Veganism and sustainability: How David Moore keeps one of London’s oldest Michelin-starred restaurants fresh

In December, we had a table of two gents who spent £5,000 and I hadn’t seen that in the last two years,” says David Moore, owner of Pied a Terre, one of London’s oldest Michelin-starred restaurants.

This kind of spend has been something of an anomaly since the Brexit vote was announced and consumer confidence waned, particularly at the higher end of the market where he operates.

“But right after the December election, we got those two guys in and I thought that was interesting. There is some confidence coming back.”

And confidence is everything in a game where your reputation and your income are only as good as your last service – a lesson that many restaurants in the UK are learning.

According to CGA, the UK’s restaurants have been in year-on-year decline for seven quarters in a row, with 633 restaurants closing in 2019. High-profile brands such as Jamie’s Italian, Gaucho, Strada, Prezzo and Carluccio’s have all suffered badly.

If restaurants at this price range are struggling to make it work, what chance do outfits like Pied a Terre have of making it?

Pied a Terre has been going since 1991 and has weathered many financial storms in its time, so it’s probably a bit more resilient than most, a resilience that seems to emanate from its owner.

In true entrepreneurial style, Moore and his business partner and head chef at the time, Richard Neat, hustled to get the funding for their new venture. Both were working at Raymond Blanc’s Le Manoir aux Quat’Saisons in Oxford at the time – Neat in the kitchen and Moore on the floor.

“I borrowed five grand off my mum and dad, and the rest I bullshitted,” says Moore.

By bullshitted, he means approaching the wealthy diners he was serving at Le Manoir, wooing and nurturing them before finally approaching them to invest.

“Mondays – my day off – were spent in London visiting prospective investors and Richard and I would go to people’s houses to cook for them. We had 48 potential investors and I would send letters to them, nab stationery from Le Manoir and stuff the letters in their post in the morning, hoping nobody would notice.”

In the end, 24 of them invested to the tune of £190,000 (about £400,000 today); the restaurant was born and, within two years, had secured its first Michelin star.

However, 29 years at this level is a long time and Moore concedes that Pied a Terre doesn’t grab the attention of the all-important critics any more, something that clearly irritates him.

“I would welcome them if they would bother to come, but of course they don’t. They all write about the new restaurants, a real bugbear of mine,” he says.

It’s been a long time since she was the hot young thing in town so how does this grand dame of London’s restaurant scene avoid slipping into obscurity?

“Veganism,” says Moore with evident excitement.

“It’s no longer a trend – it’s a thing. It’s a great business opportunity because we are a high-end restaurant that is super-inclusive. We want everyone to be able to enjoy the food here and if you look at the typical two star or high-end one star, the tasting menu is [one set of ingredients] for the whole table.

“We can do five or six different menus [to suit different diets]. It’s a lot harder work and you have to get it right, but it pays dividends for us.”

He doesn’t believe that people’s tastes are necessarily changing but that they have an increasing desire to remove certain elements from their diets. He understands that not only does he have to cater for this shift but that there is opportunity in it, too: an opportunity to keep the restaurant relevant, sustainable even.

And this sustainability is high up on the menu – literally.

The provenance of the food’s ingredients is included in the menu as is the fact that they operate a zero-waste kitchen policy, with everything being collected for compost. The sustainable approach has even crept into the way the business operates.

For example, the current head chef, Asimakis Chaniotis, has adopted a no-swearing policy in the kitchen in an attempt to create a more relaxed atmosphere and reduce the high staff turnover. This is a far cry from the days of former Pied a Terre head chef Tom Aiken, who gained notoriety in the late 1990s for “branding” a junior chef with a hot knife.

“The kitchen will become more inclusive [with this approach] and people that have maybe been intimidated by that environment could come here and shine,” he says.

“Often children who have been beaten become beaters when they are adults and we are at a stage where I hope they are thinning out,” he says.

“I am hoping that the kids coming through our kitchen now – they know that if they become a head chef, they can’t go around doing that.”

Which is a far cry from the accepted view of working in a Michelin-starred kitchen, but Moore believes it is the way the sector is headed: “If you have been through any of the top kitchens in the world – El Bulli, Per Se or The French Laundry – people speak because they need to speak; there is a serenity. Having an environment where people want to stay makes business sense.”

As the high-end restaurant scene evolves, what happens to the likes of Moore, those who have become synonymous with the sector’s heyday? Does he plan to emulate the career of Elena Salvoni, the famous maitre d’ and a woman he admired immensely, who worked at neighbouring restaurant Elena’s L’Etoile until she was 90?

“My lease here will be up when I’m 65 and I can’t see me wanting to take on the burden of a new one,” he says.

“I quite like the idea of a staff cooperative where I continue to have a stake in the business, but it is actually run by all of them. I think it will attract good people to the business. What do I need it for?”

He does, however, need to be involved somehow and confesses to being “super attached”, describing Pied a Terre as his first child. But he doesn’t want to be the one driving it into his dotage.

“I would like to be around as long as I could, yeah. As long as I’m not sitting in the restaurant incontinent.”