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By Jimmy Rice, Money Blog Editor

Jason Atherton isn’t getting much sleep.

Hardly a week has gone by this year without another big-name chef closing a restaurant amid rising costs, staff shortages and a sense that the public isn’t willing to exploit high-end food like they once were.

Marco Pierre White, Michel Roux Jr, Marcus Wareing, Monica Galetti, Simon Rimmer and Tom Brown have announced closures, but it’s the openings that keep Atherton awake.

Five of them, all in London, in as many months.

“I’ve bet my whole life on this,” Atherton tells Money, who was on his third coffee when we sat down at 10 a.m. intent, at least from the interviewer’s point of view, on answering a question: What does it take to be successful? hospitality in 2024?

“I’m not a culinary messiah,” he says. “I’m not going to sit here and say come and follow me, I’ve got the magic recipe. Nobody does.

“Hospitality is in a downturn, everyone knows it’s pretty tough out there, but in downturns there are opportunities too.

“If you are brave, believe in yourself, there are very good opportunities to work with landlords in failed places, to get good rents.”

To further reduce costs, Atherton has begun renegotiating prices with its suppliers on a weekly basis.

“It’s very long, but that’s what it takes, every Monday we have deals on our meat, our fish, our chemicals, our vegetables, fixing everything.”

Gordon Ramsay paid me £250,000 – those days are gone

It was Gordon Ramsay who gave Atherton his first chance to open a restaurant, Maze, in the heart of Mayfair in 2005.

His chef patronage salary was £250,000 and the restaurant, awarded a Michelin star within a year, achieved a turnover of £14m.

“Those days are gone,” says Atherton. “It was a different time.

“For now, gone are the days of bringing in an international designer, paying them millions of pounds to design this amazing restaurant that looks like something from the future.”

At the recently opened Sael near Piccadilly Circus, the setting for the interview, Atherton has recycled much of the decor from the restaurant’s previous owner.

“Right now my mantra is tightening up, looking at costs and getting back to cooking for Londoners who are more frugal with their spending power,” he says.

And so, down the road at Mary’s, once home to Atherton’s one-star Pollen Street Social, you can now get a ‘dirty Cumbrian beef burger’ for £16.50, while their ‘elegant’ Harrods Social restaurant has been replaced by a concession in the store’s dining room, serving gourmet hot dogs for £19.

Not exactly cheap, but not as out of reach as some of their previous and existing ventures.

A £3.2m mistake

If Atherton doesn’t want to sound like someone who thinks he’s a “messiah,” it’s because he knows what failure tastes like. In 2016, he spent £3.2 million building the luxury Japanese restaurant Sosharu, then another million to keep it alive for two and a half years before accepting its demise.

“I was the golden boy, I could do no wrong, and suddenly I was completely wrong,” he says, before recounting his litany of mistakes: overstaffing, not doing any market research and “putting a Mayfair restaurant in Clerkenwell.”

“Life is very hard,” he says. “The way I look at failure is, it’s just a learning curve. If I open 10 restaurants and two fail, I’ve won, but you don’t just brush the two mistakes under the rug. We tear it apart, we examine them, we want to understand for what happened and use it as a mini restoration university.”

A running joke

There’s a joke in culinary circles that Atherton’s prolificacy rivals Brexit in the impact it’s having on London’s workforce, having hooked hundreds of young waiters, chefs and others into one city, all at once.

At the five new restaurants, which will bring Atherton’s stable to 17 worldwide, he and his wife Irha expect to employ about 250 workers, and that’s not counting the work they’re sending to national restaurant reviewers , with Grace Dent and Jay Rayner among those who have already shared their experiences on paper.

Despite new visa rules that are deterring many of the young Europeans on whom the service industry depended, Atherton says the problem is not finding staff.

“The biggest challenge is loyalty,” he says. “Because there are so many opportunities out there, people know that if they’re not really enjoying it, instead of staying there like we did in the old days, they can leave the next day and get another job the next day. call it the social media attention span.”

He’s aware of how that might sound—an elder statesman of the industry lamenting the generations that followed—but his view of Gen Z is more rounded.

“It’s a different time, and we have to fit in,” he says. “I take incredible emerging talent and we nurture it.

“These kids are very creative. I have a very young workforce and I love their creativity. I love that they push us on TikTok, on social media, very powerful tools that I don’t understand.”

“They made me stand in a wheelie bin for the whole lunch service”

After a brief stint in the Army Catering Corps, Atherton did most of his growing up in some of the toughest kitchens in the world, even before joining the Ramsay Group in 2001.

“There are many worse things, but I threw some prawns once and had to go to a wheelie bin for the whole lunch service, with the prawns”, he remembers. “It took me a week to get the fishy smell out of my shoes.”

Atherton inherited these sometimes impossible standards, running tough kitchens himself as he stepped out of Ramsay’s shadow and earned Michelin stars with his own The Social Company.

Has an adjustment been needed to manage a generation that has grown up with a different mindset, with different values, or has it, at 53, simply mellowed out?

“A bit of both,” he says. “When you start to develop real skills, and the people around you don’t have those skills, when you’re younger you can take it as incompetence, which it’s not, you learn that as you get older.”

“We have a responsibility to the new generation of cooks”

Stories abound of chefs having to work 16- or 18-hour shifts when Atherton started.

These days, as the industry slowly embraces the concept of work-life balance, its chefs can choose between 40- and 48-hour contracts.

“Our industry has a very bad reputation for being overworked, stressed, undernourished, underpaid, and it’s my generation’s job to get rid of that so the next generation won’t be burdened with it, because my generation did to be”.

There is a question about how compatible this is with other goals: Michelin stars (Atherton’s Row on 45 in Dubai has just claimed its second) and ultimately, in this climate, survival.

“At the same time, I don’t suffer fools,” he says. “I’m here to work, I’m here to deliver to my customers. The company has a lot of debt around its neck and we have to pay it.”

“There are too many fancy restaurants”

As well as Mary’s and gourmet hot dogs, Atherton is launching Three Darlings, a bistro in Chelsea named after his daughters, and has just opened Sael, his “love letter to Britain”.

These will come in at a price point between the £16.50 burgers and what will be their latest opening in the run, flagship Row on 5 on Savile Row, where diners can expect to pay upwards of £200 a head for a “culinary journey” 15 dishes that are eaten in different places of the building.

Atherton knows the latter is a risk, as customers and the industry “are moving away from super-expensive restaurants.”

Is there even a future for the type of dining establishments he made his name for?

“The market is saturated, there are too many,” he says. “You have to be the best, the very best in the world or you don’t survive.

“For me, it’s about being able to operate at this level, with a team, for the last chance of my life – that’s the dream and we’ll give it our best shot.”

Joining him on Row on 5 will be The Ritz-led prodigy Spencer Metzger, whom Atherton describes as a “generational talent” on the global dining scene.

Metzger, who toppled a string of the country’s top chefs to win the Great British Menu in 2022, could end up as a 50% shareholder in the business if certain financial targets are met as Atherton considers life after the move.

So could he soon be joining Wareing, another Ramsay alumnus, in retiring from the industry entirely?

“This will be my last fancy restaurant,” he said.

“You heard it here first.”