The designer, restaurateur and serial entrepreneur who changed the way Britain dines out and eats in
A month ago the designer, restaurateur and serial entrepreneur Sir Terence Conran buried a time capsule at the site in west London of what will eventually become the reborn Design Museum. Inside the capsule, to be opened 100 years from now, he had placed three objects. There was an iPhone put there, he explained, so people could look back at what is now a cutting-edge object and view it as an antique. There was a good bottle of burgundy, merely as a present. "I'm praying that 2012 will turn out to be a great year for burgundy," he said. Finally there was a tin of anchovies, included to highlight how much food is wasted, because "a tin of anchovies will probably be better in a hundred years."
It speaks volumes for the vision and energy of the recipient of our lifetime achievement award that he has contrived a way to be influencing how we think about and live our lives, a full century from now. Then again from the kitchenware he once sold at Habitat, through the glossy food books he has published, to the 50 or so restaurants he has opened including Bibendum, Quaglino's and most recently Lutyens, that's what Conran has always done. "The restaurant as a middle-class pursuit is something that really came with Conran," the architecture critic and Design Museum director Deyan Sudjic, has said. "His influence has been enormous." Our own Nigel Slater agrees. "My admiration for his devotion to British stomachs knows no bounds." What's more, despite being 81 and having to deal with the irritations of advancing years – an interview had to be cancelled due to illness – he still refuses to stop. He has plans. He has projects. Terence Conran doesn't do holidays.
Jeremy Lee, who was his head chef at the Blueprint Cafe, next to the Design Museum for more than 15 years, sums up his "phenomenal" influence best when he says: "Terence put great food on a good table in a beautiful room." As the satirist Craig Brown once put it, his influence on how we live is so broad that before Conran "there were no chairs and no France". He gave us permission to enjoy the good life.
At first, Conran was simply about good design. After a privileged upbringing in Hampstead and Hampshire he went to the Central School of Arts and Crafts to study textiles and design, before leaving early to work with a firm involved with many of the attractions at the 1951 Festival of Britain. Made redundant, Conran set up as an independent designer. "Good design is 98% common sense," he has said, "and 2% aesthetics." In 1964, frustrated that retailers were not interested in selling his signature style of minimalist furniture properly, he decided to sell it himself and opened the first Habitat. By 1977 there would be 26 branches and by 1986, 52.
He had created a shop that made our living rooms more comfortable, our lamps more aesthetically pleasing, and our meal times more exciting. A lifelong love affair with France, which began with an extended stay in Paris in the early 1950s, had led to a devotion to the writings of Elizabeth David who, in 1960, published the groundbreaking French Provincial Cooking. Its pages hung heavy with the smell of garlic, but nowhere in Britain could you buy a hand garlic press. Habitat sold them. Later, they sold chicken bricks and fondue sets, and when the time came, woks.
But his hands-on involvement with eating started much earlier than that. In 1953 Conran helped open the Soup Kitchen, an affordable restaurant doling out bowls of lentil or minestrone soup and where only the second Gaggia coffee machine in Britain operated. "The Soup Kitchen made an impact," says Fay Maschler, the veteran restaurant critic of the London Evening Standard. "Espresso coffee! Soup, made with homemade stock! Served in mugs! Bread and cheese! The idea!" A year later he opened the Orrery on the King's Road (a name he would eventually re-use in Marylebone), and in 1970, went into business with his sister Priscilla and her husband Antonio Carluccio to launch the Neal Street Restaurant.
But it was in 1987 with Bibendum, in the old Michelin tyre building on the Fulham Road, that he really made his mark. The building was also home to the publishing business he had launched with Paul Hamlyn and a branch of his Conran Shop. But there was no doubt that the restaurant, which is about to celebrate its 25th anniversary, was his true labour of love. "We wanted to do good gutsy French bourgeois brasserie cooking," says Simon Hopkinson, Bibendum's original head chef and still a partner in the business. "It hadn't been done before. It was a breath of fresh air." Partly it was the no-holds barred Gallic enthusiasm of the food; the fish soup, the escargot – the word "snails" doesn't do them justice – bubbling in their dimpled trays of hot butter and garlic, the steak au poivre. But it was also the brigade, which included Bruce Poole, who would go on to open Chez Bruce, Phil Howard of the Square, Henry Harris of Racine (and his brother Matthew, now Bibendum's head chef) and Jeremy Lee.
Conran was only just getting started. In 1989, as part of the development that would include his beloved Design Museum, came the Blueprint Cafe. Two years later he created a model for what was to come with Le Pont de la Tour, not merely a restaurant but also a collection of high-end food shops. "I was a customer at Pont de le Tour," says Peter Prescott, former operations director for Conran Restaurants and now his partner (with Conran's fourth wife Vicki) in Boundary and Lutyens. "It was just an amazing thing. Nobody had done anything like that."
Shortly after that, Conran found a huge, dingy, wet basement space just off Piccadilly which could only be reached by a ladder. He turned it into Quaglino's, a massive, glossy place that would turn 1,000 covers a day. "It was insane," says John Torode, one of the senior chefs there. "We opened with just two people on the phones. It didn't stay that way for long." A lot of attention was heaped on the staircase down into it that had replaced that ladder. "When I walked down that catwalk staircase at Conran's Quaglino's in 1993," Fay Maschler says now, "I thought here is a kind of London glamour that has been missing since probably 1929 when Giovanni Quaglino launched the original. It wasn't an exercise in nostalgia though; it was a thoroughly modern take culminating in the excitingly impious altar dedicated to worshipping crustacea."
And so it began: Mezzo followed Butler's Wharf Chop House; Coq d'Argent followed Sartoria and the reborn Orrery. There was Almeida, Plateau, Floridita and on and on. Conran restaurants expanded out of London to New York and Copenhagen and beyond. Inevitably there was sniping; a suggestion that it was becoming too much style over content, as even Maschler acknowledges. "Later Conran's contribution was more design-led. After the beauty of Bibendum came a rash of restaurants that established a sort of middlebrow exclusivity with timed bookings and fearsome deskbats – my word – in designer suits guarding reception."
But they remained finely tuned machines where, as Conran himself put it, every chef was their own boss. "As long as they worked financially I was allowed to write my menus my way," Jeremy Lee says now. John Torode agrees. "Conran's brilliant. He lets you do what you want to do. He finds talent and gives it his head." Peter Prescott says he is defined by his attention to detail. "He's obsessed with it, as much at back of house as front of house. He cares as much about how the dining room looks from the kitchen as the other way round." When they were launching Boundary, a hotel, cafe, shop and restaurant in Shoreditch, there were 4,500 drawings. "He signed off on all of them."
In 2006, while still holding 51% of the business, Conran stepped away from the company that held his name and it was renamed D&D London after David Loewi and Des Gunewardena, his long-term management team, who now took charge. Conran is finally in the process of selling his holding in the £100m company so he can concentrate on other projects. "What drives him is an absolute vision and passion," says Loewi. "He doesn't suffer fools gladly. He likes people to know what they're talking about. But there are always relaxing times with him involving fantastic food and great wine." Gunewardena concurs. "In his 70s he had more mental energy than guys in their 30s." And he really hasn't stopped. Peter Prescott says they have many other plans and that even when he's laid low with a bug, Conran is still plotting, thinking, devising and scrutinising. He is looking for ways to make our lives more pleasurable. Indeed, listening to those around him talk, it becomes clear that there is only one problem with giving Sir Terence Conran a lifetime achievement award. It may be a little premature.