What It Takes to Run One of London's Most Popular Pubs

0:02 Bloomberg Audio Studios, Podcasts, Radio News.

0:18 Hello and welcome to another episode of The Odd Lots podcast.

0:21 I'm Joe Wisenthal and I'm Tracy Alloway.

0:23 Today you are going to be treated to a special two part episode. We are here in London and so we wanted to learn about the business of pubs, of course, and so we're bringing you first an interview with famed public in aushin Rogers. He is the co founder of the pub The Devonshire. And then in the second half that will be an interview that was recorded live at a show that we're doing here in London with the chef at The Devonshire, Ashley Palmer Watts.

0:48 Take a listen.

0:50 You know we've talked about this before. Some of my favorite episodes, and I mean that's completely unironically, are when we talked to people in the food service industry in some way, because I truly think that you know what we specialize in, which is sort of where the macro meets the micro, et cetera.

1:07 There are so.

1:08 Many whether it's labor cauts, food cause, consumer sentiment, consumer appetites, et cetera. There's so many things that only someone in that specific industry gets a real view on at any given moment.

1:21 No, totally. Restaurants and food service in general are great microcosms macro trends.

1:27 And so since we're in London, you know a lot of the same restaurants, a lot of the same things.

1:32 But of course there are a lot.

1:34 Of pubs here and we don't have as many in the US, and extimply have them in the US.

1:38 They are not the same.

1:39 They're like fake, right, They're like they're replicas. They're bars that have the esthetics of a pub.

1:46 Can I say one thing? So I woke up this morning and I turned on BBC News and one of the top headlines was two pubs closing every day. And for as long as I can remember, since I came to the UK for university and then stayed for a decade, every year there have been these reports saying that pubs are closing down and it's been going on, I guess for twenty years now. And I'm very curious what is cited as the reason now, because you would feel like the reason pubs are closing in say, two thousand and two versus why they're closing in twenty twenty six would be different. But the trend overall seems to remain the same.

2:26 It seems tough.

2:27 Supposedly gen Z they don't drink as much, which I think, but that can't you know, that doesn't explain why that would have been a trend in say, two thousand and.

2:34 Two, right right, that's my point.

2:36 There was another headline recently apparently a pinint has breached the ten pound mark. In some That was a lot, which is like a big deal. It's just I mean, in New York ten dollars we're used to that, but I guess the ten you know, pounds are worth more pubs that sort of.

2:50 There would have been a riot at my university if anyone tried to charge ten pounds for a pint.

2:55 So anyway, while we're hearing.

2:57 Of course, back then we were all drinking terrible things like Bacardi breezers and things like that. But anyway, carry on.

3:03 You know, my wife she briefly worked at a pub in Ireland and apparently they got really upset with her for the quality. For poor they're like not drinking bat Yeah she did. Anyway, I don't think that lasted very long. Anyway, we're here in London. We got to do a pub episode.

3:17 Let's do it.

3:18 I'm very excited to say, we really do have the perfect guest.

3:22 We're going to be.

3:22 Speaking with one of the most famous, if not the most famous.

3:27 Publican in the UK.

3:29 I don't exactly know what a publican is or what defines a public are.

3:32 We're about to find out.

3:33 I'm about to find out. We're going to be speaking with Aushen Rodgers. He is the co founder of the Devonshire, one of the most popular pubs in the city. We're going to learn all about the pub business. So Aushan, thank you so much for coming on Outlaws.

3:45 Joe, it's great to be here. Thank you so much.

3:48 What is the pub?

3:48 What's the difference? I've flown all the way from New York City to London to ask just one simple question. Then when I get the answer'll be ready to go.

3:55 This is actually an important question.

3:57 What is the difference between a pub and a bar?

3:59 Well, well, everywhere it's got bars, bars, places that people go to drink. You know, there are places for that occasion to just go and drink. But pubs are much more sort of connected into the fabric of British and ours society. I think honestly, they only really work well on these islands. I think what you said is right about the US. Yes, you do have pubs, but they're not the same. I think the pubs have a timelessness.

4:21 A lot of the ones that are really great have been around for a very long time, and they have a function for people to meet in a neutral space where you can actually have drinks, hav a cha, end up meeting people you wouldn't normally hang out with. And they're also a place of chaos and wonder and beauty and a bit of you know, art, and you know it's somewhere you can actually kick your shoes off and really enjoy and not know what's going to happen next, and their placed for great stories.

4:47 Can you explain the sort of landscape of British pubs where you have independent institutions such as your own versus a lot of chains. I was in a Samuel Smith pub the other day barging.

5:00 Yeah.

5:01 Really, punch taverns used to be the big one. I guess Weatherspoons, Oh my gosh, Weatherspoons was a place where I spent a lot of time in the early two thousands. Just to explain how it works, here in terms of ownership.

5:11 So pubs go back at least one thousand years, probably a lot longer than that, where people opened their houses and made ale or sold ale and let people come and kick back and enjoy themselves. I think during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, mostly the brewers started becoming more powerful, so there was lots of regional brewers in all around, and there still are and some of them are still amazing, and they tended to try and buy pubs up so that they could sell their wares through those businesses. And quite a lot of those pub cos in the sort of early twentieth century, you know, right up until the fifties, they'd have a thousand pubs or some had up to three thousand pubs, and that sort of became more commercial.

5:50 In the eighties, those pubs started getting traded as lots and bulk, and then they became like Alli brewers at one stage had six thousand pubs. We still have big operators that come from those wererors, like Stone Gates, like Wetherspoon's. Like you said, you know, we've got smaller ones in London like Fuller's and Young's, and you've got missions and Butler's that own the majority of the successful pubs across the country. Freehouses have always been harder to find and more difficult to run because you don't have the economy of scale. But I love a freehouse and I worked for a long time in the managed house business and it was great to work there too.

6:26 Before we get to your current public, give us a little bit of your history. What were you doing prior to opening the dev.

6:33 Prior to opening the Dev, well, go back to me. I went to university in Dublin in nineteen eighty six. I studied chemistry, physics, supplied mats. I was going to become a food tech engineer. I didn't enjoy university much. Got a job in a pub called the Stag's Head part time, loved that more than anything else. Gave up on university and since then, since nineteen eighty six, I've worked in pubs and in nineteen ninety one had my first pub in London, and I've run a lot of pubs in London in that time. And the Devonshire is the one courgey you open. Devonshire opened in November twenty three, so we're there about two and a half years. But it feels like twenty Oh.

7:08 What was the thinking, because, as you say, opening an independent pub is a pretty big challenge.

7:14 Well, I think the Devonshire might be a little bit more than a pub. We've got this wonderful restaurant upstairs. It's an incredible location, right in the center of the city. I always felt that the West End and the city, while it has some really great pubs, most of them are very small, and a lot of them are not amazingly good. And we wanted to open something that was really attractive, that would make people feel comfortable and safe and happy and have really great products. And we found this great, big site right by Piccadilly Circus and we just turned it into a pub on the ground floor with an amazing restaurant upstairs, and it's been fun.

7:45 I will say the reason I was in a Sam Smith pub last night was because we were waiting for a theater ticket and there weren't a lot of good options. I probably should have gone just a little further to the Devonshire.

7:54 Well, next time, Tracy, you'd be so welcome, be great to see you.

7:56 You mentioned food just then, and this seems to be a key thing in the survival of pubs nowadays, which is if you can tack on gastronomy of some sort and good food, the economics seem to shift quite a lot.

8:09 They completely change, if I'm honest, for lots of reasons. You know, when I go back. You know, twenty years ago, there was very little food in pubs. Everybody smoked in the pubs, and you could smoke at the counter, and the whole place was full of smoke, so you wouldn't consider eating anything. And that gradually changed, so we moved more towards snacks you could eat standing up, and then table meals, and then the gastro pubs start in about nineteen ninety one to ninety five, and that's really become a thing where gastropubs are now really restaurants and there's a sort of a real border so happening between pubs and restaurants where you can do both. They can be very successful because the pub brings people in and people

8:46 can drink before and after the meal in the bar area, and you know, it's a really nice convivial environment. And they're not as codified as restaurants, if you know what I mean. You can sort of they're more Hegel deepiggly, you can sort of get away with a little bit more chaos, and you know it's they're more fun. I think in a lot of ways. You know, you find a great gastrop pub in the country, you're going to want to go back, and the same across London, we've got some amazing ones.

9:08 Wait, just on the history real quickly. Did you say it was more like because of the elimination of indoor smoking that actually created the space for this notion of a guest.

9:19 I would say I.

9:21 Would say that was an economic earthquake for clubs in lots for lots of reasons, because lots of the old drinkers at that time would have stopped coming in because they couldn't smoke indoors, and they would have gone on strike and drank less. So something had to be done. So they needed to attract a new audience. And it was really exciting for people to go back to pubs because your clothes wouldn't smell of smoke anymore. So when you sort of audience started coming in and younger people started drinking in there with an expectation of cocktails and Bacardi breezers like you mentioned earlier, came straight out of that and all those huge drinks and stuff.

9:53 You know.

9:54 So it's always been changing, but at the same time it's always been timeless and the same. We're in the business making people feel comfortable, safe, happy, welcome, well looked after, and people need that and they love it.

10:05 Does anyone still drink snake bites?

10:08 I think, thankfully?

10:10 Not noite.

10:12 It was like this terrible concoction of it was beer and then like some sort of cordial or cider, and then like a sweet thing in current.

10:21 Well, it always worries me that you've beer, which is clear and beautiful and fizzy, and then you cider, which is clear and beautiful and fizzy. You mix the two of them together, it becomes this really cloudy thing that you've got to color it purple with the black current in order to make it sweet enough to drink. I'm certain it's not good for you, and I don't sell very much of it, thankfully.

10:40 There's a good question, and we're not going to name names here. What's a bad pub? You say, like, okay, you said, oh, you looked around, you didn't see many good pubs. What is it you walk into a pub, it's like, this doesn't have it.

10:52 I think there's lots of things. I think how we are made to feel is always an amalgamation of the that we've got. So that's what we hear, what we smell, what we see, what we taste, and what we touch. If you walk into a place and you see that the person who's likely to be serving you is miserable, or the lighting's too bright or too dark, or it sounds wrong, like the music is wrong, or it smells horrid, or something's not quite right in terms of the visual noise that you see, and it's not beautiful, the chances of you having a great time and feeling great are already diminished before you go anywhere near the counter and buy anything. So we always think about those sensual inputs when we're being good in terms of making sure that

11:33 it looks clean and bright and that the staff are in the right mindset to make people feel comfortable in that they're comfortable and safe and happy themselves and well paid. And you know, it's an amalgamation of those things that makes atmosphere, and atmosphere is the key and making sure that that is there, you.

11:49 Know, And I think of pubs, Okay, there's the beer and then there's certain dishes that I associate with pub food, the scoutcheg, the sausage roll, and I'm always fascinated by a lot of In any field, a lot of creativity comes from figuring out what you can do with a certain set of constraints. And I have to imagine that there is a certain you know, you deviate too much, and it's no longer a pub anymore, it's a bar or something like that. What are the constraints with which you feel like you're in a gastro pub where your food and beer or food and alcohol. What are the formal constraints where if you go beyond this, you're something of a ventole.

12:27 But I think it is a really good question. I'm going to answer it by saying it's a kind of a spectrum. So on one end, you've got the codified restaurant where you have to reserve and you sit at a square table and you never talk to anyone else apart from your server and your guest. On the other end, you've got a wet pub that doesn't sell any food at all, and you can just wander in there, have a pint and end up standing anywhere you want. You can't reserve any area, and you can have a drink and stay as long as you want. In between, you've kind of got the gastro pub, which is in the middle.

12:53 Some of it will be reserved for guests and some of it will be chaotic and you can go and have a beer. And there's this whole sliding scale all the way along, and the bit from a good wet pub of good food to a gastropub that is definitely a restaurant is actually really wide, so there's lots of lots of different places you could go in between, so it's really hard to define. And actually I hate the word gastro pub because it no longer means anything because that in that middle of the spectrum is actually so wide that you don't you want to know where that that business is.

13:40 So I take the point there are different formats, so to speak, of pubs, such as ones that just serve drinks and others that serve food. But have you noticed in your decades a publican experience, have you noticed a shift in the way people actually use pubs and why they're there?

13:58 I think so I totally have. I'm going to go back to the smoking ban again, because before the smoking ban, every pub had stools all the way around the bar like you do in the US, Whereas before the smoking band they thought that they could sort of mitigate against it by moving people away from the bar so that the staff wouldn't be breathing the smoke in, and they thought that was going to be okay, and so therefore they didn't allow people to sit at the bar anymore as much. So people sort of retreated away, and I think it became a little less social then, and we're trying to bring that back, so we don't brought all our stools back to the bar, so people are likely to be shoulder to shoulder and chat away and stuff

14:32 like that. I think it's always changing, but it's also always the same. There are places where community gets together. And the great thing about pubs as well is they tend to be very democratic. In other words, you'll get people who can just about afford to have a beer, and you can get people who could buy the whole place, and they can be shoulder to shoulder too and chatting to each other, and there's a kind of a leveling when you're just having a pint. And I've seen it many times where you'll get the guy who's been sweeping the street or cleaning your car or fixing your car are sitting beside a CEO or a judge or you know, a senior leader and they'll have great fun and that doesn't happen in many places, and I think we're really

15:08 proud to be able to do that and have that democracy.

15:11 Let's talk more about the business specifics of the dev You already hinted at it, but till more, let's start with Okay, location, what did you see in this specific spot such that you had this could be an ambitious, big investment.

15:25 Well, I really felt that, you know that democracy of demographic and of age is really important so that you're able to attract everybody. You're right in the middle of central London, literally at Piccadilly. It's about the busiest football place you could possibly find. So we knew the market was there and but what we needed to do was make sure we made a place that people would want to come to as well. So we just did it and we thought about it for a couple of years together, me and Ashley and Charlie, and we were very careful about what our unique selling points would be and we really stuck with those. We also felt that it was important that people would feel that they had value for time and value for money when they came in. So

16:03 as well as being able to spend, you know, two and a half grand on a bottle of two thousand and one shatter of feet, we can still have a pint of beer for four ninety five, so and we stick to that. Now we've got the set menu for twenty nine ninety five or the Scotch egg for four ninety five, which I hope you had last time you were in and you and you can still spend you know, one hundred and fifty quid on an incredible piece of dry aged Scottish beef, which will be amazing. So you've got that whole sort of sliding scale of spend and that's really important to us that people can get in there, have a great time and not spend a lot, but at the same time, if they want to spend a lot, they can and they do.

16:41 Just to be clear, which came first. Was it the building was coming up for sale and so you thought this would be a good opportunity, or was it you wanted to start your own pub and so you went out looking for locations.

16:51 So we were out looking for locations because we wanted to do a pub. We knew we wanted to do a pub with really great food. There are very very few big pubs in central.

17:00 London because it's a very large film.

17:03 Well, The Devonshire as it is, was a pub before it was called the Devonshire right up until two thousand and nine, but it was less than half the size it is now, in fact, probably a quarter of the size. So when that closed down in two thousand and nine, the landlords took the building back and they put it together with the building next door and they knocked it through to turn it into a huge restaurant. And that was Jamie Oliver's first Jamie's Italian, and he was incredibly successful.

17:28 I love Jamie by the way, and he did a fabulous job there up until his business ran away from him a little bit in twenty nineteen and it closed just before the pandemic. So we'd always had our eye on it, hoping that, you know, we could persuade the city to turn it back into a pub and that we might be able to operate it. And that was a big journey for us to make that happen just real quickly.

17:49 Does the city have a finite number of pub licenses or like or is it just it's safe to meet a bar?

17:56 What's It's a very complicated question. Basically, if you have a pub license, you can operate it and obviously trade it and sell it. But in the same location, when pub licenses like the old Devonshire one laps, they're gone. So to apply for a new pub license and be granted it is very unusual, particularly in Westminster, but we managed to make it happen.

18:15 So this is one of the things that always comes up when you see the reports about pub closures in the UK. It's too much tax heavy regulation. Can you walk us through, Like when people say regulatory burden on pubs, what exactly does that mean?

18:29 Well, the biggest regulatory burden we have is licensing, which is obviously for public safety, to make sure that you don't do things like have too many people in open at the wrong time, serve people we are drunk, encourage crime, all of those stuff. But those can be very burdensome in some locations for lots of reasons. You've also got to make sure your neighbors are happy that you don't make too much noise.

18:49 I heard noise ordinances were also, Yeah, there's a.

18:52 Big issue with that, particularly in the suburbs. Outside there's lots of regulations about when you can have deliveries, because of what time they'll come and go, how much noise they'll be, where you store your bins, what time they're collected, how your bottles are handled. There's lots and lots of things.

19:06 But of course, all of these regulations are there for the benefit of our society and our communities, and most of them are great, but some of them can be quite burdensome for businesses.

19:16 I mentioned at the beginning, I really was not trying to put my wife on blast by mentioning that she got.

19:21 Scolded for her pouring.

19:23 But you know, I take it that labor is an important factor, and skilled labor is an important factor.

19:29 Absolutely talk to us about like.

19:31 The market for that, and the supply and the ease with which one can hire. Not just a bartender is capable of the poor, but someone who's happy and someone who if you put such an emphasis on making the customers feel welcome and warm and so forth, what does that look like today?

19:48 We really look for people who will feel comfortably in our environment. So people who've got great skills at relating to others, great skills at wooing people to have a nice time, people who will work hard and you know, are a to believe what we believe. In terms of.

20:02 Hard to find.

20:03 If I like, if you found a skilled bartender today, would you be like, yeah, come in.

20:08 Absolutely will we find ourselves quite lucky. And anecdotally, I don't see that issue that people keep saying that young people don't want to work. Our best workers are between eighteen and twenty three years old. We've got a dozen amazing examples of that, who are so reliable, so hard working, incredibly happy, very efficient, and thankfully really well looked after by us. And I'm really proud of that, and it's great and some a lot of my colleagues in town and some of the better restaurants are saying the same thing, that the kids really are.

20:37 All right, How competitive is your pay in the world of pubs to this point? And then also were you affected by Brexit at all in terms of your labor supply?

20:47 I think breaks Up was once again a little bit of a shock in that we did lose a lot of our sort of casual Italian, French, German, Spanish and Greek team. A lot of those who were able to apply at the time for our right to remain and stay, and a lot of them did, but a lot of we lost a few, but then the tap turned off to them. However, we are finding that there are other nationalities and other channels of people coming through, and a lot of our very best employees are British now and we're very proud of that.

21:20 The ten dollars ten the ten pound punt, what's going on there with that? And is it just a few locations and what are you seeing pricing work?

21:29 I think prices have gone up, and that's gone up because of the cost of production, the cost of transport, the cost of the raw materials, the cost of everything going on ahead. But I think it's rising at the same steepness that it always has. And I can never remember a year when public house people, you know, put people all got together and said, oh, we've been amazing.

21:49 It's smashed it this year. It's always there's always an element of gloom and gloom, and you know, I try to avoid it as much as I can, and we try to give people great value for money. We keep a point on this lesson a fiver always. Our biggest seller's Guinness, which is seven twenty. Now I think that's fair, but I think it's true. You can if you want to go and find a pint for ten pounds. But is that the place you're going to really want to drink?

22:11 I don't think so.

22:12 How does it work with your suppliers? How much pricing power or negotiating power do you actually have when you're putting in orders for your drinks.

22:19 So what we try and do, and I think what most of the industry does, is to fix our prices for a long period of time. Okay, so we'll know what volume we're going to do, We'll speak to load of suppliers and tender are purchasing, they'll come back to a suite of price. We'll make a decision and then we can do the budget. We try and keep it as simple as that. And you know, with some of our suppliers, we're fixed more or less now for three years.

22:40 So I'm pretty happy with that.

22:41 On Guinness specifically, go on.

22:44 People are very weird about, Oh, you can't get a good Guinness in the United States, So then you're in London. You can't get a good guinness in London. I can never know of this, just like one of these things that's in people's head, etc. Where do you stand on the question of is one even capable of getting a good guinness?

23:03 Like within is there a.

23:04 Certain diameter around Ireland in which the quality of your guinness pour is declined?

23:10 All of the guinness in the UK now is made in Dublin. It's exactly the same as what you get in Dublin when it arrives in the pub. However, there's probably thirty variables that can make a difference as to what it tastes like when it gets to the glass and you.

23:24 Taste it okay.

23:25 So in order to get those thirty variables spot on is really.

23:28 Really what are some of the key.

23:31 The temperature of the keg, the temperature of the room it's in the width of the line it comes through, the mixture of gas that you push it through with the temperature of the cooler, the speed it comes through the line, the kind of top you've got, how clean your glass is, Lots and lots of You.

23:46 Do a lot of testing on these things, and like all day like talk to about as someone who at one point went into vision and going into food science. Talk a little bit about that science. How you figured out for the dev the optimal temperature could mix of gas and so forth.

24:05 Is what we actually do. I've been selling guinness for forty years, so I knew that most of the way it's done in the UK is different and not necessarily the best way, all right. So when I was before we did the Devonshire, me and my business partners went to Dublin and we spent some time having a look around.

24:21 So we went into the cellars where the beer was being stored, and we had a look at the temperatures, the pressures, the gas they were using the night to time they left it to sit, how wide the lines were, what temperature the coolers were, how quick it was coming through at the top. We looked at the nozzles, the taps and all of that, and we did a big study on the best way to do it, and we put together our way of doing it, which might not be exactly this way anyone else does, but somehow it works.

24:47 And people think our guinness tastes great, and I'll believe that if they tell me so. I'm very pleased about it.

24:52 Can you explain I guess from a cultural perspective why the pouring of a pint looms so large in the UK psyche because this is something like you don't really have this in the US, right, Like people are not going to complain that, like the phone.

25:09 Yeah, well, I'll tell you what I think it is. I think it goes back to that timelessness and that there's a performance that happens behind a bar. If you think of the best pubs you've ever seen, the bar is always kind of in the space where you can see it from everywhere, so it becomes like a stage in a theater, and the staff are like the players.

25:29 So the customers want to know that they're doing their very best and that they can talk about something that's banal and won't cause offense. So the great thing about talking about your guinness with someone you don't know is you know you're not going to fall out because you're not going to get into any political territory. You're not going to talk about religion or race or anything like that.

25:49 You can go, well, I know a place where there's slightly better one, and they do this, and I can split the g and this tastes really great, and this is my favorite one. And it's kind of a gorgeous, beautiful, banal, sociable thing to be able to banter about and know that you're not going to cross any red lines and know that you're going to have a fun time. And I think that's really important. There's both the theatrical and performance part, and then there's a sociable part. It's a really lovely thing to be able to talk about.

26:14 I think British people also love to complain and so and I can say that because I'm married to a britt but like having something to unite around and complain about.

26:24 Yeah, that makes sense.

26:24 It's such a like talk to anyone. You're never going to get in too much of a fight, is never going to be too much.

26:31 You know.

26:32 I've literally never seen someone fall out of a bit of guinness or a conversation about guinness. It's always fun.

26:38 Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. So, speaking of speaking, as I've gotten older, I've become very sensitive to loud places. I walk by a place so there's booming music, I'm like, I don't want to walk into there, obviously, I want to have a conversation with someone talk to us about sound design and building an environment that is conducive to a conversation.

27:01 I think that's really important for pubs, and I have a particular view on this that people might not always agree on. I don't think that having sports and TVs in traditional pubs is a good idea. I also don't think that having background music on speakers is a good idea. Some do, some do, and some disagree with me. But for me, I think it's best to leave it out.

27:22 And I think that the sound you should hear is the sound of convivial chat in the background and the you know, the clink of glasses and people having fun, and I think that's a very calming sound to have. And we think also really carefully about how sound would travel through through a space. I think the very best pups, and particularly the old ones, if you look at them, they've got screens and little places you can hide, and sort of textured wallpapers on the ceilings and on the on the walls, so the sound doesn't bounce around as much.

27:53 It's a much more dead space. And they use really thick old carpets as well, so that you know, you can have a private conversation you can't be overheard, and there's places you can hide and places you can sort of not be seen, and I think that's really important. And you know having you know a lot of sometimes places are great, big square boxes where if you say something, the sound travels everywhere, and we really avoid that in our design.

28:16 I love pubs with little like hidden nooks and crannies. There's a great one which I recommended to one of our producers yesterday, the chesh or Cheese just down Fleet Street.

28:26 It's a great post.

28:26 I love that place with all the little rooms and things. So, you know, we mentioned the headlines about pubs closing. Can you diagnose the problem here, like if you had to give us a summary of what exactly is going on?

28:39 What is it?

28:39 I think a lot of it is down to historical stuff. The pub was, you know, one hundred years ago, the place where people spend all of their leisure time, whereas leisure time is now being carved up with sport, with live music, with concerts, with TV.

28:56 With you can do that at a pub.

29:00 Yeah, But I think the best pubs are up there fighting alongside it for those occasions. And I think we're entering a golden age for pubs, because you know, while the world is saying that we're all going to move into this two dimensional AI space where we'll be, you know, playing games and looking at stuff on screens, I can see anecdotally the people are coming in and really loving the shared experience of the chaos, of being in a room full of other humans. And I think that that's going to translate into all sorts of stuff like sport, into being able to go to musical concerts, into going to the zoo or you know, spending time in spaces with real people. It's far more exciting than what everybody's

29:43 banging on about with AI.

29:45 Don't the Sam Smith Pubs. I'm sorry to keep going on about that, but don't they ban phones?

29:50 Or they certainly do. And that's a really interesting company I'm worth digging into because all Humphrey Smith, who runs that firm, is a bit like Willy Wonka in a good way. And all of their beers, you know, they still make themselves. They make their own voca, they buffle their own wine, they they take It's a really closed company and very interesting.

30:10 One of the things you hear is that young people don't drink as much as the older generations do. Another pretty contemporary trend that is not young people per se is the rise of golp ones and which they supposedly also curtail people's desire to drink alga.

30:28 I can't imagine guinness is an attractive proposition if you're taking a zampa.

30:32 Yah think so.

30:33 But what are you seeing in terms of like consumer tastes among newer younger people right now?

30:38 I think this whole story that young people don't drink has been massively exaggerated. I see loads of people, you know, between eighteen and twenty five still piling in and you know, having pints and having fun in the same way as I did when when I was that age. And yeah, maybe they are overall drinking a little bit less and maybe being a bit more hell, which is a great thing, but they certainly enjoy a few beers. And I think if you if you start off in business thinking, oh, young people don't drink anymore, so I'm not going to look after him, they certainly are not going to come in.

31:11 I think we need to look after those guys and make sure that they feel comfortable and safe and keep the pub as a center of community for them. So that they can use it in the same way we did.

31:21 This is a very cliche journalistic question, but what's the hardest part of running a pub?

31:27 The hardest part, I think is deciding you're going to do it, because if you do it and you do it well, it's it's a real vocation and you do it all the time. It's not a part time doing. I never turn off, so I spend six or seven days a week in the pub. I'll be there at least a few hours a day, sometimes the whole day.

31:46 And to do it well, I think you've got to be there.

31:48 What are you doing when you're there, like when you when you're on site, what's what are you doing?

31:52 Is it management?

31:54 Yelling at people?

31:57 Don't We don't yell, but no it does. We've got one hundred and sixty five staff, so just meeting and looking after them and making sure they're feeling good is a really great thing. I ubsess about details, about making sure that everything is clean and there's no visual noise around the place, and that people know to keep that stuff correct. I'm always looking at, you know, paintwork and finishes and where stuff is placed and making sure things are like that. But to me, it feels a little bit.

32:25 Now I've moved on in my career, it feels more like conducting an orchestra so I can see what everybody's doing. I love catching my team doing things correctly and right. I love them going above and beyond. And I just love working with these brilliant people that I work with. So, you know, I just spending time with people. This is what I've put my life to and it's really great.

32:46 Sorry, I'm laughing because I'm thinking about the story that you told about your wife not being able to pour a pint, And can I tell you.

32:53 That was not her fault, because because if she had been properly shown how to do it, then that would not have happened.

33:01 Ye.

33:02 I think you're just thrown in there.

33:03 We absolutely this.

33:04 Is exactly what I was going to say. So my husband very briefly worked as a bartender at Weatherspoon's, got zero training, was basically thrown into it, and made all sorts of mistakes, including pouring everyone like the top shelf gin before he was actually told about the cheap stuff, and also mixing up hoisin and barbecue sauce at one point and things like that. But what I was going to ask, actually working in pubs or restaurants is sort of a notoriously pressurized environment and sometimes kind of an abusive environment. Has your management style changed at all over the years. Do you find the way you manage people now is different to what you would have been doing in the nineteen nineties or early two thousands.

33:46 I don't think it's markedly different, But I am super aware that managing people well and making sure that they feel empowered and that they know what's going on and that they feel comfortable, safe and happy is everything. Because when our employees feel that, I know that the business accelerates, and that has been really what I've concentrated on in terms of having seen you know, unpleasant things in the past and kitchens and around once again, thankfully not in my places, but certainly I think there was a lot of that around, and I hope there's not much of it about now.

34:23 Just you know, just on the business question having started, you know, the inflation that happened in twenty twenty one twenty two, explode it everywhere. Yeah, you mentioned that you're always going to have a pint that's under five quid, but talk to us just about like when you think about menu design, or when you think about beer selection, or just when you think about the business in general managing a pub today with today's raw input prices, etc.

34:52 Versus say, if we had been having this conversation in the mid twenty times or in the mid nineties, Like, how different is it because of the reality of just the high cost of anything.

35:01 I think football is hard. It has been hit in the most inputs and that's a big killer. I think if you're selling hundreds of pints a day, you're not so much worried about the margins. Okay, And you know, I'd like to I always have flipped on its head for us and that we've always gone for volume. So when we're full, we're not so worried. Yes, of course our costs are really I but you know when you have margin that it kind of balances itself out.

35:28 And what's the key in a business? Finding a business partner?

35:31 This is always a really difficult thing in any business, right going into business with someone or two people, or finding the right investor that will be aligned time wise and margin wise and return wise. Having done this, now, what are some of the important things to know for whether it's a pub or even anything. I thought, the type of person you're willing to go into business.

35:52 I would say, don't go into business with someone who has got the same skills as you, because because you will both be doing the same thing, you need to find someone who's completely different skills to you. And in the case of me, Ashley and Charlie, it's a perfect example. Charlie is a big picture guy. He's set up his own restaurant chain, Flat Arn and was incredibly successful there.

36:15 He thinks really from the top down. He's very commercial, he's brilliant in meetings when it comes down to the financial side of things, and great like that. We've got Ashley, who spent twenty years working alongside the best chef in the world, earned five Micheline stars in that time. His attention to detail on the food and product and purchasing side his second to none. And he's also a wonderful guy and I think you're going to be speaking to you, which is great. He has the best palette for tasting things I've ever seen. He knows ingredients inside and out, and he was able to really choose dishes that we could do all year round so we don't have to change them so we don't have to be seasonal like

36:57 everybody else, and that makes a big difference on the impact of cost. And then there's me, who's the you know, front of house guy. I'll front the business, talk to everybody, operate the thing. So we're like three corners of a working triangle. And for me that has been unbelievable. And you know, we do have some similar skills, you know, in terms of the business, but the main ones are all very very far apart, and that has made us really strong.

37:25 This is actually the perfect segue into the next segment of our conversation and our next guest. But one other thing I would love to ask, and I apologize in advance for asking it so directly, but what are the margins actually like for a pub like yours?

37:39 We're pretty happy, I think, I'm because we're a private business and we don't necessarily have to say, well, I'm going to keep that discreet. But we're certainly at a similar level to the marketplace, if not maybe a little bit higher. And I think good pubs are still converting at you know, between fifteen and twenty five percent. But you know, it's a great position to be in if we were.

38:03 At the hush. Thank you so much for coming on oud Lost. That was great, Joe.

38:07 I'm absolutely delighted to be on the podcast. I listened to it all the time and seeing and hearing your voice at the same time. Same for you, Tracy has been a great pleasure. So thank you so much for having me on it.

38:18 I'm glad we made this happen.

38:19 Yeah, cheers Puddy.

38:35 All right, So that was our conversation recorded in our London studio with Oishen Rogers.

38:40 And now you're going to hear our live episode recorded with chef Ashley Palmer Watts.

38:45 I love the Devon sure, by the way, it's a great spot.

38:47 That's a good start.

38:50 Now I'm going to ask you to expose your trade secrets and give us, in the most excruciating detail possible, the conditions to serve the perfect pint of Guinness.

39:02 How long do we have so pre the pub I asked my now partner Oshen what we're all the myths busted and what were the truth and he said, look, it's going to take an hour. We don't have an hour. I'm going to top line it for you. Basically, it starts with obviously the beer coming in, and then you need to let it settle and you need to bring the temperature down really I mean slowly, but I mean it takes a couple of days. Okay, So it'll come into the sort of corridor. I mean, we sell a lot, so we've not got enough space. So it's everywhere. Every door you open it, it's there. It sits in the corridor, comes gently down. Then it goes under the street and the sort of okas in there and it comes down.

39:44 That's all chilled. That comes down. Then it goes into the cellar, so about two days later, okay. Then it then sits there, doesn't get disturbed again until you tap it and you start serving it. The pipes from the cellar to the tap are the shortest it can possibly be from the cellar to upstairs, so it's directly underneath the bar. Then you have the right circumference of the pipe to allow the right flow.

40:12 Okay.

40:13 Then it's about pressure.

40:14 Okay, it's not pressure.

40:15 You need to put pressure enough pressure through to pour it in about thirteen fourteen seconds up to the top of the harp, and then you have that ninety second rest on the font. The pressure of the gas there's two gases. There's nitrogen and CO two. Now in Ireland they do an eighty twenty eighty nitrogen twenty CO two.

40:36 In England we're kind of made to buy a pre mixed gas which is seventy five twenty five. We actually mix our own and our own little magic number is eighty two eighteen. And then from there it's about the type of there's a little plate in the poorer with five tiny holes like pin holes, and depending on which one of those you choose gives you your texture. And then it's a balance, so it's pressure, gas, miss temperature and time. And then trying to get everyone to follow that and really understand it and respect that. And there you go.

41:12 That was awesome.

41:17 Can I just say this seems like a lot of work? Okay, I asked you're a partner this question, but I would be curious to get your thoughts as well. And I'm going to play the role of like ignorant American hero. But why does pouring a good pint loom so large in the British consciousness? Because in the US, you know, if someone hands us a bottle of bud light, we don't really complain that much. Maybe we should.

41:41 I guess it's quicker. I suppose, but I mean, you know, the thing about pubs is they're so they're so British. It's part of our heritage that I think it is for literally everyone, right, it doesn't matter who you are, how rich you are, how poor you are, what you're there for, whether it's catching up with friends, or you're sad or you're happy or or whatever, or just on your own with your own thoughts in your head. I think you know it's about taste and appreciation. And I often ask myself why is it that we love beer so much? And I don't know the reason, because you know, you can only drink so many before you fall over.

42:16 So that's maybe that's the lovely tension between the two.

42:20 Let's just stick it on the technical questions for a moment. How did you figure this out? So like okay, like you've you've optimized something. How did you go from okay, you're going to start a pub. It's going to be a big investment up front. You want to get it just right. Was there ab testing? Was there taste testing?

42:38 Like?

42:39 What does that process look like of making sure that the final mix of guess everything that you know you have it right.

42:45 Well, I would say it's probably not finished, and okay, i'd say the reason why the question comes and I'm a good friend of mine who's very, very clever. He's an American guy scientist, food scientist. We're actually talking to him at the moment about the solubility of those gases in the liquid. So at the end of the night, the gases are turned off on those kegs, okay, And what that means is that if you leave the pressure on, the solubility takes too much of that gas into the beer.

43:15 The beer becomes too foamy and too frothy. But my question to him was, and we don't know the answer yet. He's coming back in June and we're going to try and figure this out with Osh as well, is that as the volume of beer in the keg reduces the relative gas saturation to it could be have a sliding scale of the solubility. But then there's the thing of saturation of the solubility of the gas. So it's a really complicated thing, probably a little bit above my understanding.

43:46 But we're never happy just going you know what, that's finished. And I think that's key with anything to do with the restaurant.

43:54 But you get to do lots of taste testing as you go along.

43:57 Well. To be fair, yeah, it's not a bad place to be at work.

44:02 Okay, So I know you've been at a bunch of different restaurants, including famously the chef at The Fat Duck with Heston Blument. Thought when you go around about setting up a menu, when you first like go to the drawing board and say this is what we want our menu to be, how important are the actual economics and the price points? Like would you say, this dish sounds phenomenal and I would like to do it, but actually the unit economics don't really work for it.

44:30 When I joined oshin Charlie, originally they just wanted one recipe of a dish that we used to serve in break. I said, yeah, there's no problem, I can you know, you can have it. It's fine. I said, look, you know, why don't we Why don't we make something synonymous with the pub? And it was more about creating things. The economic side is really really important, but it's more about what is it you're coming to experience? What are you going to feel? What are we what are we doing for you? Why are you coming to us? So after the hour's guinness chat, we then brought guinness into the beef cheek and so were pudding and finished the sauce with some guinness, and it became synonymous with the pub.

45:10 The process of the menu. They had an idea of the framework of what this menu would be. I came in quite late, obviously, you just over a year before we opened.

45:20 And what year did it open for those?

45:22 They November twenty three, okay, so November twenty two we started talking and then in January twenty three we sat down in Oshine's flat in Soho and we just talked about food for three days straight. And it was based around that framework. So we went through and there are a few things that were left off and a few things that were added in. And I sort of was the conduit of almost like two parents, input on what they loved and what they didn't love about certain things of what this thing could be, you know. So you know, we wanted to do a scollop dish and if we could buy scollops from this diver up in Scotland, and I don't know, well, maybe we'll make our own bacon and maybe if we could use malt vinegar somehow. So

46:07 I would distill this down into a plan at my sort of twenty five years, thirty years experience in creating things, but then creating things that we could replicate on large numbers. You know, we'll do six hundred and fifty covers today in the restaurant, for example. So it's great making it for fifty, but you need to do it for a large volume. So that's really where there's a lovely tension between that.

46:31 Actually talk more about that.

46:33 I'm sort of fascinated by the idea of Okay, you have a recipe, it might be good, but that doesn't necessarily mean it's going to be able to scale for and do it in volume. I still like, in my mind, I don't understand how restaurants work. How do they get so much food.

46:48 Out so fast?

46:49 I don't really understand how steakhouses were talk to us about building the repetition process.

46:55 Yeah, so I mean it's about experience. Experience and knowledge. Yeah, is probably the most powerful thing that you that you gain for your career. You know, you think you know everything at twenty five, reality is twenty years later, you know a lot more. I think it's about understanding how things work and where mistakes can happen, where gaps are that allow those mistakes to happen, and fixing the root cause.

47:17 So reducing down mistakes gives you greater consistency. So when I am building recipes around a dish, you want to put as much measurable control in there as possible. Clear, simple, step by step approach. You know, no information is stupid, really because you don't want to assume that people know something that you don't make clear to them in the first place. And then it's about you know, for example, that all the beef that we have, we have a room probably a bit bigger than this stage, where all the beef is aged downstairs. We have a grill in one of the dining rooms called the grill room, and we burn oaken beach in a mass of kiln. It runs at eight nine hundred degrees. We knock the wood down into embers and then we lift them onto the

48:06 ember beds and we cook at different heights and temperatures. And so you can cook the whole way. You know, if you wanted a medium steak or a medium you know, beef chop, you could do that the whole way. But it would be a much more gentle process, slower because you've got to allow that heat to transfer it. We've set it up slightly differently. We cook very quickly and quite hot, so that we create the crust, we create the seer. Then it goes on to the next person which is in the kitchen, and they control medium, medium, well, medium, rare, rare, and they look after it from there. Because to do that for this many covers all the way on the grill would be impossible. You'd need a grill five times the size.

48:48 Joe, why did we decide to record this conversation at dinner time? I know you were talking about beef just then, and clearly earlier in the conversation we were talking about higher beef prices. How much of an issue is that for someone who is actually serving that meat at the restaurant.

49:05 Yeah, I mean it is a challenge. I mean it went up quite a lot over the last couple of years.

49:09 Yeah, and you specialize in beef, you have a whole room dedicated.

49:12 It doesn't come down. Yeah, nothing ever comes down, to be fair. Occasionally fish will come down, but you know, pretty much, you know, we're now seeing the effects like the guys were saying earlier. You know, the fuel and prices are going up, you know, another thirty p on a scollop. It's quite a lot, you know. I think you've just got to be clever. I mean, we buy direct from avatoires because of the scale that we can and Charlie's relationships with different beef producers. But it's about having an entry level. So we use skirt steak, you know, which is on our twenty nine pounds menu for three courses steak and chips, prawn, cocktail, and then stick it toffee.

49:48 And it's about utilizing the right cut at the right price for accessibility and a sort of anyone can come to our restaurant. It's not expensive. But then you can come and spend one hundred pound on a beef chop, for example. So there's that, there's that range, you know, it's it's it's top and bottom.

50:05 Wait this actually we were I forget who we were talking about this earlier, but we need to clear something up.

50:11 Is it true?

50:12 Oh this was with Franz see last morning.

50:14 Is it true that it's a really bad idea to order the second most expensive wine on the menu. This is the thing that they always say the dad is there for suckers and the that's the one at the highest margin. Can you talk about wine pricing, Is it true that you're afforded by the second most expensive line.

50:29 Well, I'm sure in some places he could be right, but I mean I can only talk about you know what we do, and you know, we have a nice list and it does range, but it really does focus on that entry level. So instead of you know that old thing of you know, having your house wine and it's the cheapest one and no one orders it because it's the cheapest one and go for the other one, we actually what we want to watch his friends in Portugal and he makes our Devonshire wine. Now it's not a house wine. It punches a little bit higher up the list than that, but the prices are down where house wines are because we don't want to penalize people for coming in an entry level. But I think when you construct the wine list, the higher you go up

51:11 in the value, the sort of better value you get, the margins are less. We don't apply a whole you know, three or four times across the whole thing, and you know, hope for the best. It's you want to be smart. You want to reward people and encourage people to drink better.

51:26 How do you actually source drink better? That's right? How to source new wine or new ingredients? New suppliers? Are people pitching to you all the time? Do they come to the Devonshire and they're like, we have some great scallops from you know, the following origin at this particular price, or do you go out and try to find them.

51:45 A bit of both, but I mean a lot of supplies. When you do sweet to someone, you say, you know, are you sure you can do the volume? Yeh yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, we're going to need like three thousand scallops a week. Yeah, yeah, it's not a problem. And then you order three thousand and they're like, you actually do want that. I'm like, of course, I'm not trying. I'm not telling you three thousand to get them tenp cheaper. It's you know, it's all about paying the right price, a fair price for the best quality, and that's what we're about. You know, if you're trying to drive the price down on everything all the time, you're never going to have the best relationship with the people that either are farming it, catching

52:23 it and giving.

52:25 It to you wit.

52:25 Actually this is this is really interesting about that relationship. How often are suppliers changing. You know, like when you come to an agreement with a supplier, Let's say, okay, you find your skellup provider who can deliver that volume.

52:41 Do you lock it in?

52:42 Do you say, okay, we're going to do this for six months? Is it for a week? We come to an agreement, maybe you come to a price.

52:48 What is the duration of that agreement.

52:50 I mean it varies massively. You know the scallops for example, it was last week you know, the fuel went up and you know, I'm going to have to put you know, thirty pence on at into the guys on before me. You know, we listen to those guys. So when it comes down again, you know, fair is fair. But I think there are people out there that take the opportunity and you know, exploit that a little bit. I would say, we like to build relationships that last and mean something, and we bring a lot of our supplies in to the Devonshire. Most people come and enjoy it as a place to come and you just hope that you have this really great honesty and integrity with these guys. And that everything's fair.

53:46 The Bear has taught me that every restaurant is always, you know, one disaster away from absolute chaos and probably bankruptcy and failure. When something does happen, first of all, you have to say whether or not you think the Bearer is a realistic take on the show, if you've seen.

54:04 It, yeah.

54:05 But secondly, when something does happen, like if a supplier fails to deliver, or if you know you expect to get I don't know, a load of spinach one week and it shows up and it's terribly wilted and you can't use it. What happens? How do you respond to those kind of issues?

54:22 Generally? I mean, I let the team deal with most of it, but it's not nastari right, but with the caveat that when when I step in, or Off steps in or Charlie steps in, you know, it's pretty serious. And if it's repeated, there's always going to be mistakes. It's how we rectify those and make sure that it doesn't happen again or we minimalize that. But I always keep a you know, keep an eye on the messages that are going between all the top chefts. I call them that we've got a group called the top Dogs in the in the kitchen, and you step in when you need to step in. Eno if I only need to phone this fish supplier or whatever. You know, it's a serious conversation. But it's not. I don't blast them

55:01 down the phone. It's just like, hey, look what is going on? And there's often you know, there's two sides to everything, and you know, it's just the way it is. In terms of the Bear, I've not really got past episode two.

55:14 Probably too close to home.

55:16 No, I don't know. I think this there's one of these things. I mean, it'd be like these guys watching a trading film, you know, or a rain driver watching a Formula one film. It's it's never going to be one hundred as it is, but I mean, you've got to make something that people are going to be interested in and watch, and that's going to be sensationalized and it's going to be dramatic. And but restaurants are hard pubs are you know, we're in a hard business.

55:41 Do you yell as much as the chef's on the Bear?

55:44 I I don't yell, to be honest. It's much better to be silent and you know, you have the gratask, but I try and I try and do things a different way, encourage people to you know, you get young chefs are a little bit afraid when you're to need. I can't compute why. I just want to make them happy and do a great job, which is what we're all about, all right.

56:07 I totally believe you that it's now. I totally believe you that you know you want the menu. Do you want to be accessible to rich and poor, and that you want fair relationships or fair agreements all this stuff. You want to be accessible. It's part of the ethos of the pubs in general, et cetera. Okay, all that being said, it's some there have to be times where okay, your prices, your suppliers prices go up, so you have to raise menu prices. Right, how do you decide when to make that decision? This is the question that like people from the Bank of England might be listening because they're trying to understand about how much inflation pricing power retail establishments have. How do you think about when that

56:49 to make that decision? It is like, you know what, we're going to have to adjust to higher.

56:52 Prices we've we've only done it once on a few things really since we opened. Yeah, wow, yeah, we operate slut. We're not a massive group. We're not run by the account's department. We're run by giving people the best time. What do we think that we can that's acceptable to pass on it? And it won't be at the rate of inflation. Some things haven't changed, but it's you know, can we put fifty pence on a side order? You know it's ten percent, but it's ten percent over two and a half years and that probably won't change this year either. How do we become more clever with our purposing?

57:25 Do we need to look at it? How can we be more efficient in production? How can we waste less? You know, these are all things. How can we look at labor in a slightly different way? You know, if we make this small change and someone come, we have two people in at six o'clock instead of one at five and one at seven, is that more productive when it comes to making bread for example. So it's really not run on that economic side. It's more about what are we comfortable charging for that? And we never want to be thought of as expensive or you know, exclusive or excluding people from in.

58:01 That's interesting. So some of the most important lovers you have to offset higher costs don't have anything to do with actually raising menu prices. No talk to us about I don't know if you like this label or not, but the rise of the gastropub in the UK, because it does feel like you have this sort of division now between pubs that are all liquid, that don't sell food except for bags of like Walker crisps or something, and they're not doing very well, they're closing a lot, and then you have the successful pubs and all of them seem to serve food.

58:33 Yeah, I mean, you know there's a big range there. I mean, wet lead pubs are really popular. You know, our local is in Sohome and it's really busy. It's a great place to go, but it's really kind of old fashioned in a way. I think the danger is when you have people driving the economics of menus. Examples, purchasing departments are dictating to you know, maybe small, mid large groups that have let's say chefs that run the kitchen with some sort of autonomy, but actually they're being told what to have and actually this comes from a central kitchen. And I do understand it. I'm lucky I don't live in that world. It would be very painful, i'd imagine, and probably not how a real chef would want to do it. And I think those things are

59:24 very difficult because it's easy to cut quality, cut cost, put the price up and none of that. That's the race to the bottom. But I think depending on who those people are and how your little microclimate of a business is, it's hard to fight against that when you're just a chef, when you've got a big group and you've got a board and returns, etc. So we're lucky we're not in that at the moment and we will never be, which is good. And that's the way we focus on why people want to come to us, and that's why we've got six hundred and fifty people in for dinner, lunch and dinner today. They want to be there, it's the right price and they have a great time.

1:00:02 We make them feel good.

1:00:03 Is there a difference between just sort of you know, conceptually or menu design or anything between, or you know, how you think about the business of a true local where everywhere it's the same people day in and day out, and it's their pub versus a place such as yours, where yes, of course you have regulars, but also you're going to have people who are just only going to be there one time in their life.

1:00:26 Yeah.

1:00:27 I mean, the one surprising thing with the Devonshire is I thought there wouldn't be this local thing, you know, because it's London, it's busy, you wouldn't see this like us. There are so many locals that come, you know, as part of our inner circle, but then also customers from all over the country, from Europe that even Australia the first place they come when they come here. Every year they come to Devonshire, so I consider them a local when they come, you know, when they can only come once or twice a year. They're in as well, and I think it's about a real eclectic bunch of cool people that just want to have a bit of escapism time.

1:01:06 You know.

1:01:07 Wait, how are the locals getting reservations? Because consistently, because when I told everyone we were going to interview you, the first question they had was, oh, can he like get us into the Devonshire.

1:01:18 Yeah, it's a bit of a tricky one this Well, the best way is the book online. We release tables every Thursday at ten thirty in the morning. We release a whole week's worse than three weeks, but you need to be ready, card ready, et cetera, et cetera. If you can't do that, we do take about hundred walkings a day, which is quite a lot, you know. So if people are patient, they're polite to the team, you know, they're happy to have a drink, wait ten to fifteen minutes.

1:01:44 We will take as many people as we possibly can. We hate saying no, so those that persist a little bit more than others, they do get in.

1:01:52 We recorded earlier with your co founder Ushin, and he told us to ask you this question. And I'm not sure he thought we were actually going to ask you it, or if you meant for us to actually ask you it live on stage, but I'm going to give it a go. He said that we should ask you about gifts for the guys from Apple while you were at the Fat Duck.

1:02:12 Oh yeah, Oh, that's a good one. She loves all the he loves all the stories, right, and I think that's a big part of what we do is about storytelling. We'll come back to that on the menu. What was it? I was in the office one day I was in Bray. So we have this corner office, Fat Ducks over there, Hindsight's there, the Crowns down there, and we got a call in from Johnny. I's pa saying, listen, Johnny's just finishing his British holiday. He's going back on his private jet where we would buy some food from Dinner by Heston, which was my restaurant in London, the Hindsight, and we serve it on the plane on the way back, and we're like, yeah, why not, let's let's do it. So I had about a week and a half and I

1:02:55 thought one of our famous dishes at dinner is called a meat fruit, which is from the fifteen hundreds when Victorians used to make meat and fish look like fruit, so when you cut into it, something else. So we put a duck liver pathe inside a mandarin jelly and it even had the dimples on and everything, the most incredible texted path. But of course it was an orange.

1:03:16 So I thought it would be amazing if we could make an apple, and so went into the development kitchen. I had one guy working with me on a day to day basis. I said, look, we've got to make an apple in a week and a half and it's going to be served on this plane for Johnny if this is going to be brilliant. But as you know, apple, as soon as you cut into it, it discolors, the oxidizes.

1:03:38 So how do you make a really green apple that doesn't taste oxidized or look oxidized? Anyway, we made this thing look like a Granny Smith with even the air bubbles, like the little sort of dots on it. And so I sent five oranges and one apple in the middle, and I thought, this is it. He's going to be on the phone going, this is blowed brilliant. You need to come out see Apple. Didn't hear a word. So I'll see them one day.

1:04:06 Maybe one day he'll come on. If he ever comes on our podcast.

1:04:10 We'll go back to the menu thing when we were doing this. When you construct your menu and you lay out your stall of your restaurant and what you want to give people, it's really important to look at ten fifteen things that you really want to drive home. So there's a bakery downstairs, you know, for the bacon sandwich which is on the bar menu. We make the bread, we make the bacon, we make the butter. That's a great little story and it's not groundbreaking or anything, but most people aren't doing that, so it becomes real. There becomes this value in the storytelling that you're actually doing.

1:04:46 It's no good making up fake things that you don't do because you will get caught. But it's about what are those stories?

1:04:53 Yeah, I can't imagine there are many places making their own butter and making their own bag and you're talking about the designing of the apple and the oranges. Truly remind me of a question I wanted to ask in the pub context, how much creativity can you have in the food beyond, which is like, this.

1:05:09 Isn't pub food anymore?

1:05:11 Like is there?

1:05:12 You know, there's so much tradition bound up in the concept of a pub. How far can you push How do you think about like pushing the edges of what is pub food?

1:05:22 It's a real tricky on that because like for me, I grew up in Dorset and pub food was scampion chips, fish and chips, sausage and mash. That's not what we do at the Devonshire. But we're in a completely different time. You know, food is always evolving. Obviously, it's I think it's about simplicity, it's about quality, boldness with hidden things that make things taste good. So, for example, if you come to the Devonshire and the order the lamb cutlets, for example, we hang the lamb fourteen days so you get really great flavor. The lamb comes from Cornwall beautifully French trimmed, and then we take the fat from the bone and then we render that down and then I don't know if it's an American thing or not, but

1:06:07 it's definitely is here English, we have mint sauce with lamb. Right, Oh yeah, So we take the lamb fat and then we picked mint leaves and then when the lamb fat is cool, we had the mint leaves in so it's cold and fused. You get all the sort of volatile aromas from the mint into the lamb fat and we simply brush that on to the lamb just before serving. Right, So you can imagine it's the fat, there's lamb, there's mint, there's salt, and there's a bit of pepper. That's it.

1:06:34 It just looks like a lamb chop. But the actual impact of that is so much greater than what you see and feel.

1:06:40 You know, all right, everyone goes see this man for reservations at the Devonshire ask for Roshen.

1:06:47 Yeah, Ashley Palmer watched.

1:06:48 That was amazing, Thank you so much, Thanks very much.

1:07:04 All right, that was our special two part episode recorded in London, all about the Devonshire Pub. I'm Tracy Alloway. You can follow me at Tracy Alloway.

1:07:13 And I'm Joe Wisenthal. You can follow me at the Stalwart. Follow our producers Carmen Rodriguez at Carman armand dash Ol Bennett at Dashbot, Kelbrooks at kel Brooks and Kevin Lozano at Kevin Lloyd Lozano. And from our Odd Lots content go to Bloomberg dot com slash odd Lots were the daily newsletter and all of our episodes, and you could chaut about all of these topics twenty four to seven in our discord Discord dot gg slash odd Lots And.

1:07:37 If you enjoy all lots, if you like it when we talk to publicans, then please leave us a positive review on your favorite podcast platform. And remember, if you are a Bloomberg subscriber, you can listen to all of our episodes absolutely add free. All you need to do is find the Bloomberg channel on Apple Podcasts and follow the instructions there. Thanks for listening in