This month’s Featured Chef…
Alan Murchison
Alan is Director of Alan Murchison Restaurants, which includes L’Ortolan, Le Becasse and newly acquired Paris House.
Alan, first and foremost thank you for your time today. It has been great to see both you and your team in action. You have been at L’Ortolan since 2001?
Yes, I came here in 2001 from Le Manior. I worked for Raymond (Blanc) for a number of years, but I had previously worked at L’Ortolan for John Burton-Race in the mid-nineties and moved from there to Le Manoir aux Quat Saisons. I came to L’Ortolan in 2001 with a backer and we did that for a couple of years and then set up our own company. And we have been running it under our own company now for 5 years.
How have you found that, in this current climate? The big economic downturn that everybody has been talking about – have you had to adapt what you do, here at L’Ortolan?
Yes, very much so. We reduced the amount of covers we were doing in the restaurant and we made a conscious decision to do less guests and to drive the average spend up. I think you have two options, you can either discount your product, and then ram more people in; or you can do like we did – we actually recognised that there were less people about but they were spending more money (they were going out less often). The corporate side did hit us dramatically; that disappeared literally over night and we are now seeing a little bit of recovery in that area. But we are almost maintaining the amount of money we’ve got coming through the business due to the fact that people are actually spending a lot more than they were 12 months ago.
Was it, therefore, a very brave decision, on your part, to take on what was formerly Claude Bosi’s Hibiscus in Ludlow?
Hibiscus was a natural progression for us, because we’d kept the same senior team in the kitchen and we had such an amount of strength here at L’Ortolan, it was unbelievable. We had so many good chefs and at the end of day we were ready for a new challenge.
L’Ortolan was working well, it was busy and the food was progressive but we had too many good chefs. And then the opportunity came up with Hibiscus; I went and had a look at it and made an immediate decision that this was a good thing to do. It was just based on gut feelings; there were no facts to it. I just thought “Yes, we can get this to work.” And by the time I had driven back from Ludlow to Reading we had the name in our head and I had thought about Will Holland going up there; I had planned the whole thing.
