Bellamy’s in Bruton Place, Mayfair, celebrates its 20th anniversary this year. Harden’s sat down with its founder, Gavin Rankin, to find out what makes it tick
Tucked away in a mews off Berkeley Square, Bellamy’s is famous for its ‘club with no sub’ atmosphere. It’s a calm and welcoming place, “civilised” is the word its founder uses, with the style of a smartly understated Paris brasserie – less stuffy than the haunts of what used to be called “Establishment London”, but with none of the glitz of newer Mayfair rivals. Queen Elizabeth II was known to have eaten here at least twice, although its proprietor remains discreetly tight-lipped on the subject.
Gavin Rankin, our host, cuts a tall and always elegantly suited figure, although he is adamant there is no dress code here – “if there is one, it’s self-imposed by our guests,” he says. “People like to make an effort.” He draws the line at shorts for men, though: “nobody wants to eat sitting next to a tarantula…”
As we settle at our table, Gavin quotes with approval the old sign you used to see posted in restaurants across France: “le patron mange ici”. He certainly knows how to lunch and relishes it – importantly, too, he is always thinking as a guest.
“A glass of Champagne?” he offers. “I don’t drink it all that often, but sometimes it’s the only thing that will do. This [the house Champagne] is from a vineyard that is 10 feet from Bollinger’s. So it is very similar – but much less expensive.
“Of course, the same principle wouldn’t apply in Burgundy, where each row of vines has a different level of minerality. But in Champagne it does work.”
To follow, he chooses a Chablis then a favourite red, Le Vieux Donjon Chateauneuf du Pape 2022, which supports his theory that in general a wine with a romantic-sounding name will be of good quality. Bellamy’s all-French list always includes half a dozen hand-written recommendations – an important, human touch. And while we’re on the subject of wine, Gavin says he does not really approve of the term “sommelier”, with its suggestion of self-importance as much as expertise – “I prefer to say wine waiter”.
Finally, with pudding, a Klein Constantia Vin De Constance 2020 – a wine he tells me whose earlier vintages were “enjoyed by Jane Austen, Byron, Dickens and Napoleon”. It’s no accident that he names three writers: Gavin is the most literate of restaurateurs who, in a neat example of fiction becoming fact, lifted the name Bellamy’s from Evelyn Waugh’s Sword of Honour novels. Through lunch, he enlivens our conversation with quotations from William Blake, GK Chesterton and the late magazine editor Willie Landels.
So to business, as Gavin tells me how he set about opening Bellamy’s. At the outset, he made two key appointments, recruiting a pair he had worked with at Annabel’s, the Mayfair institution where he was managing director under Mark Birley: chef Stéphane Pacoud and manager Luigi Burgio (note the low-key titles: elsewhere they would no doubt be ‘executive chef’ and ‘maître d’’). Remarkably, they have remained at his side ever since, making Bellamy’s probably unique among London restaurants in having the same senior management for two full decades.
As for the interior design, Gavin hired an architect, Tim Flynn, who “I was pretty sure had never been inside a Parisian brasserie. So I took him to Paris, organised a car, and we visited 14 brasseries in one day.”
A similar approach underpinned the menu. Stéphane is a classically trained chef from Lyons, but he had never been to Brussels – a major inspiration to Gavin not only for its first-rate brasseries but also because, notwithstanding his very British appearance, he happens to be half Belgian through his mother (Marina, who is memorialised in two of her recipes on the menu). So they took a trip to Brussels and sampled some of its best cooking. “Stéphane is a proper chef, so he can taste a dish and work out the ingredients and how it was made. Then he will re-create and even improve the original.”
Bellamy’s single-page menu is easy to navigate, with house ‘classic’ dishes printed in red, vegetarian dishes in green, and a ‘table d’hôte’ menu that changes weekly. One ‘classic’ dish you are unlikely to see anywhere else in London is the delicious ‘iced lobster soufflé’ – although Stéphane refuses to claim it as his creation, declaring: “Show me a chef who says he has invented something and I’ll show you a liar!”
When it comes to service, Gavin has strong opinions on how things should be done, and Luigi drills his staff accordingly. “Our service is largely silent, except when communication is necessary,” Gavin explains. “I hate being interrupted when I’m eating by a waiter butting in with a fussy question – ‘is everything alright?’. And it invariably comes at my punch-line!
“A good waiter develops a sort of sixth sense, knowing exactly when to top up a glass of wine – without filling it to the brim, of course – and when to ask questions.”
For all his admiration of French and Belgian brasseries, Gavin is not sure their brisk service style, with its nonchalant and rather cold professionalism, is quite right for the London market. Here, a rather softer approach is called for. “I think the British clientele needs a bit more love,” he says.
It is a source of some pride on Gavin’s part that an extraordinarily high proportion of guests – about 80% – are regulars. He and his team know their foibles: which table they like to sit at, who can and cannot be seated in close proximity. And when trouble looms, “Luigi is an absolute genius at defusing potentially tricky situations. We can occasionally have a very difficult customer here – fussy eaters, masters of the universe” (another literary reference, this time to Tom Wolfe’s Bonfire of the Vanities financiers – in this context, Mayfair hedge-fund types).
Other senior staff have been in place for more than 10 years, including Cheryl Dulnoan, who runs the Oyster Bar – a crucial addition to the “club with no sub” ethos, where you can drop in for a plate of shellfish or one of Stéphane’s brilliant open sandwiches and a glass of wine between noon and 4pm.
This consistency is not just at manager level: the retention rate among the kitchen brigade and front of house staff is quite remarkable in an industry notorious for its high turnover. How has Bellamy’s achieved this?
Gavin is too modest to claim the credit for himself, saying: “We have a young group who genuinely like each other – they celebrate birthdays together and so on. They feel they’re part of a team and don’t want to let each other down, so there’s very little in the way of absenteeism.
“They are truly international, too. At our height, just before Brexit, we had 14 different nationalities working here. There have been some changes since Brexit. The Poles left because they no longer felt wanted, and we now have more from India – they’re allowed to stay on with a working visa for two years after university here.”
As we talk, a departing guest stops by the table, having not seen Gavin since a dinner given for a particularly august, late public figure with whom they were both acquainted.
Reminiscences over, Gavin turns to me and shrugs: “Honestly, I didn’t pay him to say that…”. Clearly, it was very flattering that someone who hardly ever dined in restaurants as a private customer chose Bellamy’s in which to do so. Equally clearly, Gavin has no wish for Bellamy’s to be defined by it.
And what is the future of Bellamy’s? Well, says Gavin matter-of-factly, that rather depends on his 18 backers – “but I’ve not heard about any plans to sell up.” And he certainly has no plans to retire: “What would I do?” he asks – a man who clearly enjoys his work.
“I was given a piece of advice from Mark Birley before we opened,” Gavin remembers, “which has held true: Don’t expect your friends to come along as customers. It can feel awkward for both sides. On the other hand, a lot of your customers will become your friends.” This, for Gavin, is clearly a major source of satisfaction.