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| Arjun Waney in The Arts Club, Mayfair |
For some time now, London has been the hottest destination for international restaurateurs to launch new ventures – New Yorker André Balazs and his Chiltern Fire House is just the latest in a long line of contenders. Daniel Boulud, Alain Ducasse, Wolfgang Puck and Joel Robuchon have all entered the fray with varying levels of culinary excellence and also succeeded in establishing themselves in this fiercest of competitive environments.
There are plenty of local restaurateurs with international reputations too, such as rag trade to riches Richard Caring and the Wolseley-owning duo of Jeremy King and Chris Corbin, but perhaps the most highly regarded of them all is a publicity shy septuagenarian Indian called Arjun Waney. He not only has stakes in the most successful restaurants in London but also in a handful of other places around the globe, with an annual turnover of around £200 million.
Ask any of the best-known restaurateurs about Arjun Waney and they all agree that he is probably the most respected restaurant investor in Britain. Anthony Demetre, a Michelin-starred chef who owns a number of London restaurants, says “I like every single one of his restaurants – Arjun does nothing by halves and spends a lot of money on them but he has the Midas touch and gets it right. He has also taught us all a valuable lesson in the way he reinvents his restaurants too.”
In little more than a decade, he has not only created a handful of the most fashionable (and profitable) places in the capital – Zuma, Petite Maison, Coya and the Arts Club - but is successfully opening all over the globe. This Summer, Waney launched La Petite Maison in Istanbul to keep Zuma company, his other London success story. Later this year, Zuma will launch in Manhattan and at 22,000 square feet, will be his biggest venture so far.
Zuma has nothing to do with the president of South Africa or for that matter with Malibu’s Zuma Beach, despite it being the inspiration for the name. Rather, it is a stylish version of Izakaya cuisine, which is the equivalent of Japanese pub food. The first one was opened 12 years ago with Rainer Becker in the kitchen, just around the corner from Harrods in Knightsbridge. The bold and straightforward flavours of the colourful dishes, such as whole native lobster tempura with spicy sauce or seared miso-marinaded foie gras, serves hundreds of people daily and makes millions annually. It is not just society-types who like it – Michel Roux Jr is said to go several times annually.
The inspiration was born from Waney’s frustration at never being able to get a table at Nobu, which was then the most fashionable Japanese-inspired restaurant, just across the road in Park Lane, Mayfair. “I realised that every time I called up Nobu, they were always full and wouldn’t give me a reservation. So one day, I said to the girl, don’t worry, I will open my own Japanese restaurant. One day I was having a haircut at the Carlton Tower Hotel and mentioned to the hairdresser I wanted to start a Japanese-inspired restaurant. Shortly after this, I got a call from him saying that Rainer Becker, the chef at the Carlton Hotel Grill also wanted to start a Japanese restaurant so why didn’t we meet? He said I want to tell you up front that I can only put up £50k and my skin in the game, but that is a lot of money for a chef to put up and then I would own the rest, so I made it up to 15%.”
It quickly became the alternative Japanese experience for Oligarchs and celebrities and has remained so for more than a decade. The New York Zuma will be the eighth to be opened, with others in Hong Kong, Dubai, Bangkok, Miami and Abu Dhabi. Recently, Waney sold a 50.01% share of Zuma Restaurants to a Turkish bank, but maintains majority control in the management contract. The price was undisclosed but it is believed by industry sources to run into tens of millions of Pounds. Becker has obviously played a key part in Waney’s success, which prompts some people to give most of the credit to Becker, but facts don’t necessarily support this line.
Four years after Zuma was successfully launched, Waney branched off into a restaurant focussing on French Provencale cuisine, which Rainer Becker has no financial involvement. “I have a beautiful home in Cap Ferrat and one day I went to La Petite Maison in Nice for dinner and I thought this is a beautiful restaurant – I am going to get a world franchise for this and make it a global brand. So I said to the owner, I will take the world rights and give you €25,000 for every restaurant that I open. They were stupid enough to sign the contract to give me the world rights for that price. They should have said they wanted a percentage of the sales but they didn’t!” The focus is on straightforward French Provencale cuisine and again, it quickly became one of the most profitable restaurants in London. Prices are equivalent to those of the River Café, which means no bargains, but no one complains about the quality of the dishes, especially the poulet au foie gras for two at £70, double the opening price in 2007. Curiously, the full menu is displayed on the website, but no prices….
Arjun explains: “Seven years ago, I hired Raphael Duntoye, the sous chef who worked under Reiner and before that worked with Pierre Koffmann. I asked Pierre about Rafael and he told me he was a very very good cook and so I sent him to south of France for two months and he learnt about all of their dishes. It is place to be seen and it also has enjoyable and healthy food, which is all the things that the future wants, then we opened the same in Dubai, which is a phenomenal success. Zuma does pretty well too -on Monday Dubai Zuma does £49k, on a Tuesday £54k, Thurs £72k. Dubai Petite Maison does £25k on an average day but this is an 80-seater restaurant and Zuma is 186 seats.
Again, Waney must take a serious part of the credit for the success of this venture. Nicole Rubi, the French proprietor of the original Petite Maison, has opened branches of Petit Maison in Beirut, Moscow and elsewhere, tacking her name on the end to avoid legal problems, but these ventures have not made anything like the splash of Arjuns.
She must, however, must rue the day she made the franchise deal. The branch of La Petite Maison in Dubai is arguably one of the most profitable restaurants on the planet. “You could almost make it a case study for the Harvard Business School. It has a ROI (Return on Investment) of 44%, which is unheard of in the restaurant industry,” Waney commented.
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| Duke of Edinburgh flanked by Cameron Diaz (left) and Gwyneth Paltrow (right) at an Arts Club Charity Bash |
Waney has a deliberate hands off approach to running his empire. He admits that his main approach is to carefully study the financial spreadsheets of each of his establishments but he has never actually been to any of his Hong Kong restaurants. “That’s how distant I am in a way from the business. However I am totally alert when it comes to numbers, food quality and service. If anybody gets bad service and I get a complaint in my house, woe betide. I am really tough on that. Also, I will never sacrifice the quality of the food to make an extra buck. I don’t need to, which I admit is a privileged position to be in. Food is very important in a club, especially if you pay £3,500 membership fees and you don’t even get a free glass of bloody water. That is why I have brought back one of the Zuma chefs from Japan to run the Arts Club restaurant upstairs. Sales have doubled since he has come.”
Waney’s background have no indication that he would end up running some of the most fashionable eating establishments on the planet. Born in Karachi before India’s 1947 Partition, his Sindhi family fled to Bombay, leaving behind their ship-building business and ending up in what Waney calls “the lower-end of the financial spectrum even in those days”. He was educated at the Anglican Cathedral College in Bombay, when he met Lowell Thomas, a now forgotten globe-trotting American journalist famed for virtually creating Lawrence of Arabia as a worldwide figure with his OTT picture shows complete with veiled women and incense braziers.
“In the mid-Fifties, I met Lowell Thomas, who was doing a movie for CBS called Search for Paradise. He wanted me to help him attend the 1955 coronation of King Mahendra of Nepal for his Cinerama film. As a favour in return, Lowell Thomas knew I wanted to study in the States, so he gave me the money for a ticket to California, which was a fortune for my family in those days there were no work permits so it was a real struggle for four years. I had a very accommodating dean at Berkeley, called Dean McCormack who got me a 25 hour a week work permit which was how long you could work legally but when I asked about the unofficial part he said no comment so I ended up cleaning sorority houses and hashing. So I had a job on the graveyard shift from 10 at night to three in the morning.”
(While he was at Berkeley, he met Judy, who became his wife. Still married more than half a century later, their daughter Devika now runs Savitri, the charitable arm of their business that deals with curable blindness in the Subcontinent.)
“I continued working like that for four years and one day I got a very desperate call from my mother saying she had to sell her jewellery so I said all right I do what I can my two other others were at boarding college so I started a new concept called Import Cargo which was eventually merged with Pier One Imports and there was a CFO who worked for Charles Tandy. Tandy went to Harvard Business School and decided to devote his time to developing Radio Shack so he gave up his role at Pier One to Luther Henderson, who never smoked, never drank. I don’t he did anything. He came to see me on Long Island and said could I arrange the money to start it on the East Coast as there was nothing like it there. I borrowed $80k from the mother of a family friend. All she said I hope to get it back, which I promised, even if I had to work as her personal servant. Then I opened one two three four stores and Mr Henderson came to see me and wanted to buy me out and give me stock but I said I wanted cash, so I made a foolish mistake by doing that. But I wanted to pay off my loans. I had to sign a restrictive covenant not to compete east of the Mississippi, so I went west and opened the same stores but I now had $100k of my own money so I bought an existing store called Cost Less and I expanded those at a very rapid pace and had 17 stores in three years. In 1969-71 and in 71 Mr Henderson came to see me again and said your stores do far more sales than ours do – I don’t understand why as we have more money but when you are surviving by yourself, God gives you a sixth sense so you buy the right products so we brought products from Vietnam, set up a collaboration with a Japanese company and we were the first people to import scented candles into the States.
We built our business up on items that were perishable, incense, candles, dinnerware, and bedspreads for students, rattan furniture and Mexican glassware so you could furnish a students house for $100. This time I was smart enough to get shares from him because he said he was going to do an IPO. He said if you perform for the next 25 stores, I will give you an earn out based on a reduced multiple. So if we are selling at 20 times earning we will give you 50 times earnings so I said fine.
50% less earnings.. It was a very mutually beneficial relationship and I made millions and millions of dollars. I was also give $3m more for a non compete clause in the states for any retail. So by the time I was 34, in 1974, we had opened all of the stores we had said we would – in Salt Lake City, Santa Barbara, Las Vegas so I decided to go to Europe and open the same concept. So I came to London and opened the first store in Richmond and then in Brompton Rd and one on Kings Road called Pier Imports so I sold those and 17 other stories I had opened in France it was an interesting experience but I had never had money before, so I was a real nouveau riche kid on the block, so I hung around the wrong guys in London – Jimmy Goldsmith, Kerry Packer, John Aspinall – he told me that it was his ambition to ruin the aristocracy in Britain. He also ruined me a bit because I must have lost a few million dollars in his gambling clubs. Then I went on a mission to India and met Mother Theresa and she said do you believe in God and I said mmmm, not really. So she said you don’t believe in God – you are not a Catholic? Then get out of here!”
So I said Mother, I beg you to help me find a direction in life so she said you must believe in some religion – any religion will do – they are all basically the same only Catholicism is better than the others. So I said mother, I read a Sufi novel recently which said “You can tear down a temple, tear down a church, break a mosque, but never break the heart of a human being because it is in that shrine that God really dwells.”
She was so touched she said you have your mission in life - you should serve blind children and malnourished children – as of today, that should be your religion so I built the first home for handicapped children on a piece of land in Delhi in Merawli. But she was a very difficult woman to deal with – honestly probably the most difficult woman I have ever dealt with. I sent her $300k from the States and she sent back $303k saying you are never to send money to us before we call for it. It is divine providence – if you don’t give it, we don’t care because someone else will give it.
I said Mother, that is not logical and she said “Don't you preach logic to me, I am Mother Theresa”. This was in 1977/78. So in 79 I went back to the States and started a clothing company called Beebas and in 1982 we took the company public and in 1988 we spun off another company so I made my fortune once again.
In 1992, I started to get stomach problems and I had to calm down – it was too stressful for me so I sold the entire company to J C Penneys and got out of the business entirely.
So from 1992 to 1995 I lived in la Jolla and did nothing - played tennis, and looked after my investments so I came to London when the son of the lady who had given me the loan wanted me to help him as he had gone bankrupt, so I started a fund called the first Winchester fund offshore fund and the management team was called Argent Fund – we took 2% and 10% because we weren’t a known fund. We did very very well – we focussed on only one sector - the banking sector.”
In 2012, after a decade of success opening Zuma, La Petite Maison and a handful of other places, his latest restaurant venture is Coya, a Peruvian-inspired place in Piccadilly.
Less than three months after opening, the Zagat Guide named it as one of the ten coolest restaurants on earth. Soon there will be a branch in Miami and doubtless in the Gulf.
His own taste in food is quite simple: “I have always cooked and I cook for my wife – personally, my favourite style of food is Japanese – I love Japanese food and second to that, I love Provençale food like Petite Maison. I have a very good French friend who is always asking me to dine with him in his three star Michelin restaurant but I don’t like Michelin restaurants - I always know what I am going to get -Caviar, champagne etc. Once every three to four months I go to Paris to look at various places but not the sort of places that most people go to – for instance one of my favourites is a small place that does excellent cous cous. Then there is a Brasserie and an oyster bar I love that that serves red mullet.”
Waney concedes that his success is obviously due to having good business acumen, but it would be a mistake to see him merely as a society figure. His involvement in charities is also something taken very seriously. “The Savitri Waney Charitable Trust, named after my mother, tries to combat malnutrition in India with the introduction of an egg a day to villagers. One of my grandchildren is behind this scheme, which I help financially and logistically. The older one gets, the more satisfaction I gain from dealing with such bread and butter issues rather than the superficialities involved in being a highly successful businessman.”
A shorter version of this story first appeared in Newsweek:
http://www.newsweek.com/2014/08/15/restaurateur-bent-world-domination-263537.html