learned.
01:16:43:00 - 01:16:52:21
Jeremy King
So against the background of that and a very long answer to a question, why? Why did I decide to write the book? I started writing the,
01:16:52:21 - 01:17:04:07
Jeremy King
And it was it was difficult. And particularly when Fourth Estate said, should we give you a ghostwriter? And I said, no, the whole point is I have to write it for myself.
01:17:04:09 - 01:17:32:05
Jeremy King
It's cathartic. It's, it's a challenge. And in life, I like challenge, I like risk, I like I've done various things. I was actually talking this morning to a very, very dear friend of mine, Amanda Levy, who who worked, who's an architect, a brilliant architect is built, built for me and, has a really successful practice.
01:17:32:10 - 01:18:02:07
Jeremy King
I was her best man at her wedding, and the and decided pretty much last minute the basis of my speech, which was a Stephen Sondheim song called sorry. And and starts off of a younger man asking an older married man, do you ever regret who you married? And, And so it's not sorry. It's grateful, I think sounds and says you're always sorry.
01:18:02:07 - 01:18:21:18
Jeremy King
You were always grateful. You always wonder what might have been. So I sang that at the, the reception, which surprised people. How it was an insight into my nature is that if it's scary, wow. It doesn't debilitate me. It challenges me.
01:18:21:20 - 01:18:31:03
Dan Pope
So how important is shyness? How is shyness an unfair advantage when it comes risk taking? Would you say.
01:18:31:05 - 01:19:02:24
Jeremy King
Is an interesting question? I'm not sure it does have the unfair advantage because in many people it would send them back into the shell. It's my nature and is to try and do things really well. Being shy makes makes me a big observer, and so I observe and observe and serve and why. And in some ways that is the underlying fundament of the book, is that it's my observations.
01:19:03:01 - 01:19:17:11
Jeremy King
And so that I will I look so much that the staff would be they might say, oh, table 42, whatever it is,
01:19:17:11 - 01:19:33:09
Jeremy King
the, the, the guest, we're trying to remember who who, who they are. And the guest is sitting there with their back to me. So I've only got the back of the, the head. And the team has worked there and I will, I will name them.
01:19:33:11 - 01:19:43:06
Jeremy King
And so how do you do that. And I of it's partly I know the host. So that narrows it down to a certain set of people who might.
01:19:43:08 - 01:19:43:16
Dan Pope
Yeah.
01:19:43:17 - 01:20:10:20
Jeremy King
More likely to be having lunch with them and then I believe so, so strongly that we don't use our brains enough. And because we have too much help and this is we have information, we can read things, we can be phoned, we can go on the internet, we can any, any number of things we can do. And I asked myself, why is it?
01:20:10:23 - 01:20:17:19
Jeremy King
And this has happened far too many times to be coincidental. Is that not long after,
01:20:17:19 - 01:20:19:04
Jeremy King
we got a dog.
01:20:19:04 - 01:20:36:20
Jeremy King
My wife Lauren noticed that she would sometimes jump up on a chair and look through the window suddenly in earnest. And normally about 15 minutes later, I would appear. And it's not the regular time every day. Yeah.
01:20:36:22 - 01:20:39:16
Dan Pope
So I was the dog would know that.
01:20:39:16 - 01:20:43:16
Jeremy King
You know, and it could be 6:00. It could be 8:00. It could be 11:00.
01:20:43:18 - 01:20:44:04
Dan Pope
Yeah, yeah.
01:20:44:09 - 01:21:09:12
Jeremy King
She she would know because she and she can communicate and, we can see things and hear things if we utilize our brains, but we don't need to so much. So there's, there's a wonderful book called Extraordinary Knowing. I can't remember the name of the author, which is about people who can divine information across continents.
01:21:09:14 - 01:21:11:02
Dan Pope
What do you mean by divine information?
01:21:11:06 - 01:21:30:20
Jeremy King
So that and the story started by, by way of a. A mother and professor at Berkeley College in California. Her daughter was a, bit of a prodigy at the heart, and she had a comparatively.
01:21:30:20 - 01:21:31:04
Dan Pope
Small.
01:21:31:04 - 01:21:55:22
Jeremy King
Heart. And she performed at a place in Oakland not far from Berkeley. And the heart was stolen. The. So she did everything she could to try and find it. And this is pre-internet days. So she rather than searching all the musical instrument dealers because it was a valuable piece she wrote to them across the country, if you see this, nothing, nothing.
01:21:56:01 - 01:22:09:23
Jeremy King
And months later of a friend of hers said, did you ever get that harp back? And she said, no. I said, what did you do? And I said, well, I wrote to everybody, I did this, I tried everything.
01:22:10:01 - 01:22:10:21
Dan Pope
Yeah.
01:22:10:23 - 01:22:24:11
Jeremy King
And no, no sign. And she said, have you tried divining? So. No, of course, divining we associate with finding water. You know, when you hold two sticks, hold a forked stick and it'll.
01:22:24:11 - 01:22:28:18
Dan Pope
Go into water. Divining was like some sort of divine like no. Oh, is that.
01:22:28:22 - 01:22:36:01
Jeremy King
Divining water is a lot of people. You get, a you get a stick which has this.
01:22:36:01 - 01:22:37:18
Dan Pope
There's no this has no context or.
01:22:37:20 - 01:22:43:09
Jeremy King
It's about getting information so you can find out where the water is by holding stakes above.
01:22:43:09 - 01:22:44:01
Dan Pope
The ground.
01:22:44:03 - 01:23:07:08
Jeremy King
And, in this situation, how does this person I can't remember Kansas or something like that, who's who's brilliant get in touch with them. So they spoke. So send me a photograph. Send me all the information you've got on this, and I'll find it for you. So she's in Kansas. So I don't know how many miles, thousand miles away or some.
01:23:07:10 - 01:23:32:19
Jeremy King
And she comes back, you said, yeah, I know where your heart is and gives an address in Oakland. And she said, you'll find the heart that. Wow. And of course, the the mother. And you can't knock on the door and say, have you got my daughter's heart? So she put up signs around saying, looking for this harp, no questions asked.
01:23:32:21 - 01:23:55:22
Jeremy King
What a big reward for it. And she gets a call from somebody who said, yeah, my next door neighbor has that. And so it was down to. And because of that, she started to to really delve into it. And because she was an academic, she really researched and any number of stories in the book, which are really interesting.
01:23:55:22 - 01:24:11:07
Jeremy King
And the ultimate is that during the Cold War, the CIA were using people with these powers to look into nuclear bunkers in Russia. And this is all I'm saying, really, is that we have extraordinary.
01:24:11:09 - 01:24:14:20
Dan Pope
Extraordinary knowledge to like, observe a century.
01:24:14:21 - 01:24:52:11
Jeremy King
And it's but we have we have to learn that and develop it. And if you're a silent person, which is how I was for much of my life, and I'm just watching, and I love watching it, then to use that word again, I'm divining, information, information. And so the more that went on and I learned how people behaved, and I would walk up to a table and I'd some and I can feel it's tense, and it might be a cop who are having marital problems or something like that, and that side of me which likes danger, which.
01:24:52:11 - 01:25:14:20
Jeremy King
And there's that other element I will I might say something and I said, I know what's happening. You're saying that he's doing this, he's saying that you're doing that, and so on and so forth. They said, how do you know? I said, he's just I know you over the years. I know your marriage. I know what's happened there.
01:25:14:20 - 01:25:17:17
Jeremy King
I can tell by your demeanor. And now I can tell you like.
01:25:17:19 - 01:25:34:18
Dan Pope
What about for like, non-regular customers. The nun. Right. Is that divine? Divine? This pull through is that is that that's what I'm trying to ask. Is, is that something that you can train? Is that like getting rid of the ambient noise from your phone, or is that something you can only learn through experience, or is that kind of just an innate thing to Jeremy that you've you've.
01:25:34:22 - 01:25:43:08
Jeremy King
I think we can all I think we can all do it. If we open our minds to and, the.
01:25:43:08 - 01:26:01:18
Jeremy King
I'm one of the, one of the things is that we our brains are incredible, incredible digital machines which we use a fraction of. And we use the brain. A lot of people, we help now, of course, through screens and so on.
01:26:01:20 - 01:26:10:06
Jeremy King
A lot of people use their brain almost like an analog animal, rather rather than a fully sophisticated digital.
01:26:10:08 - 01:26:12:12
Dan Pope
What what do you mean by that specifically? So, like, so.
01:26:12:12 - 01:26:26:04
Jeremy King
That, we take everything on, on just first observation and we don't wonder why we're why we're thinking it. I mean, let's say in restaurants, you're.
01:26:26:04 - 01:26:27:16
Dan Pope
Going to saying, what's that in restaurants and.
01:26:27:16 - 01:27:14:04
Jeremy King
In restaurants. And it's part of the process, right at the beginning of somebody deciding to go to a restaurant. So let's say we decide to go for dinner. Where should we go? One of us suggests the restaurant. What enables us to say yes or no? Very quickly. And for me, I see it that what happens is if you, if we say, to point of argument 1 to 1 of my old restaurants, let's say if you, if you say let's go to the Woolsey, I, I see it the, the a media card suddenly plays in our brain.
01:27:14:09 - 01:27:28:10
Jeremy King
And that media card is a mixture of audio visual, almost scratch and sniff. And there are a lot of things they say that restaurant, they and immediately the brain pictures the restaurant.
01:27:28:12 - 01:27:29:12
Dan Pope
Yeah.
01:27:29:14 - 01:27:48:01
Jeremy King
So you're thinking of that too. Then what else makes you decide to go to a restaurant? It might be a dish at their reason. It might be who you with. You had a great time or you had a bad time because restaurant. If you have an argument in a restaurant, you're less likely to go back to restaurant. Even if it's not the restaurant's full.
01:27:48:03 - 01:28:05:13
Jeremy King
There'll be a little video playing of an incident and members, all these things have. But that media card in our brain plays in a fraction of a second and enables to say us to say, yes, that's a good idea.
01:28:05:19 - 01:28:06:13
Dan Pope
Yeah.
01:28:06:15 - 01:28:18:02
Jeremy King
And we incredibly fast. I mean, and if we analyze it, it almost defies analysis in the same way is that there's another book.
01:28:18:04 - 01:28:42:03
Dan Pope
So just quickly on the analog so thing. So you're basically saying that the way it analog, it was operating like analog creatures versus digital creatures, in the sense that analog sense, we see something like what we're going to go and do that it's a split second. Whereas whereas say a digital creature would be processing it more, you know, just looking through the different, you know, what the weather was, is that basically trying to say interesting.
01:28:42:03 - 01:29:19:02
Jeremy King
Yeah. And because we're not utilizing the brain, there was a this is quite an interesting film with Scarlett Johansson and, about a woman who is forced to smuggle a drug which breaks in in her, in her stomach. And the end result is her brain goes crazy and she sees things, his things, etc. because, it it's, everything is enhanced and then it that it explodes effectively.
01:29:19:08 - 01:29:45:12
Jeremy King
And there was there's an interesting argument because I think I may be completely wrong on the exact figures that it's felt that we utilized about 30% of our brain. So how does my dog, which has an infinitely smaller brain than me, knows things better than me? And as that sense of smell, the dog has an incredibly enhanced sense of smell.
01:29:45:12 - 01:30:17:08
Jeremy King
And also, when the dogs sees danger, any dog owner will know the dog to go and say hello to different, and then they shy away or shy away from people. And, there's a wonderful book called The Social Animal written by forgotten his name. Which, which became very popular. The the White House. And he, he would talk about the fact that we are much more sophisticated than we give ourselves credit.
01:30:17:10 - 01:30:43:04
Jeremy King
And he in the book, he talks about, how, let's say a man looks at a woman and says they're beautiful. Well, a lot of people think women are beautiful or not or fairly, whatever it might be, which is so wrong. It's a woman that's beautiful to me, or a man who's beautiful to me. May not be to, to you.
01:30:43:06 - 01:31:17:04
Jeremy King
What his argument was is that we're being too slow and Humpty Dumpty is on, you know, the good looking person I mean, he used in the book. I'm not sure it's the. It's the best way of doing it. Whereas the brain is actually the brain knows what the man or woman likes about somebody else. And it's measuring the distance between the nose and the lips, or the size of the mouth or all sorts of things very, very quickly, which allows us to make that.
01:31:17:06 - 01:31:57:07
Jeremy King
Yeah, yeah. In that, I mean, he and he does. He talks about a really, really interesting thing, which is, Marines, American Marines, when they're serving in Afghanistan and Iraq, there were particular the particular people who gained a reputation and were used a lot by by the forces because they put them at the end of the street and say, is there a, what do they call I, IEDs and improvised explosive devices there an IED in the street?
01:31:57:12 - 01:31:58:00
Dan Pope
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
01:31:58:06 - 01:32:25:10
Jeremy King
And there's one particular guy who is brilliant who look and would say yes or no. Now, you and I would fail at doing that. We would look for some maybe disturbed ground or something. I mean, we'd get it wrong. They would get it right so much of the time. And when I asked, how do you know? And there's a I don't know, I don't know, why do you say yes or no?
01:32:25:12 - 01:32:29:23
Jeremy King
So if I get a cold feeling in my chest, I say yes. Wow.
01:32:30:00 - 01:32:31:16
Dan Pope
And it's the to say so.
01:32:31:17 - 01:33:09:09
Jeremy King
It's it's not what the eyes are seeing. Yeah. And what I would call the analog basis. It's the all the information going back into the brain which informs that decision. But it's intuitive. It's not fully regarded and something which, I'm feeling stronger and stronger about and I talk about somewhat in the book, is that I feel intuition and instinct have all been have been discredited in a society which.
01:33:09:11 - 01:33:14:18
Jeremy King
Is is driven more by what was that film called? Moneyball?
01:33:14:22 - 01:33:15:18
Dan Pope
Yep yep yep.
01:33:15:22 - 01:33:24:10
Jeremy King
Everything has to be has to be defined by statistics, precedence, etc. we cut out instinct.
01:33:24:12 - 01:33:42:16
Dan Pope
There's a book called The Score which was recommended to me, which is really interesting, and it's essentially how we've we're starting to everything is now done through, metrics and numbers. And it's actually making us kind of depressed. So it's, you know, there's a whole thing now if, if you can't just go on a run, you have to put it on Strava and you have to be.
01:33:42:16 - 01:34:07:11
Dan Pope
I was having you the other day with these this, this fitness couple and they were saying like you've done a marathon. But now to beat the score in societies, unless it's a sub three you don't have status. Yeah. You know the score of restaurant reviews, the score of Instagram likes, the score of followers, the score of money and and and it's written by a philosopher, whose names escape me.
01:34:07:11 - 01:34:37:19
Dan Pope
But he he's. The central theme of the book is stop playing everyone else's game, which is beautiful. Let's move this from battlefield to a sort of dining room right. And I love the idea of the guy's kind of that sixth sense or intuition of knowing where the bombs are when you walk into a restaurant or any of your restaurants, what it's like, and I love this idea of this kind of thing that's not it's ethereal, it's intangible, this energy and sense.
01:34:37:21 - 01:34:47:04
Dan Pope
What would you. What's obvious to you? But like, non obvious to most people when you when you walk into rational like what what's the in Jeremy's antennas. How do you pick up that energy mean.
01:34:47:06 - 01:35:12:21
Jeremy King
Yeah. And as with all these things and as with that marine, it's difficult to actually identify and and and describe what makes me know that something's going wrong. Now, if somebody's got their hand up in the air waving and, you know, the server's going badly. Adrian Gill used to talk about the hum in a restaurant and that, which is one aspect of it.
01:35:12:23 - 01:35:37:19
Jeremy King
And it's the same for me. I can walk in, I can walk into because I go between the restaurants, come back, say here to the park and walk into the room and the number of people, what's going on? It doesn't define whether it's going well, but I can feel because my brain scans the room and it will pick up on all sorts of things.
01:35:37:19 - 01:36:03:14
Jeremy King
The demeanor of the people, the the demeanor, the staff, the the. It might be a ratio of, people waiting for for meals. I couldn't tell you what that percentage was, but the brain's saying, hey, there are too many. There are too many people waiting. There's so many things. And I think Adrian's right. The hum of, of a successful room.
01:36:03:14 - 01:36:07:07
Dan Pope
How do you cultivate the hum? Is is there a way, ways to cultivate that?
01:36:07:07 - 01:36:11:05
Jeremy King
I know, I think it's just natural and I.
01:36:11:05 - 01:36:36:23
Jeremy King
It's trusting our intuition that something is going wrong, even when ostensibly and theoretically, it's going really well. And so something might statistically say it's very good a really a very simple empiric, version of this, it just occurs to me. Is that very much in the news at the moment?
01:36:36:23 - 01:36:42:19
Jeremy King
Is, is, PSA readings for men to make sure they don't have prostate problems?
01:36:42:21 - 01:36:43:24
Dan Pope
What sort of PSA readings?
01:36:43:24 - 01:37:10:22
Jeremy King
PSA I can't remember what the channel is. So that you take a test through blood and it gives you a reading. Right. And that reading alone tells you whether you are high risk for prostate. And a lot of people, even people I know who've been told that PSA is good. And at the same at the same time, they then develop prostate cancer quite soon afterwards.
01:37:10:22 - 01:37:37:04
Jeremy King
And now nobody could understand it. But the good doctors, the good surgeons will actually say, I'm going to get you an MRI. And the it's instinctive and that because on on the Moneyball basis, the PSA reading is good. Then they realized and and it becomes is what we observe has to be put into context. And what and we make assumptions.
01:37:37:04 - 01:38:07:18
Jeremy King
So there's a famous famous advert made by Don McCullin I think it was the 70s. And it's the shot is, you see an elderly man walking down the street carrying a bag and you see, a guy and playing into particular time as a black guy running towards him. And so what is our prejudice, what is our conditioning and so on.
01:38:07:20 - 01:38:43:05
Jeremy King
I mean, most people read that, that the black guy was attacking the, and the, and you see him right up to the moment of contact and we made a prejudiced decision on that. And, and and they did they did the statistics and it's incredible. And then they stop the film and then play it on. And actually that guy is running to push the older guy out of the way because there is a piano or something, a big load about to drop on him.
01:38:43:07 - 01:38:57:02
Jeremy King
And this guy has seen it acted quickly. So he's a hero, he's a total hero, whereas two seconds before is he he was an aggressor and a robber or whatever, whatever.
01:38:57:02 - 01:39:20:23
Dan Pope
But looking, looking beyond the first thing is a really good advert, which, it was about a male suicide. I think it was. That was two friends at a football game. And the goal, the one guy is on his phone looking kind of, you know, sort of drenched in melancholy, and the guy next to him is going like that screaming, like, really no happy.
01:39:21:00 - 01:39:45:02
Dan Pope
And then and then they I think it cuts to, like the funeral and the guy's the funeral was, it was the guy who was happy when. And it was like, you know, mental health hides in plain sight or something like that. And I think it's, it's, it's Lincoln's your example there. It's like, that's so interesting. And I suppose what I loved about your book is when you say, because just for context, like a journal, a girl was like he was my inspiration for starting everything.
01:39:45:02 - 01:39:59:12
Dan Pope
So I write, so I write a newsletter every week. His his style. I think I've got table talk, probably about 2016 to 2018, and I've read like literally every single of his books multiple, multiple times. Like his writing style is just.
01:39:59:14 - 01:40:00:12
Jeremy King
Oh, he's ordinary.
01:40:00:16 - 01:40:23:03
Dan Pope
Extraordinary like and just. And I think for me is just a beautiful book as well. Like even just that just it's just a beautiful book. But I think with writing you get into different you can writers can get into different layers by because it's quite a solitary process, but you are kind of digging through the you're questioning things.
01:40:23:03 - 01:40:38:17
Dan Pope
What is hanging out with Adrian, with Lucien Freud, like, I know all your rest. I would love to sort of talk about, literature and how it coalesces with being a great restauranteur, because I think, I think that's that's a beautiful place to explore.
01:40:38:19 - 01:41:18:10
Jeremy King
Yeah. I think I've always enjoyed being with creative, creative people. Yeah, I would love being a creator. I created the notion when I was young that I would ever write a book that was impossible. And even now, when people say really, really lovely things about it, that, because my mother made me suspicious of anybody complimenting me, I but I, I think one of the fundamental things is that I believe restaurants and what attracts me to restaurants is that they are the catalyst for so much.
01:41:18:11 - 01:42:02:03
Jeremy King
Yeah. And that might be relationships or whatever. But when it comes to the arts, I am why I particularly like Grand cafe brasserie type operations. Is that my contention is that no great movement in the arts, whether it's literary, musical, painting, or indeed political or revolutionary, whatever it might be, I don't. I challenge that they didn't all start in restaurants because I think people coming together and and then engender creativity and the creativity gets better if we all work in silos.
01:42:02:03 - 01:42:32:02
Jeremy King
And of course, people have learned this now about working from home is the work can be good, the work can be applied. It's always, it's always because of other people. Other than a few absolute geniuses, that makes the creative process so much, so much better. And I been thinking about it recently. I like meetings, rather than zoom, zoom, zoom.
01:42:32:04 - 01:42:44:07
Jeremy King
Okay. But I prefer meeting because I think people being one on one on one or in a group creates a much great, a much, much, much greater result.
01:42:44:07 - 01:42:59:18
Jeremy King
that restaurants are the catalyst for so much gives me the the pleasure that my believes that there is no great artistic movement, whether literary music, painting, whatever it might be.
01:42:59:20 - 01:43:02:18
Dan Pope
Even some of those movements. What are the big movements that you witnessed?
01:43:02:24 - 01:43:39:04
Jeremy King
I think I've, I've witnessed a lot of, a lot of people coming together to, to, to have creative partnerships. I've seen a lot of the shows of over the last 40 years, which have been great successes in the West and have their genesis. In one of the restaurants, a composer meets a lyricist, whatever it might be in the musical, I've watched the post rehearsal creative process happening.
01:43:39:06 - 01:44:02:17
Jeremy King
I they have, funnily enough, the advertising world and which I was always quite fascinated by. I used to participate sometimes, particularly at the Ivy, which had quite a lot of, a lot of, artists, advertising creatives in the and they would say, we've got to come up with, an idea for this campaign to prove that.
01:44:02:17 - 01:44:06:19
Jeremy King
And I would always love to be able to solve that.
01:44:06:21 - 01:44:09:14
Dan Pope
Any of do you know, have you met Sir John Hegarty?
01:44:09:16 - 01:44:10:16
Jeremy King
Oh, yes, very much so.
01:44:10:17 - 01:44:27:18
Dan Pope
So he so we I interviewed him, last summer and he was talking about, like the creativity in advertising is kind of died. And he said one of the examples is because he says creativity is a generous and convivial act. Yeah. And basically because of budgets and like the no alcohol stuff is a long lunch has kind of died.
01:44:27:18 - 01:44:34:07
Dan Pope
And that he was saying to me, it's like we'd go into a lunch and I really believe creativity needs conversation.
01:44:34:09 - 01:44:35:08
Jeremy King
And embarkation.
01:44:35:08 - 01:44:55:02
Dan Pope
Lubrication, but also needs a deadline because it forces you to. It's like we need. And he would say, you need to solve this by food. Yeah. Are there any like delicious examples of if you at the ivy or the walls of the ad guys coming to you with a problem, like if you could imagine, like despite the conversations, like a pay like patron but like, what does that look like?
01:44:55:02 - 01:44:58:01
Dan Pope
You know, when all these people that I.
01:44:58:03 - 01:45:32:18
Jeremy King
I've, I've got involved and in many of those and said, why did you try doing such and such and walk away and they go, oh gosh, I really well, I think it's bringing you objectivity. Yeah. Yeah. And, and that, that process, I was with my son yesterday who's an actor and, a screenwriter as well, and he wanted to, it was complicated to the extent that he was writing is about a father and son relationship which had gone wrong and is great to say.
01:45:32:19 - 01:45:45:04
Jeremy King
It's not not our relationship. And the background was the town which I grew up in in Somerset, Burnham on Sea. And so we went to Burnham on Sea, yesterday.
01:45:45:06 - 01:45:46:05
Dan Pope
And.
01:45:46:07 - 01:45:48:05
Jeremy King
Near Weston super Mare in Somerset.
01:45:48:05 - 01:45:48:12
Dan Pope
Okay.
01:45:48:12 - 01:46:20:24
Jeremy King
Yeah, yeah. And we spent the day a while reliving my life and, It was, it was in that part of the narrative was the son to the reconciling the son teaching the father who doesn't know how to swim and and this is a tiny, tiny example, but indicative is that the son happens to be, a lifeguard, and he's doing teacher.
01:46:20:24 - 01:46:58:00
Jeremy King
So he's teaching the father how how to swim at Burnham on Sea and thinking about Burnham on Sea is that second to the. It's only second to the Amazon for the the largest rise and fall of the tide. Oh wow. So it becomes a river at low tide and then it comes up and becomes a sea. And I said and he said, so the father panics in the water and I said, well, then you use the mud from Burnham off seas famous mud that he's going out, and then it's you sink into the mud.
01:46:58:00 - 01:47:40:11
Jeremy King
And this is quite scary. He said, perfect. Now it's a tiny, tiny thing, but two people coming together who needed need to have that interaction in order to sort out a very small, a very small element of that story. And what I'm thinking about a lot at the moment is the generally people are either proactive or reactive, and there's something really good when proactive, reactive people come together and whether it's in a personal relationship or at work is the proactive person is organized.
01:47:40:11 - 01:48:32:22
Jeremy King
The proactive person. In your story about John Haggerty is the one who's saying, we've got to make a decision. We have to have it today because we have to develop it next week and so on. And then you produce and you need it by 4:00. And the reactive person goes into that meeting without without necessarily any idea what they're going to think of the coming together of the people suddenly engender is and this is what I find is that, and in many ways, the strength of Chris Corbyn's and my relationship was that he was the formally trained restaurateur and put it up how things should happen and how how that always happened.
01:48:32:24 - 01:48:43:04
Jeremy King
And I and then my brain would say, we don't need to do that. I know everybody's done that for 50 years or 100 years or something, but actually we could do it better if we if we do this.
01:48:43:04 - 01:48:48:15
Dan Pope
I wanted to ask about, So books that I know, Harold Pinter.
01:48:48:15 - 01:48:57:21
Dan Pope
And Adrian, like, what are some of the books you discussed with them? I know you've talked about. I really believe that rereading books is one of great life's most underrated luxuries.
01:48:57:23 - 01:49:08:14
Dan Pope
Yeah. What are some of the books list? Because, I asked myself. Jeez, I want to go and read them, you know? But, like what? What are some of the books that you guys were discussing or art that you guys were discussing? You can remember vaguely.
01:49:08:16 - 01:49:43:16
Jeremy King
I'm we would talk about books and actually a favorite question that, Harold Pinter, Antonia Fraser would ask me was, what are you reading at the moment? And, sometimes, sometimes they, they might be a bit surprised or it stimulates a discussion. I think I mentioned in the book when I made the mistake of saying I was reading dance music of time and forgetting that Antonia's uncle was Anthony Pohl, who wrote that book.
01:49:43:16 - 01:49:45:21
Jeremy King
And then and, was asked.
01:49:45:23 - 01:50:03:22
Jeremy King
Was there anything else? And I said, well, there's, the I go, I forget whether it's in the heat of the night or the heat of the day by Elizabeth Bowen and Richard Book and I, and I said, you know that. And Harold said.
01:50:03:22 - 01:50:10:21
Jeremy King
What do you mean, do I know it? It's the I wrote one of my best fucking scream queens to that.
01:50:10:24 - 01:50:35:11
Jeremy King
And I, I, I'm even more in trouble now and said, really? I of course I did. And it was never produced. And and he said, what do you mean never reduces the of course it was reduced. I said, no, I think I know every, every film in your, in your, you know, what genre and.
01:50:35:11 - 01:50:40:14
Jeremy King
And he's a well it was made for TV.
01:50:40:14 - 01:51:03:23
Jeremy King
And I said, that explains because I, I don't watch that much TV, but we would have a book and that would lead on sometimes discussion with Adrian. Adrian used to for somebody who it would take at least twice as long to read a book because you are, you know, and I because of his dyslexia, he was incredibly, incredibly well read.
01:51:04:00 - 01:51:30:22
Jeremy King
And I mentioned the dance music of time, which I find fascinating. I because when I spoke to on that occasion, I think I must have been, about 50 and I was reading a dance music of time, and I gave up on it because for some reason, and that was the third time of reading, I and this why I mentioned.
01:51:30:23 - 01:51:31:18
Dan Pope
That.
01:51:31:20 - 01:51:35:03
Jeremy King
It's 12 is actually 12 books within one.
01:51:35:05 - 01:51:37:04
Dan Pope
I. Wow. And bit of a mouthful.
01:51:37:10 - 01:52:11:03
Jeremy King
Yeah. And and I, I read it first when I was about 19 and I thought it was a load of tosh and, sort of toft tosh, as I call it. The life wasn't like that. And it was all it was really, really irritating and alienating to me. And then I read it again when I was about 35 or so, and I realized that actually life was like this, and it was and I, I changed and I appreciated and understood it and enjoyed it so, so much more.
01:52:11:05 - 01:52:36:04
Jeremy King
Then I was reading it for the third time, but only got through about three books, and I go distracted. And now I'm just on the 12th book, but I'm listening to it as opposed to, reading. And I, part of this is because I wasn't keeping up with my books in any way, shape or form because it just didn't have time.
01:52:36:04 - 01:53:03:07
Jeremy King
But if you listen, listen, on audible, I put it on in the car. I put it on whenever I got time. I might be, and it can be anything. So, when I was sick recently and I was making sure I was steaming my Vicks steam, etcetera, I instead of it being a chore, I look forward to it because that would give me another 10 or 15 minutes listening to the book.
01:53:03:07 - 01:53:33:01
Jeremy King
And and so I feel my life around the book, and I'm actually feel that I'm going to be bereft when, when it's, when it's done all 12 books. But most importantly about it is that and the reason I started reading is that with my own book, people were being very complimentary and one of the greatest compliments, which I also didn't entirely understand, was that people would say I didn't want it to end, which is a massive compliment.
01:53:33:01 - 01:53:55:17
Jeremy King
I'm very gratified by it, but I also didn't entirely understand it, because I realized that when I read a book, I do want it to end. I thought, that's maybe because I'm a little bit too narrative driven, that I'm not enjoying the language or the writing as much as I should do, because I want it to to be resolved by listening to a book.
01:53:55:19 - 01:54:08:01
Jeremy King
You then are forced to go to the right cadence and of the reading, and then you hear the language and understand the language, and you can't suddenly.
01:54:08:01 - 01:54:08:23
Dan Pope
You can't rush it.
01:54:08:23 - 01:54:11:19
Jeremy King
You can't speed read it. Or if anything.
01:54:11:21 - 01:54:20:00
Dan Pope
Do you you like books for like the light intensity or complexity of the prose, or are you more like narrative?
01:54:20:02 - 01:54:42:13
Jeremy King
I'm more narrative. And so that's why on audible. Yeah, much more so. The only good thing about finishing dance music, good time is that I will finally, through audible, properly read to speak the Proust remembrance of Things past. Oh, shit.
01:54:42:14 - 01:54:47:04
Dan Pope
What are you like? Because Bruce is like the Madeleine moments, isn't it?
01:54:47:06 - 01:54:49:14
Jeremy King
Well, that that's part Christine moments.
01:54:49:14 - 01:55:06:11
Dan Pope
Yeah, yeah. This. So the smell of Madeleine. Yeah yeah yeah yeah. Coming up, what would you say those are from your early moments in your career, those moments that come to you. Just those kind of experiences. It could be you know, the colors and the smells or whatever. Those beautiful periods at the beginning of.
01:55:06:13 - 01:55:29:22
Jeremy King
A is a fair question. I think there really is so many and and I get surprised by them. And yesterday particularly because I there I was in the town I grew up and every every turn, every corner, every everywhere, there was something which was reminding me of, of my youth and, so I find that very poignant, difficult to define.
01:55:29:22 - 01:55:31:05
Jeremy King
What exactly do.
01:55:31:07 - 01:55:34:06
Dan Pope
I read, anyway? Do you do transcendental Meditation?
01:55:34:08 - 01:56:05:17
Jeremy King
I, I learned, TM yeah. And I think it's incredibly important. I'm not a good practitioner because with TM, you're meant to practice twice a day. Yeah, 20 minutes, twice a day. And I. So I'm not fulfilling that, but I use it as a tool. If I'm tired and, and I times when I set off in the morning and driving through France and within 15, 20 minutes, I'm tired.
01:56:05:17 - 01:56:31:15
Jeremy King
I won't fall asleep if I meditate for 20 minutes. It enhances everything. But my kids were taught a simple version of TM when they're nursery school, and it's stood them in good stead. And in fact, if if you look carefully into it, there's a lot of bad things said about TM is that schools which properly utilize TM perform so much better, but people get scared of it.
01:56:31:17 - 01:56:39:07
Jeremy King
Yeah. And I think the, if they change the word transcendental, then it would have a much greater movement.
01:56:39:08 - 01:57:00:17
Dan Pope
Yeah, it needs a rebrand. Well, because that the Beatles did it when they went, when they went to India. And then a lot of writers and artists. Yeah. So I've done it. I've been doing it for ten years in the morning just to try. So yeah, that's what I wanted to ask you. I feel like what it does is it helps you notice things, non-obvious things, or also obvious things that are non-obvious to other people.
01:57:00:19 - 01:57:15:12
Dan Pope
And so I just wanted to understand, how is the restaurant, being on the ground, like, does that give you kind of a I think it makes you the noise in your head, the ambient kind of just so I just kind of dissipates and then you're in your, in the moment of just move, I.
01:57:15:12 - 01:57:40:17
Jeremy King
Think I think, yes, I think you're right. Those folks who practice are more attuned to what's going on around. And I think for me, calmness is, is a major, major element of it. And, and even 5 or 10 minutes, I would use it quite a lot with, you're asking about Lucien Freud is when I was sitting for him because that.
01:57:40:19 - 01:57:41:22
Dan Pope
That when you walk.
01:57:41:22 - 01:57:45:05
Jeremy King
Sort of when I was sitting for him for the for a portrait.
01:57:45:07 - 01:57:46:03
Dan Pope
Or the.
01:57:46:05 - 01:58:02:04
Jeremy King
The, his the room is often quite warm. I might be quite tired. It's easy to fall asleep if he's left the room for five, five minutes or so. I would use TM to give me a burst of energy.
01:58:02:06 - 01:58:21:07
Dan Pope
Just on on. Only when I love the bit. When you say like is it was your headmaster who said warming the, bottle of claret by the fire and you said you really understood restaurants through literature. Yeah. Wow, I love I love cross category like learnings. Need you take kind of two similar things and see how they coalesce.
01:58:21:07 - 01:58:33:06
Dan Pope
And that's really interesting to me that how's a love of literature like indulging in lots of literature made you unique or better at restaurants? Would you say the parallels differences?
01:58:33:08 - 01:59:12:20
Jeremy King
To to a degree, I and so it's a it's a big question which would need a more considered answer. The but literature literature wasn't part of my younger life. It wasn't I wasn't led by my my parents on it. And that's one of the most important things I got out of my schooling was understanding worlds, which I didn't realize exist, and food came into it a large and large way for that very reason that it was such a big part of life is stylistically a lot of a lot of writers would never include a meal because that was sort of dirty, almost.
01:59:12:22 - 01:59:34:06
Jeremy King
The sense, but it was fundamental. And that's where I suddenly realized there was, a immense amount of enjoyment to be derived from the coming together of people to, to eat and and talk and discuss.
01:59:34:08 - 01:59:37:12
Dan Pope
The escape is it is that the escapism, the link of those.
01:59:37:15 - 01:59:43:14
Jeremy King
To to a degree it was just it was another, another world. Not the less. I hadn't really understood.
01:59:43:16 - 02:00:01:19
Dan Pope
Few more things are made. Then we'll begin to wrap this up with I loved our conversation. Just, what are some of the business principles that no. 1 or 2, the main salient ones from from the book or from your lives that you think are really important for people who may be listening to this, you can only pick 2 or 3.
02:00:01:21 - 02:00:24:19
Jeremy King
Well, funnily enough, the lessons which people keep quoting back to me and which are domestic and business in ways is, the one particularly light is when I said to people never except to do something in the future that you wouldn't be happy to be doing tonight, because soon what you're doing in the future will become tonight.
02:00:24:21 - 02:00:51:19
Jeremy King
And we all do that. Somebody invites us six weeks in advance, feel we can't say no. And out of that, then. So how do you deal with that? Will make it a very quick no and and say no straight away and then never never give an excuse would justify as that wonderful old saying is that your your friends don't need it and your enemies don't believe it.
02:00:51:22 - 02:01:03:05
Jeremy King
And, when you give a, when you give that, excuse of apology and these are the happy problems I think is really important because and.
02:01:03:07 - 02:01:07:24
Dan Pope
Just detail a little bit more so that we kind of we serve skin, but this really is.
02:01:07:24 - 02:01:09:03
Jeremy King
Really the happy problem.
02:01:09:03 - 02:01:11:12
Dan Pope
Yeah. Just like the re how you reframe things.
02:01:11:14 - 02:01:45:04
Jeremy King
Because when, if we're leading busy lives and, and varied lives, there are a lot of things which give us stress. And it can be in any number of ways. And the first time I realized early 80s, when Caprice was starting to get busy and I was catching up and the phone was ringing more than normal, and it was interrupting me, counting the American Express vouchers, which were more than normal and and so it went on and I got really tense about it.
02:01:45:04 - 02:02:18:12
Jeremy King
I thought, hang on. And almost begrudging the phone ringing, begrudging having to count. I thought, so I'm complaining about the fact that the more people want to come to the restaurant, that I'm counting more receipts, and I'm getting stressed about that. This is not a problem. It's a happy problem. And I do believe that when we're feeling under pressure, if we if we divide, things which are, oppressing us or worrying us, actually analyze them, most of them are happy problems.
02:02:18:14 - 02:02:20:18
Jeremy King
If if we're getting.
02:02:20:18 - 02:02:50:14
Jeremy King
Too many requests from friends to get together, surely that's a happy problem. The unhappy problem is when I don't have any friends and nobody wants to get get together. And so it goes on. I got I was getting on the tube earlier in the week, and I ran into an actress friend I've known for years, and she was talking a few things generally, and she was saying that, the.
02:02:50:16 - 02:02:56:24
Jeremy King
She was she was upset about her tax return and how much tax she said, I said, how can you be upset about.
02:02:58:13 - 02:03:15:08
Jeremy King
Would you rather you didn't have any income to be taxed on? Yeah. You're working you're doing all this is this is a happy problem. Don't. And suddenly all the tension falls. Falls away. Interestingly, what probably.
02:03:15:08 - 02:03:29:17
Jeremy King
Probably the most repeated is either that one or the happy problems one or and don't do something in the future. And but the other one, which really captured people's imagination.
02:03:29:17 - 02:03:36:06
Jeremy King
I was surprised how much the story I told of having tea with Ruthie Rogers and her granddaughter.
02:03:36:08 - 02:03:46:11
Dan Pope
That's when my mom called me, two days ago. Some other book. We went to Arlington the other week. But anyway, so that's her favorite story, but yeah, I'll let you.
02:03:46:11 - 02:04:22:12
Jeremy King
Yeah. Because it's, because we were sitting together and they were having some tea, and the waiter left the table and and, I, we, the granddaughter turned to Ruthie and said, Brown. And Ruthie said, well done, very good. And I, I said, what was that? What was it? What was brown and he said, the she's been taught that she she's not allowed to be served by anybody unless she can tell us afterwards the color of their eyes.
02:04:22:14 - 02:04:42:07
Jeremy King
Because it means you've engaged, you've looked people in the eye and not disdainfully. And that's a proper human reaction interaction. And you both benefit from it. And I, it's interesting. And there's not just children who, who need that. Adults need that.
02:04:42:08 - 02:04:43:17
Dan Pope
Especially with our friends.
02:04:43:19 - 02:05:05:14
Jeremy King
And our friends. We either looking or if you look amongst a particularly wealthy section of society, they won't look you in the eye. I've had plenty of people who will engage me to the point that I'm the person to talk to about something, but then will turn their head and ask the question and,
02:05:05:16 - 02:05:24:05
Dan Pope
It's so true. Well, I love this questions overstatement. And I'm one that's I've used personally because I'm with the team running. This is if something is not working or like not like going ballistic, but I just like, like kind of like that, kind of energy person. Whereas now I've just been. So why do you think that, like.
02:05:24:07 - 02:05:33:17
Dan Pope
Well, first, if you could just quickly detail that and then what are some of your favorite questions to ask your team to get the best out of them? Because I feel like it's it's really working for me. That one.
02:05:33:17 - 02:06:07:11
Jeremy King
Well, I think questions are really important because they defuze situations and yes, you know, when somebody makes an assertion, I've, I've watched a child say to their mother, You don't love me, you don't care about me. And all those things never argue with the child. It's an irrational argument. Anyway. But ask it if you ask the question, do you really believe that?
02:06:07:13 - 02:06:35:20
Jeremy King
Why do you think that is? Or what if suddenly the whole thing is is dissipated and I think with staff, a lot of, a lot of the questions are, have you done enough? What can you do to help them? Can you see a different way of doing it? It's rather than saying, you should have done it such and such way, because the more we learn for ourselves, the more it sticks, because there's two things in life.
02:06:35:20 - 02:06:46:24
Jeremy King
And when training staff, People don't realize there's a difference between teaching and training and teaching.
02:06:47:02 - 02:06:49:00
Dan Pope
Yeah. It's gone, so it's different.
02:06:49:02 - 02:07:12:10
Jeremy King
Teaching is when somebody stands and tells you the theory of how something is done. Training is when you actually go out and show them how it's done and work with them. And it's and it makes all the difference because just the classroom is important to learn the theory, but then you try and do it. And I go back to that analogy of the car.
02:07:12:10 - 02:07:24:07
Jeremy King
If you can, you can stand for hours on end telling somebody how to drive a car, but until you put them in the car and say, try it, they won't really learn.
02:07:24:09 - 02:07:33:13
Dan Pope
Interesting final thing I want to just to wrap up on is I love the story of when Mick Jagger was coming to the restaurant, and you fill up the tables.
02:07:33:13 - 02:07:34:20
Jeremy King
With paper, the tables.
02:07:34:20 - 02:08:01:10
Dan Pope
So, so because I think obviously now again, was a retrospect, a wonderful thing. And, and I've had this huge, glorious success in restaurants. But that early day kind of hustle and competitiveness, I love the idea of studying the rise, not necessarily the results, because the result, people will say different things once you're up at the bar. The Hills kind of a at the top of the mountain is a very kind of, and never ending kind of thing anyway.
02:08:01:10 - 02:08:07:10
Dan Pope
But like those that first bit, that first bit of getting off, it was, it was that look, a precept.
02:08:07:12 - 02:08:38:03
Jeremy King
That was that those that look for free. Well, I think in those early days it's very first was easy to forget. How long it takes to get a restaurant going. Not always sometimes. And people would talk about the ivy, which did become extraordinarily busy. And I would without in any way wanting to to sound arrogant, I would say it was the sublime restaurant of the of the 90s without any question.
02:08:38:05 - 02:09:12:23
Jeremy King
I mean, it was just a lot of things came together. Right? And the perception is it was busy from day one. No, the first night we opened, we did 46 covers and the IRA bombed the Junior Cotton Club and everything was subdued. I've done at the Ivy, I've done zero service. As I remember when we opened Saturday lunch and doing a service zero covers is quite surreal because unlike the Sears, if you haven't got anybody booked in for the Sears, you just don't perform as a restaurant.
02:09:12:23 - 02:09:41:16
Jeremy King
You have to stand there sort of with a, rigor of the smile and on the face and hope maybe somebody will come through the door. Deception changes and, it's very it's very important to see that. And, and there often are tipping, tipping points. In those days it was all about word of mouth. And, and I do think of social media as being a version of word of mouth.
02:09:41:18 - 02:10:18:14
Jeremy King
And I like any, like any of the phenomena, you can, you can enhance your public persona by social media and so on, but you can't maintain it. You there are ways of stimulating the market to ensure your full. Will you be full in 2 or 3 years time? And the whole thing about restaurants, and a lot of people open a lot of restaurants and I firmly believe it's a massively enjoyable opening restaurant is also incredibly hard.
02:10:18:16 - 02:10:28:16
Jeremy King
The really hard thing is maintaining a restaurant and keeping it going, keeping it successful. And it goes back to that whole theme of constantly trying to improve it.
02:10:28:18 - 02:10:34:13
Dan Pope
And what were you doing just to get the people in originally like that? Maybe that Mick Jagger and Mick Jagger calls you?
02:10:34:18 - 02:10:55:09
Jeremy King
Well, that was it was Marie Heldman who actually made the call. Because we knew them. We knew a lot of people, a lot of the theater people that I knew from Joe Allen days helped us. A lot of the artists which were coming out of the Royal Academy, they will help Susan. And the beauty of that Mary held in story is that we weren't particularly busy that night.
02:10:55:09 - 02:11:33:05
Jeremy King
We papered it. But the people who were legitimate customers look and see Mick Jagger, making Bianca Jagger and Bryan Ferry and all these people come in, they talk and they will talk. And then there's the, the point where you have to have discretion that you don't publicize, you don't want to publicize that these people are in because it attracts, a clientele for the wrong reason, perhaps what attracts the paparazzi and also the paparazzi on one hand, help you feel the restaurant because people say, oh, I've got to go there again, you lose control.
02:11:33:07 - 02:11:43:09
Jeremy King
So that's why I always talk about the fact I don't really like broadcast. I much prefer, narrow cost.
02:11:43:09 - 02:11:49:05
Dan Pope
Final question. What's one truth you believe that most restauranteurs would disagree with you?
02:11:49:07 - 02:11:50:09
Jeremy King
What's the one thing that.
02:11:50:15 - 02:11:54:18
Dan Pope
One truth, one thing that you believe most would disagree with? You?
02:11:54:20 - 02:11:56:11
Jeremy King
Not sure entirely. I.
02:11:56:11 - 02:11:57:08
Jeremy King
I know that.
02:11:57:08 - 02:12:11:07
Jeremy King
When I was trying to get a hotel and I did an interview for the Financial Times, I was persuaded to to do it. And they wanted me to go and lecture, the, the, the.
02:12:11:07 - 02:12:27:01
Jeremy King
That's not that again, I do I remember when I was in the search of, hotel, my architect to be it did a piece for the Financial Times and they asked him most of the most exciting project you're working on at the moment.
02:12:27:01 - 02:13:01:01
Jeremy King
And he said, oh, the hotel with Jeremy King. And they said, oh, really? Where's the hotel? So we haven't found the site yet. But I like the thinking. I like I like the approach and so they persuaded me to do an interview for the Financial Times. And at the end of it, the journalist phoned me back a couple of days later and said, the editor is really happy, but they want to do a box on this article, make a feature of these articles and ask for the six.
02:13:01:03 - 02:13:21:15
Jeremy King
Your six key points for success. I said please don't ask me to do that. It's just makes me look and make me look smug and arrogant. And so I said, no, please, because otherwise the article might not happen. So do you want a few days to think about? I said, no, I'll do it now. So I reeled off what I thought was six.
02:13:21:15 - 02:13:44:09
Jeremy King
It actually turned out to be seven points. Of interest and I said, that's great. And I said, fine. I couldn't even tell you now what what I said until we heard from the big hotel in catering school in Switzerland saying, and they said, we want Mr. King to come and do the keynote lecture for, for the end of year.
02:13:44:11 - 02:14:06:21
Jeremy King
So why? And they said, well, basically because all your key points for success actually at odds with what we're teaching the students, and they want to make it, their, study work for the next year. And I think it's the important thing is that we went through learned there's, there's more than one way of doing it.
02:14:06:21 - 02:14:24:17
Jeremy King
And what underlines hospitality is care, love, attention, generosity, all these things how you do it can be argued about as to what people would disagree with me. Now I don't I don't know, it's we're all different.
02:14:24:19 - 02:14:36:10
Dan Pope
I love I just what I've taken for you today, different school courses, different games and just not believing everything that face value. Dig a little deeper and nothing is is right. Jeremy. It's been an absolute joy. Thank you so much.
02:14:36:10 - 02:14:38:08
Jeremy King
Thank you, thank you.
02:14:38:10 - 02:14:40:16
Dan Pope
That was amazing. I absolutely love that.
02:14:40:24 - 02:14:42:23
Jeremy King
Thank you. Thank you.
02:14:42:23 - 02:14:59:07