Mykonos was already a rival to Ibiza for its party vibes, and its stellar list of restaurants and bars such as Nobu, Coya and Buddha-Bar. But this summer the Greek island gained two more feathers in its cap. In May Richard Caring opened Noema, bringing a Caprice take on Cycladic cuisine and DJ sets until the small hours. A few weeks later Jason Atherton joined the party with Mykonos Social, the latest roll-out of his casual fine-dining brand, overlooking the island’s only private sandy beach in Santa Marina.
“It’s not a Scorpios,” the 50-year-old chef tells me, referencing the Mykonos beach club where the off-season Coachella crowd can be seen dancing on the artfully distressed driftwood tables and loungers into the small hours. “It’s just fun food for sharing, lots of grilled fish, a few twists on Greek dishes. We’re not trying to get 1,000 people in for lunch. It’s just a cool place to have a restaurant.”
He should know. There can be few parts of the world where Atherton hasn’t launched a restaurant over the past decade. Always the most ambitious and astute of the lieutenants who emerged from Gordon Ramsay’s kitchens, the softly spoken chef was at one time opening three or four a year, all anchored around his flagship Pollen Street Social in London. He didn’t need the attention-grabbing histrionics of his mentor to make his mark (although his conversation is still peppered with the F-word): his empire was built on a quiet but unshakeable resolve.
Atherton was in Mykonos with his wife and business partner, Irha, and three young daughters at the start of the season – “our first week away since lockdown” – but he wasn’t there for the sunshine. His success is down to hard work, rather than just talent; he generally leaves home around 7.30am (when without fail he takes his daughters to school) and is back again after midnight. Plus, he has a lot on: three more projects are planned in Dubai next year, and one in Brussels, as well as the relaunch of King’s Social House in Badrutt’s Palace hotel in St Moritz.
It’s a rate of expansion one would expect from the boom years, not the first tentative steps out of a pandemic. But it may also indicate the direction of travel in this most battered of industries by a man who has, perhaps more than any other chef, shaped the way we eat out today. Until Maze, which Atherton launched for Ramsay in 2005, there was fine dining and there was casual dining, but no one had tried to bring the two together. At Maze he introduced us to small plates of intricately crafted food which the whole table could share – a concept relatively unknown outside Asian or Spanish restaurants. It was fun, it was buzzy and the cooking was very good.
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Atherton blurred the lines further when he went it alone with Pollen Street Social five years later. It was a Michelin-starred restaurant without airs or graces. You could come in just for a drink and a single course if you wanted – although you’d be mad to turn down the three-course set lunch for just £19.50. Within a few years he had 23 restaurants to his name, including three more Social concepts in London. Not bad for a boy who was brought up in a static caravan in Skegness and at 15 took a coach to London without telling his mother to see if he could make it in the restaurant world.
The trouble was he wasn’t enjoying it. Every one of those restaurants had a different DNA and different demands. “The restaurants were all success stories. They just wouldn’t stop giving, it was crazy. I’m not the kind to believe your own bullshit, but you do start to think you’ve got the formula, and that’s really dangerous.”
Atherton would fly to Australia, spend a week trying to sort out problems there, return to his kitchen in the UK for a couple of weeks before flying off to fight fires somewhere else. “I just didn’t want to do it any more,” he says. “I was running around at a million miles an hour, causing carnage and leaving my team to pick up the pieces. My perfectionism meant I had to pull back. I’d come back from Shanghai or wherever all stressed out, worrying about some detail that 89 per cent of customers wouldn’t even notice. But I’d care about the 11 per cent and the 89 per cent.”
Then came the pandemic, Atherton’s 50th birthday and a rethink. “I said, ‘Irha, what do we do with our spare time? We go to restaurants. We love fine dining and when I go to other people’s restaurants I get restaurant envy. I want that kind of restaurant for myself because I love it,’ ” he says.
So he has retrenched. He’s down to 12 restaurants for now, but more decisively, he has dropped the covers at Pollen Street Social from 78 to 38 and put the prices up, with the set lunch now £55, and the seven-course tasting menu £145 (“although they are really eight and 14 courses with all the extras,” Atherton says. “That’s still under £10 a course for the best ingredients in Britain.”) He has invested in the wine list, upgraded the linen, and is in the kitchen every day from 9am to midnight. “And you know, I’ve never felt so comfortable in my own skin with my cooking,” he says.
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He will continue to roll out Socials around the world when the opportunity arises (“they won’t get me, though; they’ll get my team”) but his focus now is on the fine dining that many commentators have suggested is a busted flush. “I’ve got no time for Michelin-bashers,” Atherton says. “You don’t have to agree with that kind of cooking, but catering for Michelin-style guests is a lifelong commitment. It takes a lot of dedication and hard work.
“I don’t want to retire not knowing what could have been had I had the courage to follow my dreams and cook in the type of restaurant I’ve always dreamt of cooking in. I love being in my restaurant, and I love making customers happy. All I’m worried about is that they keep coming back.”
jasonatherton.co.uk
