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He's the reserved, crisply dressed Oxford-educated lawyer who turned his back on a banking career 20 years ago to open a restaurant - and hasn't put a foot wrong since. That's the image most of us have of Nigel Platts-Martin, but is it the truth? Andy Lynes was granted a rare interview
Nigel Platts-Martin is something of an enigma. He is one of London's most successful and influential restaurateurs, the winner of the 2004 Catey for Independent Restaurateur, and co-owner of five award-winning restaurants, including the Square and Chez Bruce. His businesses have total annual sales of £13.2m, employ 220 people and serve about 190,000 customers a year. Yet his name is barely known outside the industry. So how did a former City lawyer and banker with no industry experience come to run a group of restaurants with five Michelin stars between them? And what is the secret of his success?
In his chinos, sports jacket and steel-framed glasses, the slightly built 51-year-old is the epitome of the modern successful businessman. He has come prepared for our meeting at the newly refurbished Square in Mayfair with notes and piles of paperwork that he checks names and dates against as we talk. So it's something of a leap to imagine this serious, considered man arm-wrestling Marco Pierre White in the early hours of the morning after dinner at Lampwick's, a now long-forgotten restaurant in Battersea where White was working back in 1986.
"We were very competitive but Marco always won," recalls Platts-Martin with a rueful smile. "He didn't do anything unless he knew he would win. We started eating out together and soon became friends with a shared interest in food."
Platts-Martin had caught the restaurant bug during holidays in France in the early 1980s. "It was the height of nouvelle cuisine and I ate at many great restaurants, such as L'Esperance, Boyer and Georges Blanc. They made a huge impression on me. I collected all the menus and wherever possible I got them signed," he recalls. "I asked for the labels to be removed from the wine bottles and I came back and made collages of them and framed them all. I was terribly nerdy about it."
In 1986 Platts-Martin decided to draw...