Only the hum of distant traffic and the London Eye in the background indicates we are in the heart of one of the great cities of the world.
Inn the Park, Oliver Peyton’s latest restaurant in London, comes with a royal imprimatur courtesy of the Queen, who can see its grass-covered roof from the balcony of Buckingham Palace.
Peyton was born and grew up in Swinford. Some day someone will write a book about Mayo people who made it big abroad. It won’t be a slim volume.
“What motivates me is new things,” he says, gazing across at the restaurant’s eclectic mixture of tourists, businessmen and civil servants dotted around the restaurant terrace.
“Opening this has been a real joy to me. I like seeing grannies with a pot of tea, I like seeing people drinking champagne at the next table.”
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By the age of 40, as the saying goes, every man gets the face he deserves. In Peyton’s case the lines suggest too many hard nights — he’s a reformed drinker — but the spiky salt-and-pepper hair reflect a boyish enthusiasm for life.
His parents were in the rag trade. In a career where he has relied on his instincts, they taught him to be an incorrigible optimist and to have no fear of failure. “Why am I the sort of person I am?” he muses. “It is because of my parents.”
After attending St Mary’s College, Dundalk, and boarding at Summerhill College, Peyton left Ireland on a Confederation of Irish Industries scholarship to study textiles at Leicester Polytechnic.
He quit without qualifying and opened his first nightclub, the Can, in Brighton with his friend Andrew Hale, the former keyboard player with Sade.
Three years later they set up Raw, an underground club in London’s Tottenham Court Road. It was a smash.
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“We got our investment back in weeks,” he says. “We were making £40,000 to £50,000 profit opening just three nights a week.” Diamond life indeed.
He also set up Rivalage, a drinks importer which brought in Absolut vodka from Sweden, helping to transform it into an icon of urban chic. When he sold it in 1991, the business was turning over £13m.
Though he is one of the best known restaurateurs in Britain, he maintains he is merely the public face of a family enterprise. Peyton believes in family. He even married into a business dynasty. Charlotte, his wife, is a niece of the hotelier Rocco Forte.
Peyton has three sisters. The conventional wisdom is that they work for him. Correction, he says they work together.
Peyton is chairman and the creative force, Siobhan is managing director, Cathriona does purchasing and Maria looks after the events business.
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“There is security working with your family,” he says. “We all have a common goal, working together nigh on 15 or 16 years. I owe a lot to them.”
In the heady days of the late 1990s there was talk that Gruppo, the parent company, would be floated on the Alternative Investment Market. Friends and analysts urged him on but Peyton decided against it. Keeping control was key and besides, he wanted a life.
“It is preferable to put our own money into the business. This is our own money,” he says of the £800,000 he spent on Inn the Park.
At one stage, Peyton owned six restaurants and a catering business, but he wasn’t happy.
“There was a point when I had to go to too many meetings. I don’t want to be sitting in an office all day long . . . when a business starts to feel like that for me it is time to get out.”
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He spent four weeks in the Priory clinic — heavy drinking being an occupational hazard in the hospitality sector. It prompts a monologue about contentment. “I could open 20 restaurants, I could open restaurants in every city of the world, but it is not really going to make me happy,” he says.
He now owns three: the Atlantic Bar & Grill, Mash and Isola, all in London, a 15-year lease on Inn the Park, and a catering business. Last September he was involved in the creation of Villa Zevaco, a restaurant in Casablanca. The operation is now smaller but he still has 500 staff and a turnover of £17m, though he’s rather vague on annual profits. After a pause, he says: “£2m to £3m a year.”
The Atlantic Bar & Grill, the art deco emporium just off Trafalgar Square, celebrated its 10th anniversary in April. “It still does 400 or 500 covers every Thursday, Friday and Saturday night. The Atlantic will be around in 100 years because it is a beautiful place.”
He feels the same way about Inn the Park. Peyton brought in Tom Dixon, the creative director for Habitat, to design the interior but the food is solid British fare: steak and chips, rack of lamb, that sort of thing.
Working abroad has helped him “get off the rock”, as he calls Britain, but if he can pour his creative energies into Morocco, why not the auld sod? For the first time he sounds wistful. “I would love to do something in Ireland. I don’t know why the opportunity has not come up yet. It is not for lack of trying,” he says.
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A few years ago, he looked at setting up a Dublin version of the Groucho Club, the haunt of London’s chattering classes, but decided rents were too high and the clientele too small.
Still, he says he will not give up and dreams of one day living in Ireland; Leenane, maybe, Killary Harbour or the Wicklow mountains. He could certainly afford it. It is all a matter of timing, and timing has always been his forte.
VITAL STATISTICS
Age: 42
Education: Summerhill College, Sligo, Leicester Polytechnic
Family: married with two children
Home: London and Cornwall
Hobbies: running, reading and travelling
Favourite book: Prince of Princes: The Life of Potemkin by Simon Sebag Montefiore
Favourite film: Citizen Kane
WORKING DAY
I GENERALLY get up at 6.30am and have breakfast with my two children, Finn and Molly. I then take my son to nursery school. I usually go to the office in Great Portland Street at 9.30am and do the office work from there. Then I go to one of our restaurants and have meetings there for the rest of the day with various managers, chefs, clients, sales, marketing people or customers.
I tend to hold a lot of my meetings in the restaurants, rotating between the ones that need my attention. During the week, I tend to go home at 6pm for an hour before my children go to bed. I then go back to the restaurants for the evening. I’m normally in bed around midnight.